“Viva la muerte”
the role of death-defying “heroic time” in fascist fanaticism 

Paper presented at Talk for the conference Fanaticism and Modern Conflict, Salford, 14-16 June 2002

You found a fairy-tale, and inspired by love fuelled by desire you set out on a journey to make her real and, most remarkable of all, no one taught you how.[…] Our test was a simple one: where would your self-motivated reasoning take you, to the logical conclusion.[…] The Blue Fairy is part of the great human flaw, to wish for things that don’t exist, or of the greatest single human gift: to chase down our dreams, and that is something no machine has ever done until you. Steven Spielberg, A.I.

Self-sacrifice in the light of ‘chrono-ethology’ At the outset of what is, according to the reckoning of post-Christian Eurocentric humanity, the Third Millennium, much of what motivates human behaviour is still shrouded in mystery and controversy. There is thus no straight-forward or uncontested explanation for the most extreme manifestation of ‘fanaticism’, namely the readiness, or even determination of some human beings to give up their lives in a calmly premeditated manner for a cause that is not even as immediate or concrete as saving one’s own offspring, already in ethological terms a remarkable trait for a species to be endowed with. Indeed, human self-sacrifice for purely religious or political ends would surely have become the object of a major research project for the sublimely inquisitive extra-terrestrial anthropologists depicted at the end of Spielberg’s extraordinary reworking of the Pinocchio legend, Artificial Intelligence. These aliens are shown exploring the mysteries of the life-form responsible for the deep-frozen remains of the planetary civilization found in a first drowned then ice-locked New York long after the last specimen of homo sapiens has died, the only tenuous link with which is a ‘Mecca’, a mechanical rather than an organic human, David, endowed with the sensibility of a human child, and the capacity to give and crave love. He is the product of an ambitious technological project conceived at a future stage of human society to create a ‘robot who can dream’. This project highlights a quintessentially human faculty which is treated in this paper as for heuristic purposes as playing a vital role in fanatical acts which involve self-destruction, namely the ability to dream, to day-dream, to imagine other realities, to project more desirable worlds to inhabit. It is the fact that David is finally able to enter this realm at the end of the film that signals he has finally completed his rite de passage from robot to ‘real boy’, but also marks the onset of his mortality. The last words of the film are: ‘So David went to sleep too. And for the first time in his life he went to that place where dreams are born.’ Certainly sophisticated forms of ‘evolutionary ethics’ may go some way towards explaining the paradox of extreme forms of apparently idealistic or altruistic behaviour which deliberately cost human beings their lives. However, focusing simply on the way self-destructive behaviour at an individual level can be traced to innate genetic programmes designed to maximize the prospects for survival of the species as a whole run the risk of reductionism, sometimes ad absurdum, as when the geneticist Colin Tudge (author of The Engineer in the Garden) assures readers in a recent issue of The New Scientist that: Self-sacrifice makes evolutionary sense because the gene that promotes the behaviour is also contained within other bacteria of the same genotype. All individuals of a given genotype will produce the toxin and so sacrifice themselves on behalf of the others. Game theory analysis can show what proportion will emerge as suicide bombers’. The same article suggests that such behaviour may also be illuminated by Geoffrey Miller’s hypothesis in The Mating Mind that all great human exploits have their roots in displays of prowess, and that extreme violence can be seen as an elaborate form of showing off, pointing out that ‘Some animals do weird and wonderful things for the opposite sex that are quite useless or even damaging for survival’. By way of contrast, this paper is based on another theoretical approach which is yet to exist as a formally constituted discipline and which I might dub ‘chrono-ethology’, the study of human behaviour in relation to time. Its premise is that much can be gleaned about the hidden mainsprings of human action, in this case ‘our’ propensity for blind devotion to causes at whatever personal cost, by probing into the (in terrestrial terms) unique capacity of human beings to experience time in qualitatively different ways, both as a linear procession from past to future and as a special period when linearity seems suspended and individual time is subsumed within a supra-personal reality. It is an approach tantalizingly glimpsed at the end of a chapter on Suicidal Terrorism: ‘Terrorism is an example and product of human interaction gone awry and is worth studying and understanding in the human terms that befit it: as conflict, struggle, passion, drama, myth, history, reality, and, not least, psychology.’ It is chrono-ethology that can help illuminate the psychological processes at work in the uniquely human capacity to perpetuate conflict and struggle by living out passion, drama and myth and so changing reality and history. As T. E. Lawrence declared in what surely is an autobiographical observation, All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.’ This paper argues that investigations of the dynamics of fanaticism should give due weight to the human capacity to dream, and especially to day-dream, which can turn idealistic, intelligent human beings into smart biological missiles capable of delivering warheads to their target personally despite the certainty of dying in the process. How the human brain first developed self-consciousness, and attained the reflexive awareness of time and death that is its concomitant, is another story, one which evolutionary science will surely never be able to tell as a seamless, fully coherent biological and historical narrative. Nor are the human sciences ever likely to plumb the depths of the convoluted relationship which exists between the so-called ‘reality principle’ of curiously or ironically named homo sapiens and the continual act of imagination involved in planning and living out every day life, and the counter-factual speculation needed to project alternative futures and new realities. However, comparative cultural anthropology can at least allow us to speculate in an informed way about the significance which our species attributes to time, in particular the qualitative distinctions which exist within human time approached experientially (phenomenologically), however slender their empirical basis in scientific terms. The outstanding illustration of this is, Mircea Eliade, the pioneer of chrono-ethology, who spent much of his academic career documenting and analysing the universality of rituals and beliefs within pre-modern societies. Central to his work was the distinction which he inferred as a norm of the human condition between profane and sacred time, which he related to a deep inner compulsion to ward off the ‘Terror of History’ induced by the experience of time as nothing but a ‘grey future continually opening up before us’, an infinite corridor of undifferentiated rectilinear chronos. From this perspective the elaborate cosmologies which structure entire ancient civilizations such as the Chinese, the Aztec, the Maya and the Egyptian, the grand cultural matrix which Lewis Mumford calls ‘the megamachine’, can be seen as the fruit of a deep-seated human drive to keep at bay the paralysing sense of futility and absurdity which would result from the experience of existence devoid of regular access to the sense of an all-transcendent higher reality and purpose. In terms of evolutionary ethics the universality of human mind-games to create a canopy or templum of sacred time to demarcate the earth’s fragile capsule of life from the infinity which surrounds it could be seen as evidence of a need to win symbolic victories over time as crucial to the survival of the species as language, socialization, or tool-making. Even the extremely hard-nosed and clear-sighted military historian, Martin van Creveld, includes among the other factors that condition the ‘will to fight’ in humans a temporal factor, namely the fact that, as long as fighting lasts, ‘reality is suspended, abolished, lost. The joy of fighting consists precisely in that it permits participants and spectators alike to forget themselves and transcend reality, however incompletely and however momentarily.’

The hero and sacrifice as archetypes of time-defiance Comparative anthropology also reveals two archetypal features of the obsession of pre-modern societies with sacred time: the mythic Hero, who plays a crucial role in the creation of the world (i.e. in cosmogony) and preserving the resulting cosmology from entropy and decay, and the concept of sacrifice which involves the ritual destruction of something valuable or pure, whether to restore the harmony of the divine order, or to ensure the success of a physically or spiritually important undertaking, such as planting the next season’s crops, preparing for battle, building a bridge, or launching a ship. Within the Eliadean perspective both the hero myth and rite of sacrifice, along with other important recurrent fruits of human mythopoeia such as the legend of cosmic creation, initiation ceremonies, and shamanic practices, as well as the intricate world of ritual, symbology, religious belief, superstitions, myths, legends, and folklore with which they are inextricably enmeshed, are to be understood as components in an elaborate game played by the mind to suspend chronos. The body too has its own techniques to enable the mind to ‘stand outside’ profane time, to achieve ek-stasis, such as in ritual dance and theatre, yoga, martial arts and simulated combat, liturgical ball-games, or the ceremonial use of hallucinogens. Both mythopoeia and the body, psyche and soma, can work in harmony to create a powerful (though from a secular scientific perspective ultimately illusory) sense of metaphysical home, human scale, and rootedness in a universe whose infinity, if ever glimpsed by disenchanted eyes, would numb our senses and crush our spirit. At that point we feel protected by a sheltering sky which shields us from the boundlessness of space. The human imagination is endowed with an extraordinary creative capacity for decorating and making over the minute existential room to which the body is assigned in life, and with an unlimited capacity to syncretize disparate mythic elements into new compounds. It is thus hardly surprising that the hero myth and the concept of sacrifice have frequently been fused in the topos of the hero who is prepared to sacrifice himself or herself in fighting for a holy cause or in defeating the monstrous embodiment of evil and chaos, so achieving a special form of immortality. This may be the immortality of myth and legend, as in the case of the Perseus and the Minotaur, or St George and the Dragon, equivalents of which are universal in folklore and tales all over the world. It can also take the form of a metaphysical immortality identified with the fulfilment of a higher duty based on a set of values associated with a supra-human God or transcendental Good, a notion that informs the medieval concept of the Knight and its equivalents in so many cultures where the warrior is the upholder of a social order instituted on the basis of a cosmic principles (the Japanese samurai, the Hindu kshaitrya, the Red Indian ‘brave’). Hence the recurrence in history of the ‘warrior priest’. The higher plane of reality may even be associated with a special fate after death reserved to the hero who dies fighting for a higher cause, as in the case of the Nordic myth of Valhalla, a sort of heavenly barracks. The Qur’an promises the youth who gives his life for his faith will: Spend eternity in gardens of tranquillity… Youths of never-ending bloom will pass round to them decanters, Beakers full of sparkling wine. Unheady, inebriating. And suck fruits as they fancy. Bird meats that they relish. And companions with big beautiful eyes Like pearls within their shells. We have formed them in a distinctive fashion, and made them virginal. The fusion of hero with the idea of self-sacrifice perhaps finds its most telling expression in the idea of the holy war which occurs in several religious traditions (e.g. the crusade, the jihad), and invokes a collective ethos in which an entire army or people are involved in a communal battle with Evil. This calls upon a small elite within the community to be prepared to sacrifice itself for a cause which transcends the realm of the human in its significance and thus guarantees immortality of some sort for all those who lay down their lives in the struggle. The use of the term ‘suicide bomber’ in this context thus points to a profound category error. The type of suicide which Durkheim researched as part of his investigation of anomie, and which is explicitly condemned in all the major religious traditions, is in many ways diametrically opposed to the act of martyrdom, which is sanctioned by the very same traditions. For example, a senior member of Hamas assured a New Scientist journalist, when asked to justify suicide bombings against Israel, ‘It is not suicide. Suicide is not allowed in Islam. It is the highest form of martyrdom.’ It is this categorical difference between suicide and martyrdom that would explain why research into the sentiments of Kamikaze pilots just before their last missions shows that the cult of the Emperor was sufficiently strong for most to be serene and calm about the prospect of dying. As one pilot put it in a letter, he was willing to die in order to ‘let this beautiful Japan keep growing, to be released from the wicked hands of the Americans and the British, and to build a ‘freed Asia’. Such convictions meant that ‘some young and innocent pilots died believing they could become happy dying that way.’ One of the letters examined is from the pilot Isao to his parents on the eve of his mission in Manila which closes with the words ‘We are sixteen warriors manning the bombers. May our death be as sudden and clean as the shattering of crystal...Isao Soaring into the sky of the southern seas, it is our glorious mission to die as the shields of His Majesty. Cherry blossoms glisten as they open and fall.’ Materialistically inclined historians may well argue that the discourse of Holy War and martyrdom must be seen as a mystification of the struggle for ideological, political or economic hegemony which have existed between rival cultures since time immemorial, and Bush Junior’s gaffe of referring to the war against Islamic terrorism as a crusade lends credence to such an approach. Meanwhile geneticists may well enrich further our understanding by focussing on the biochemical roots of martyrdom, such as the toxins produced by the colicin gene. But as long as it is carried out in the anti-reductionist spirit of methodological pluralism, it also makes considerable sense in anthropological, chrono-ethological terms to suggest that the celebration of the self-sacrifice of the warrior for a higher cause is the exoteric expression of an esoteric notion which lies at the heart of all mystical traditions. It is the notion, born of surely one of the most extraordinary flights of the human imaginaire, that total self-renunciation to the point of self-annihilation is the precondition to the rebirth of the self.

Mystic death as the prelude to rebirth Thus it is that in the Buddhist tradition ‘for a Bodhisattva to surrender life and limbs in aid of others is the keenest joy.’ Similarly in the Zen tradition the death of the false self is called the Great Death, after which ‘we give birth to a new self’, while the Islamic mystic Farid Al-Din’Attar exhorts adepts to ‘Become a bird of the Way to God and develop your wings and your feathers. Nay, rather, burn your wings and feathers and destroy yourself by fire, and so will you arrive at the Goal before all others.’ St Paul’s talk of the need for ‘old Adam’ to die in order to give birth to a Christ-like new Man, and the apostle St John’s declaration that ‘he who hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal’ acquire a new resonance within the tradition of universal mysticism. The millennial fascination of the Phoenix legend, the numerous permutations of the story of being trapped within the belly of a whale or some other monster as a prelude to rebirth, the universality of the shamanic rituals of dying to be reborn, the countless variations on the theme that the path to the gates of rebirth and eternal life necessarily passes through suffering, the confrontation with the demonic as in the legend of the Holy Grail, the Osiris myth, and the world’s various alchemical traditions point to some sort of archetypal predisposition in the human imagination to create poetic narratives which dramatize the access to a sacred time through a death within profane time, a death which is mostly symbolic but sometimes literal. The notion of an ‘inward odyssey’ of the soul which involves an elaborate process of ‘self-naughting’ as the prelude to palingenesis informs the rites of Australian Aborigines, Navaho Indians and Tibetan monks just as much as the classics of world literature from Mahabarata and the Norse myths to Dante’s Divine Comedy and Shakespeare’s King Lear. It even recurs thinly disguised in the less Hollywoodian Hollywood movie, such as Groundhog Day, The Game and The Matrix. It would seem reasonable, then, to postulate that some sort of archetypal matrix or ‘great code’ is inscribed within human mythopoeia in its response to the destructive onslaught of chronos which has at least as formative a role in shaping the human impulse to sacrifice and self-sacrifice as genetic processes, albeit at another layer of the onion-like reality we all inhabit. At this point, etymology, that somewhat unreliable friend of scholars, is illuminating. It is well known that ‘sacrifice’ derives from the Latin for ‘making holy’, a process which in religious cultures often involves the destruction of the most precious or the most pure specimen of a living being in order to appease higher powers or invoke metaphysical forces. Less well known is the fact that ‘fanaticism’ derives from the Latin for a temple or sanctuary, ‘fanum’, the root element in the term ‘profane’, meaning literally in front of and hence outside, excluded from, the sacred place. ‘Fanaticus’ originally referred to those possessed by a temple deity such as Cybele, the Great Goddess of Phrygia, whose cult was orgiastic and associated with violence like the Dionysus cult itself. According to Greek mythology it was Cybele who was able to heal and purify Dionysus after he had discovered the sacred vine and been sent mad by Hera. The fanaticism of someone devoted to a cause to the point of self-sacrifice, therefore, can thus be seen as the expression of a deep-seated matrix within human psychology which affords human beings the powerful subjective experience of being able to transcend and abolish a crushing but essentially unreal chronos through a door in it which gives access to a higher, indestructible realm of metaphysical time and being.

The interpenetration of the sacred and secular If the matrix of self-sacrifice in the human psyche is one of the symbolic codes which coexists with and may even ultimately be conditioned by the genetic ones which determine human life, the concrete historical circumstances in which it finds expression obviously vary enormously. In the countless religion-based societies that existed in the world before the onset of the globalizing force of secularization and Westernization, it is possible to infer from the ample documentation of anthropologists and archaeologists a vital common denominator that underlay the myriad differences between them. A shared cosmology, symbology, and set of metaphysical beliefs, underpinned by deeply rooted ritual and tradition ensured that the distinction between the sacred and the profane was hardwired into the culture which shaped the experience of time of every member of the community. It is worth stressing that even in pre-modern societies the distinction between the this-worldly and the other-worldly is rarely clean cut. In monistic schemes such as Buddhism, or animistic cultures which instinctively operated an immanentist sense of the metaphysical powers which hold together the universe, the profane and the holy are constantly commingled and interwoven. Even in a dualistic religious system such as Christianity the secular world is conceived as so intimately bound up with the divine that human history itself assumes a metaphysical subtext and is penetrated by the divine in Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion. A sinister thread of theocratic logic thus leads from the historicization and secularization of the divine in St Augustine’s image of the Two Cities, Holy and Earthly, whose fates are intertwined, to the Crusades in which many thousands of Christian knights were ready to give up their lives to reconsecrate an entire country which in their eyes had become profaned by a pagan occupation. For them historical time and geographical space had been transformed into a site of a cosmic metaphysical drama and metamorphosis. It was thus not a matter of an idiosyncratic conceit or self-aggrandizing delusion if James I of England literally believed that not just his own eternal life but that of all his subjects hung on his response to Cromwell’s demands and that his execution prevented the nation’s spiritual purity being defiled. An even more telling adumbration of the future of fanaticism which is the subject of this paper is the fact that as early as the 14th century a curious blend of religion with secular nationalism had already come about in the wake of defeat at the hands of the Ottomon Turks in a ‘Serbian faith’ in which ‘the memory of the medieval kingdom was worked into church ritual’ and national heroes became saints. As a result, the Serb nationalist leader Lazar was canonized by the Orthodox Church and, according to the tissue of myth woven around his name, had renounced earthly victory and deliberately accepted death at the hands of the enemy in order to gain future spiritual redemption and a heavenly kingdom for the Serb people as a whole.

Modernity as the break down of a shared cosmology For centuries Christendom created regular patterns of human behaviour and generated new ritualized forms of religious political and social life which displayed a cohesive underlying logic in the attitude it betrayed to profane historical time, one which remained fundamentally akin to that which informs the relationship to time of all human societies based on a shared metaphysical cosmology. However the situation was to change radically under the impact of the nexus of processes associated with the term modernization, especially secularization and the rise of individualism as the concomitant of the break down of communal existence. As T. S. Eliot puts it in Choruses from the Rock: But it seems something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where. Men have left God not for other gods, they say, but for no god; and this has never happened before.’ Obviously the emergence of a secular society, in all probability a unique event in human history, is a highly complex phenomenon which involves not a dramatic leap from one era to another, but a slow waning similar to the one which allowed paganism to coexist and commingle with with Christianity, and Christianity in its turn to coexist and commingle with the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Millions of devout believers in Christianity and other religious faiths still live out large components of ‘pre-modern’ world-views while in other respects managing to be members of a Westernized society. Moreover, much secular life retains echoes of the original religious substratum of Western life, as when the ritualized materialistic frenzy of Christmas continues to reproduce, no matter how mechanically, elements of both Christian and pagan mythology. The sacred and the profane are thus far from being neatly compartmentalized categories and the historical process by which one emerged from the other defies the search for symmetrical patterns. However, it is possible to suggest a simplifying narrative fiction or ideal type of the rise of secular modernity which identifies the early part of the nineteenth the point when a significant number of the more metaphysically sensitive of the Western artistic and intellectual elite became aware of what Heinrich Heine referred to as ‘the great rip in the fabric of the world’ which was tearing his heart apart. The same sense that the most sensitive souls now register the loss of the world’s wholeness and the resulting incompatibility between the soul of most creative human beings and the nature of the world lies at the core of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal published in 1857. It finds explicit expression, for example, in the poem in which he compares himself to a cracked bell which when rung can only make a discordant sound. In ‘chrono-ethological’ terms the most significant poems in this collection are those which explore the sense of bottomless ennui and depict the poet helpless to withstand the merciless onrush of clock time which ‘wins without cheating, every time: it’s the law!’. A vast documentary reader could be produced to demonstrate that the defining aspect of Western modernity is the diffusion to all strata of society of the sense of fragmentation, break-down of values, proliferation of incompatible world-views and logics, loss of centre, of harmony, of connectedness with the age and the world, the failure of language, the capricious irruption of the irrational, whether in sublime mode from above or demonic guise from below the sphere of an increasingly besieged, debilitated, and vulnerable reason. All the self-confident, utopian projects of modernity are fatally linked to a dialectical, a mood of self-doubt and disorientation. Conversely the expressions of the darkest nights of the soul, its ‘seasons in hell’ can suddenly be transfigured by intimations of an imminent breakthrough to a new realm of order, certainty and meaning in which the lost logos is restored, albeit in an altered and even unrecognizable forms. Modernity is the age of both bottomless anomie and the hypertrophy of ideologies and values, of utter meaninglessness and sudden epiphanies, of metaphysical nausea, and inklings of cosmic futility interleaved with countless glimpses of irreconcilable certainties and utopian projects. It is an era (or rather a geographically and culturally delimited sensibility which only a deeply engrained Western ethnocentrism turns into an ultimate and universal reality or ‘the human condition’) in which the auratic, that in premodern societies is attached by a shared cosmology and ritual to specific actions and objects has become a ‘free-floating signifier’ which can assign itself almost at random to anything in the world which human beings infuse with passion and meaning. The outbreak of brooding, paralysing Angst induced by the hypertrophy of information and by conflicting portents of salvation and catastrophe which Dürer encapsulated in his Melanchiolia I has now become pandemic. ‘Outsiderdom’ and ex-centricity now form a paradoxical part of normality. For millions in the steadily encroaching West, even if only at a subliminal level, ours is an age of existential homelessness, of disinherited minds, of anxiety,of ambivalence, which evokes images of dispossessed aristocrats whose star is dead or ontological orphans thrown into the world and prey to the ‘restless hungry feeling’ of being just ‘one too many mornings and a thousand miles behind’. At the heart of modernity there is an absence: the absence of a cosmological centre to which all can turn, the absence of a public gate to a higher realm. It is a situation evoked in the parable of the man from the country seeking access to the Law in Kafka’s The Trial, but who finds his way barred by an enormous gate guarded by a gatekeeper. Unable to sacrifice himself, to go through a process of ‘self-naughting’, he remains outside the gate in an increasingly pitiful physical and mental state, though with his eyesight dimming he can just make out the light shining under the gate from the other side. The gatekeeper now has no option but to lock the door when he dies (for it has been open all along), with the words ‘No one else could gain admittance here, for this entrance was meant for you alone. I will go now and close it.’ In the subliminal logic of the fanatic, the minute aperture or wormhole in the wall of chronos can only be passed through by a voluntary act of self-destruction in profane time, an act which makes the individual’s life holy in the process of offering it up to a supra-personal cause.

The randomization of the epiphany Seen in terms of ‘chrono-ethology’ human beings trapped on board a ship of modernity cut adrift from its metaphysical anchors behave as if personal time itself is out of joint, as if a divine watchmaker is needed to wind up the psychic clock or change its battery and put back in synch with the sacred rhythms of life. The rivers of secular and sacred time no longer run predictably and manageably within the channels, but both constantly threaten to break their banks or dry up altogether, leaving individuals either high and dry in a world without transcendence, or vulnerable to various forms of sustained religious mania. In such a condition homogeneous, empty time can be transfigured by modern news and entertainment media, fuelled, like the world-wide explosion of drug-consumption, by a universal craving to be snatched even momentarily and self-destructively from the jaws of all-consuming chronos, and lifted into a travesty of what Walter Benjamin calls Messianic time, even if it lasts no longer than a world-cup football match or a pop concert. (Baudelaire aptly described the states of mind created by hallucinogens as an ‘artificial paradise’). Yet just as modern human beings have retained a physiology adapted to stone age living, so we still have the metaphysical instincts, gift for ecstatic experience, and mythopoeic faculties of the primordial hunter/gatherers of higher meaning who once constructed Stonehenge, built the pyramids of Egypt and Yukatan, and elaborated the rituals which in aboriginal Australia made Dream Time more real than profane time. Those whose hunger for spiritual manna cannot be sated by carefully designed, commercialized and mass produced ‘highs’ continue subliminally to crave a more authentic mystic experience. Peter Shafer’s play Equus dramatizes the dilemma of an individual who, despite being stranded high and dry on one of the inhospitable beaches of modern secular existence well above the tide mark left by the ebb of a shared cosmology and ritual, draws on his primordial myth-making powers to fend off being engulfed by the absurd. This is does by elaborating his own private religion which endows the horse with a sense of the godhead living out in extreme isolation a fragment of the energies which collectively forged Greek religious culture. Just as the contingencies of psychology and moment can enable a suburban teenager to create a special ritual in which he temporarily but regularly metamorphosizes into a Centaur, so the potential lies within all individuals, no matter how inured in secular modernity, to rediscover within themselves the psychic energies which produced the archetypal hero. Rilke’s Duino Elegies, though ostensibly about ‘the human condition’ can be read as a sustained reflection (articulated in the scrupulously semi-encrypted register of epiphanic obscurantism so typical of modernism gripped by the crisis of language itself) on the dilemma of modern human beings cut off from the numinous and trapped within a self-reflexivity which is either utterly debilitating or else thrusts its victims into the most utopian ‘causes’ in a desperate attempt to break its thrall. It is because in the course of growing up human eyes are ‘turned round’ and act as cognitive ‘traps’ in the perception of reality that the purity of unselfconscious experience and unreflecting action is perpetually contaminated, denying us the timeless experience of the ‘open’ he attributes to animals and children. We cannot live life to full because our self-awareness causes us to cling to the ephemeral, to fix time in the routinized consciousness of habit and familiarity. We are so preoccupied with enjoying the blossoming stage of our development that we can never give ourselves totally to the act of becoming fruit. In contrast the hero is unconcerned with permanence and makes no attempt to prolong the ephemeral: ‘he lives in continual ascent, moving on into the ever-changing constellation of perpetual danger.’

The ambivalence of the modern will to heroic time However the impulse to break through into a heroic, chronos-defying, state of being, now that it has become detached from the traditions, rituals and rigours generated by a shared cosmology has, in this age of ambivalence itself taken on a deep ambivalence. Cultural anthropology and history suggest that the human capacity for self-transcendence has always had a dual aspect. It can lead to integration in a higher cause which does not involve acts of destruction and self-destruction, a form of selflessness in which the individual still retains a separate identity. Equally it can produce the type of total identification with a cause to the point where it abolishes a critical detachment and sense of self, often leading to a sublimation of the collective self to which the devotee now belongs and a demonization of the Other now perceived as its antithesis or enemy. However, with the ‘decay of values’ and the ‘randomization of the sacred’ under the impact of high modernity, any human cause can potentially be transformed into a source of self-transcendence in an integrative or identificatory spirit. Moreover, even the most apparently secular set of values on closer inspection proves to be given affective coherence and normative power by being infused with a sacral dimension. This structural situation gives rise to a basic process at the heart of modernization the evidence for which is all around. Driven by a subliminal ‘terror of history’, a phobia against meaningless, profane, rectilinear time inscribed deep in the human psyche, the tendency towards secularization and the death of traditional religious cosmologies and communities generates its own countervailing forces, as people find activities and causes with which to experience self-transcendence. This resolves the paradox that the age of secularization has infused all politics with a religious dimension to the point that even the most apparently secular democracy, namely that of the USA, turns out on closer examination to be an extraordinarily elaborate civic religion. This also explains why in times of crisis or conflict so-called liberal democracies instinctively institute a powerful campaign to sacralize politics and turn the war into a holy cause, a fact fully borne out by the history of both world wars or by the official US reaction to 11 September. In doing so it may create a deep resonance with the lives of millions of its citizens whose nationalism for as long as the subjective perception of crisis prevails default into an identificatory form of self-transcendence. However, even when there is no collective sense of crisis, some individuals are predisposed like Alan Strang in Equus to lock their mind into a private cause of their own to give their lives a metaphysical meaning it would otherwise lack.

The exoteric and the esoteric in the fascist cult of death If the main premises of this chrono-ethological explanatory scheme, despite their inevitably highly contentious nature, are accepted in a heuristic spirit as a working hypothesis, then we are in a position to understand two different manifestations of fanaticism associated with fascism in the twentieth century: the organized death cult, and the lone act of terrorism. Since it was the crucible of the First World War that did so much to weld ultra-nationalism and the myth of total regeneration into the new ideological compound that came to be known as fascism, it is a banality that the extolling of militaristic values as the key to overcoming decadence is a central theme of the rhetoric, ritual and style of all inter-war fascisms. It would be misleading, however, to cite texts that celebrate the readiness to sacrifice oneself for one’s nation as the highest form of courage as evidence of a genuine death cult in the mystical sense we have explored earlier. In the case of Fascism, for example, the famed ‘menefreghismo’ of the squadristi was inherited from the Arditi for whom defiance in the face of danger had never been the sign that death had been put behind them, or the expression of a genuine will literally to give up their own lives so that their country might be reborn. Rather it was a vulgarized form of Nietzschean vitalism and the determination to ‘live dangerously’. Despite the emblem of skull with the dagger between its teeth sported by the squadristi, a celebration of the values of the Blackshirt called ‘Heroic Rhapsody’ affirmed that ‘The Fascist loves life’. Nor was there anything really mystical about the ‘Sacrarium of the Martyrs’ in the ‘Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista’ in which a phonograph continually played the Fascist song ‘Giovinezza’ in a cavernous black room in which every painted star represented a Fascist martyr. At bottom this was simply an imaginative variation of the cult of the fallen soldier common to all the combatant powers of the First World War, an integral part of the quite exoteric process by which the masses were nationalized in the modern age through state propaganda. The same could be said of the many rituals, theatrical events and films produced by the Nazis dealing with the theme of martyrdom, blood and death. Close analysis shows that their basic theme was not generally not death as such, but rather the evocation of the collective palingenesis by which the Volksgemeinschaft passed through its winter of decay and death to a new spring. This was a process of communal salvation through which it entered a mythic, this-worldly eternity metaphorically, avoiding an existential confrontation with personal annihilation. Thus the elaborate ritual staged each year in the centre of Munich to commemorate those who died in failed putsch of 9 November 1923 symbolized ‘the historical turning point through which the old ended and something entirely new began’. As one phrase in the liturgy put it, ‘The earth finished with your death, with your fame our life starts afresh’. In the same way, the killing of a member of the Hitler Youth in the film Hitlerjunge Quex is presented without morbidity as the rite de passage to the immortality of a national martyr. Much of Nazism’s elaborate ‘political religion’, including the obsessively repeated topos of sacrifice and death, salvation and resurrection, is little more than a thinly disguised travesty of Christian ritual and symbology overlaid with spurious Nordic mythology. As such mainstream Nazism lacks an authentic esoteric or ‘necrophiliac’ dimension, and is at bottom a form of theatrical or aestheticized politics which no more betokens the presence of a death cult than the ceremonial honouring of the dead of two world wars which takes place annually at the Cenotaph in London. However, it is reasonable to suggest that more lies behind the choice of the skull and cross bones to adorn the uniform of the SS than a histrionic gesture to instil terror in their victims. Himmler went to considerable lengths to turn the Ordensburgen, the academies in which the elite of the Waffen SS were trained, into the sites of a prolonged rite de passage both physical and metaphysical. The ‘examinations’ could include such bizarre ordeals as fighting savage dogs bare-handed for 12 minutes, digging a hole to take refuge in within 80 seconds to avoid being crushed by a relentlessly advancing tank, and deliberately exploding a hand-grenade placed on a helmet with a brim specially reinforced for the occasion: any attempt to run away led to the candidate being shot on the spot. The aim went considerably beyond conventional military training of turning out obedient soldiers. It was to teach the cadets to ‘receive death’ in the sense of ‘dying to one’s own self’, thus creating the new man, the ‘god-man’ evoked by Hitler in his conversations with Rauschning. Himmler also poured considerable energy into the project of creating a mystic fulcrum for the new Nazi Empire in the castle at Wewelsburg in the Teutoburger Forest. Under the influence of Weisthor, pseudonym of the occultist anti-Semite Karl Wiligut, Himmler set about transforming the castle, requisitioned by the SS in 1934, into the temple his neo-pagan cult of National Socialism as the spiritual reawakening of pre-Judeo-Christian Aryan energies. At the heart of the project was the construction of a domed, crypt-like room in which the coats-of-arms of dead SS-Obergruppenführer were to hang and where ceremonies to honour ancestral forces of the Germanic race were to take place. Clearly Himmler felt called upon to create an esoteric elite to spearhead Germany’s rebirth under the influence of an occultist cosmology similar to the one that led the Ariosophist Lanz von Liebenfels to form the Ordo Novi Templi in 1907 and to acquire the Austrian castle of Burg Werfenstein as its headquarters. Here he and his followers enacted the bizarre rituals rooted in the fantasies of a cosmic racial war between humans and demons in human form (Jews) in which chivalric order, the Knights Templars had been the front-line solidiers in the time of the Crusades. Weisthor’s most conspicuous impact on mainstream Nazism was as designer of the SS Totenkopf ring ornamented with a death’s head, a swastika and various runic symbols worn by all members of the SS. In 1938 Himmler decreed that the rings of all dead SS men were to be kept in a chest at the castle to symbolize their permanent membership of the order. However it is questionable how many members of the Waffen SS were ever turned into latter day Knights vowed to die on behalf of their race, despite the sinister mystique that has always clung to them and the role of warrior priests sometimes ascribed to them by those who insist that Nazism was a occultist rebellion against Western rationality, science and modernity which has been utterly misunderstood by conventional historians. In any case, the vast expansion of the SS in the course of the war ensured that by 1945 it had degenerated into little more than a conscript army of mass-murderers operating above any sort of legal or moral constraint, rather than the spiritual and physical elite of a new master race of ‘human gods’. In all likelihood the death cult remained a minor strand in the Third Reich as a whole, largely restricted to the utopian fantasies of Himmler himself, just as the ravings of Lanz von Liebenfels in his Ariosophist periodical played a minimal part in the operational ideology of Hitler, even if they may have been one of the influences that helped transform him into an ideological anti-Semite fanatically committed to national rebirth in the formative years spent in Vienna before the First World War. Though it makes a lot of sense to see Nazism as a political religion bent on regenerating history through the awakening of mythic and ritual forces, this is not a blank cheque to treat it as a form of esotericism driven at its core by a special relationship with the occult.

The death cult in Spanish and Romanian fascism A similar situation pertains to the death cult in Franco’s Spain. Mainstream Fanquismo and Falangism did not cultivate death in any esoteric sense, the calls to sacrifice in the battle for the soul of the nation and the cult of Primo de Rivera as a Falangist martyr were part of the conventional symbology of militaristic nationalism. However, something more profound resonated in the main hall of Salamanca University on 12 October 1936 when General Millán Astray y Terreros, leader of the Spanish Foreign Legion (el Tercio) yelled ‘Down with Intelligence! Long live death!’ (‘Viva la muerte!). he was responding to the declaration of the famous humanist philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, that ‘At times to be silent is to lie. You will win because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right.’ The ageing philosophy was driven from the university at gun-point and died of a heart attack a week later. The General’s cult of death was more than mere rhetoric. He had taken it upon himself to turn his troops into fanatics who had left their secular lives and commitments behind them in order to devote themselves utterly to the cause of Spain. Outraged to learn that some of his men still had savings in bank accounts he railed: ‘The legionary must only think of today, not of the past, which is, even more so than for others, dead. Not of tomorrow because, by enrolling he knows he has placed his own signature on his death certificate. We live today. We fight today. We die today. To die: this is your duty. […] Legionaries, go and take out your savings. You have all the time you need to spend them because I am giving you leave till two o’clock. I am sure that by tomorrow none of you will still have savings books. Legionaries! Long live Spain! Long live Franco! Long live death!’ For Astray at least there was something more than rhetorical in the Tercio song, Death’s Fiancé with the line ‘I am betrothed to death and will bind myself with a strong rope to this loyal companion.’ But of all inter-war fascist movements it is the Iron Guard which displays the least rhetorical and most genuine ‘thanatophilia’, or love of death. Like the Tercio, its songs celebrated death in such lines as: ‘Death, only death, legionaries, is a joyful bride for us. Legionaries die singing and sing dying’. However, such sentiments were not confined to a faction but permeated the entire movement. Codreanu’s incorporation of Romanian orthodox Christianity within what remained at bottom a deeply secular form of racist nationalism led to an ideological discourse in which the resurrection of Romania from decadence was evoked in terms strongly reminiscent of the millennarian fantasies of 14th century Serb nationalists in which personal death became equated with national rebirth. The more fanatical of Codreanu’s followers took the willingness to die for the higher cause to the point where only self-sacrifice could guarantee the success of the revolutionary project, at which point the exoteric language of militarist rhetoric crosses the Rubicon into the realm of a genuine cult of death. Thus we assured that Ion Mota, Codreanu’s brother-in-law and lieutenant, left to fight the republicans in Spain, ‘with the firm intent of dying there’, persuaded as he was that ‘death is a creative and fertile act’. The Italian expert on European esotericism, Furio Jesi, suggests that the death cult in the Iron Guard went further than that of other fascisms because it was rooted in a deep-seated Balkan tradition which sanctified sacrifice and eroticized death, and is epitomized in the ballad The Legend of Mastro Manole who immures his wife alive in order to complete a building. Mircea Eliade saw this legend as one of countless permutations of the mystic notion that in order to last a major project (the building of a house, a bridge, but also a spiritual undertaking) must be animated, receive a life and a soul through a ritual act of ‘transfer’, and that this in turn demands a sacrifice, a violent death through which the victim accedes to a new life in a metaphysical dimension. Arguably the combined impact of Romanian orthodoxy and pagan folklore on Codreanu’s conception of the Iron Guard was to imbue it with a cult of death which permeated it at every level. It was a component reinforced by the dedication of the movement to the Archangel Michael whose icon adorned the chapel of the prison where he was interned in 1926 for his involvement in a plot to assassinate a deputy who had voted for granting citizenship to Jews. For the Iron Guard the Archangel symbolized the ‘active principle of good and eternal light struggling with dark outside us and in us’, and the Messianic role which Codreanu assumed in the fight for his nation involved ‘taking upon himself all the sins of his race’. Furio Jesi, one of the few genuine scholars to have probed into this murky area which lends itself so readily to sensationalization, suggests that such acts of martyrdom are only needed in the absence of God: Where God is present the sword is not drawn: in the presence of Jesus the sword taken out of its scabbard by Peter is the sign of unnecessary guilt. Where God has withdrawn into exile within himself and where only sub-divine entities are the only ones accessible, such as the archangel, the just must become guilty and must kill: the miles Christi, the athleta Christi, the knight-crusader, the Templar, the Legionary of the Iron Guard, must choose to become martyrs since they are guilty. The rebirth of Romania is a heroic undertaking which demands sacrificial blood which the killers must expiate with their own. Consistent with this mystic principle of sacrifice are some of the phrases found in The Nest Leader’s Handbook. For example, Codreanu tells his Legionaries that by joining the movement they have entered a ‘school of suffering’ for ‘he who bears suffering will win’ and ‘every suffering is a step towards redemption’. Again: ‘Only those who have passed the three examinations of suffering: the forest of the wild beasts and the slough of despair - and succeeded - are true Legionaries.’ ‘He who knows how to die will never become a slave’. Thus for the most fanatical activists of the Iron Guard the emancipation of the Romanian race was not the exoteric principle of ‘win or die’ but the esoteric concept of ‘winning by dying’. In contrast to even the most fanatical SS officers, Legionaries could only justify their violence only when it was expiated, with the result that some gave themselves up after carrying out an assassination, in some instances remaining passive as they were mown down by a hail of bullets.

The role of self-sacrifice in post-war fascism No matter how much it grew out of a reaction to the black hole which drives the galaxy of modernity, the Legionaries of the Archangel Michael at least was able to operate as a travesty of a medieval order. However, in the post-war era, at least in Europe and the USA, a nexus of forces has eroded the basis for mass-movements infused with the charismatic political energies generated by a shared utopia. The revolutionary right has fragmented just at the time when the progressive decay of organized religion has made the projection of the auratic and the numinous onto secular causes more random and idiosyncratic than ever. This is the age not of mass assaults on the citadels of liberal decadence led by paramilitary troops in coloured shirts and sporting sinister emblems, but of leaderless resistance, the lone warrior-priest, the political soldier, the Kshatriya, who remains inwardly loyal to the cause and retains his anonymity in the midst of the pleasure-seeking crowd. The flight of the phoenix, the coming of the new order is indefinitely postponed. For the true revolutionary determined not to compromise his ideological purity by association with electoral populism, this period of history is an interregnum, the time of withdrawal from the political arena, of ‘apoliteia’. His Bible is no longer Mein Kampf with its programme for building up a political party and an irresistible mass movement, but books like The Turner Diaries which explains how true Aryans, denied the possibility of belonging to a cohesive movement such as the NSDAP, should react when the race war breaks out, The Hunter who fights a lone war against the Federal State, and Unintended Consequences depicting a terrorist war against civil society in which leading government officials are picked off one by one. Yet the loss of the historical conditions which bred the NSDAP has done nothing to eradicate the capacity of a handful of human beings to carry out acts of symbolic violence against the state or society, and thereby subliminally re-enact in modern guise the role of the hero, despite the lack of heavenly rewards for his death. As two experts tell us in their investigation of the ‘psychopolitics of hatred’ The individual whose world is falling apart is experiencing his own psychological apocalypse. From this state of ultimate powerlessness and meaninglessness some create a world of meaning in their mind, a new world in which they have power and significance. Through this vision they have found personal redemption. What is missing from this statement is recognition that such an individual may find him or herself in a world which can objectively be seen as falling apart, and that the key to personal redemption lies in the decision to do something about it at whatever personal cost. The psychological template for this is the role played by Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver who, let down by politicians, decides to fight a one-man crusade to clean up New York and fight the vice which is corrupting the city. Thus it was that both Timothy McVeigh and David Copeland made the transition from an obsession with their nation’s decay to a sense of mission to do something about it. An echo of the primordial mystic fantasy of regeneration through sacrifice lurks in McVeigh’s statement in a letter sent to a newspaper three years before the Oklahoma bombing. Having catalogued symptoms of the break-down of the American Dream cataloguing he asked ‘Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system?’ It is no coincidence if the T-shirt he wore when he carried out the attack was inscribed with a quotation from Jefferson: ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants’. After his arrest he steadfastly maintained the composure of a captured soldier and one of his statements made while awaiting execution is revealing: ‘A shrink might look at what I have to say and decide “He’s a psychopath or sociopath. He has no respect for human life”. Far from that - I have great respect for human life. My decision to take human life at the Murrah Building -…I did it for the larger good.’ His expressionless stare into the TV cameras as he succumbed to the lethal injection points to a powerful subjective sense that he was expiating the blood he had shed in the fulfilment of his mission. Even before his death he had gone beyond. A feature of David Copeland’s own account of his emotional state during his bombing campaign in London is his sense of being a robot (a term he uses several times to describe his state of mind). He was emotionally numbed, incapable of empathy with his victims. The authors of his biography ascribe this to fact that he was a ‘classic psychopath, someone who usually appeared quite normal but was also devoid of feeling and capable of inflicting severe violence.’ Their assumption was endorsed by his barrister who declared to the judge at his trial that he was suffering from ‘serious schizophrenia, delusions and emotional disorders’, and much of the subsequent proceedings centred on the issue of his sanity. The authors insist he embarked on his bombing campaign ‘fuelled by a desire to be famous’ and by the personality disorders of a lonely underachiever. Instead I would suggest a chrono-ethological explanation of his behaviour. Once he had found his sense of mission (‘I just had to do it. It was my destiny), Copeland literally left ordinary, personal time, and the whole moral sensibility that goes with it, behind him: he was beyond. Certainly, it was a mission which resolved his own acute sense of impotence, failure, and anomie (‘I had no life anyway…I’m shot-away - a loner - just weird in the fucking head’). However, the key to its success in doing this lay in the conviction it gave him that his actions would trigger a race war that would lead to the resurgence of the white race, or at least strike a blow against the decadence of a multicultural and permissive society. It was the possibility his mission gave him of acting on behalf of a higher cause at whatever personal risk that enabled him to access a state of identificatory transcendence. This helps explain his personal use of Biblical references culled from the Christian Identity movement to rationalize and justify his actions, the implication that he sometimes felt he had been chosen by God to fulfil his mission on behalf of his race, his willingness to confess, his incapacity for remorse. Copeland’s subliminal mythopoeic and palingenetic drive, rationalized and articulated thanks to the neo-fascist and racist subculture he had frequented, had enabled him to perform disturbing feat of becoming not the Buddah of Suburbia, but a latter day Knight Templar in a base-ball cap and trainers, a modern jihadic warrior delivered to his enemy not astride a white charger but sitting in the back of a black London taxi-cab. Though neither McVeigh nor Copeland fall into the category of suicide bombers as such, both seem to have generated within themselves largely spontaneously an unshakeable belief that they were called upon to sacrifice the lives of fellow human beings in order to reverse the process of decay which anaesthetized them both to the suffering they inflicted on their victims and to the consequences to their own lives. They had both become heroes, playing the star role in a private palingenetic drama, displaying the lethal brand of fanaticism which would normally only be produced either from a combination of intensive cultural and religious conditioning with extreme socio-political conditions (as in Palestine) or from ideological indoctrination in the severest of training regimes (as in the Ordensburgen of the Third Reich). David in A.I. was conceived as ‘a robot who could dream’. David Copeland used his dreaming faculty to conjure up such a total sense of mission that he effectively programmed himself, becoming a robot dedicated to carrying out his own orders.

Tentative inferences and conclusions The conclusions to be drawn from this highly speculative foray into the extraordinarily complex phenomenon of fanaticism can be summarized as follows: First, that the tendency to associate the fanaticism which causes extreme acts of terrorism with psychotic states is likely to prove as unproductive, limited and misleading a line of enquiry as the Frankfurt School’s futile search for the identikit of the ‘authoritarian personality’ as the key to fascism and Nazism fifty years ago. No less helpful are attempts to identify the genetic or biochemical substratum of fanatical devotion to a cause, since they tend to lead to absurdly reductionist positions reminiscent of the behaviourist fallacies of a generation ago. Rather, the principle of methodological empathy is to be applied which gives due weight in the interpretation of human behaviour to the sphere of cognition, ideation, value-formation, cosmology, the uniquely human craving to make fairy-tales real, ‘chase down dreams’ and inject meaning and narrative shape into each individual existence. In this paper the time aspect has been given particular emphasis with the coining of a new virtual discipline, chrono-ethology. This subjective sphere should be probed into forensically in a spirit of methodological pluralism, informed by that sense of complexity, awe and compassion that is at the heart of all humanistic enquiry, for as Kafka reminds us: When you stand before me and look at me, what do you know of the pain that is in me and what do I know of yours. And even if I were to throw myself down in front of you and weep and pour my heart out, what would you know about me more than you know about hell when someone tells you it is hot and terrifying. If only for this reason we human beings should stand before each other with the thoughtfulness, with the awe, and with the love we should feel at the entrance to hell. Three forms of political fanaticism exist in the world today which can lead to Kamikaze behaviour: a) The fanaticism of politicized religions. Traditional, ‘premodern’ religions have survived with millions of orthodox believers into a world flooded with the forces of modernization, secularization, and globalization and containing numerous sites of deep political conflict between rival historical, ethnic or religious communities fomented by conditions of desperate social deprivation and state oppression. This tends to generate extreme forms of politicization of religion which in crises can mass-produce fanaticism, and create a steady supply of volunteers for potential suicide, or better martyr missions in the self-sacrificial spirit of the Kamikaze pilots of imperial Japan, who serenely rationalize their acts in the discourse of religious orthodoxy. The twentieth century saw the emergence of a number of totalitarian movements and political religions which, driven by the myth of rebirth, were able to generate manifestations of self-sacrificial fanaticism, as we have seen in the case of some inter-war fascist movements. The ideology rationalizing such acts derived its ideological coherence from established currents within the movement or regime, and were linked to a sense of hierarchy and leadership. However, genuine self-sacrificial devotion was the exception in behavioural terms within both fascism and communism, even if the rhetoric of fanaticism and self-sacrifice is a feature of all totalitarian movements. In contrast to the organized, structured behaviour of the fanatics associated with the totalitarian movements and regimes of inter-war Western society, the drive towards self-transcendence and the re-enchantment of the world has undergone an extensive process fragmentation and randomization. The culmination of this process is the lone terrorist, ideologically programmed by an eclectic mixture of extremist diagnoses of the crisis of the modern world or of national decline. These will typically have been absorbed in post-modern fashion from a variety of sources, but welded into a coherent narrative and sense of mission in a profound rebellion against the bottomless relativism of the postmodern sensibility. It is a sense of mission pervaded by a urge to purify and sanctify on a symbolic level which can all too easily translate itself into what appear to be random, nihilistic acts of violence and destruction, but which for the perpetrator are ritual acts of catharsis. This analysis corroborates the recognition of one commentator that: Some sort of "complex" seems to be at work that is common to all terrorists. Notice how often the terrorist idealizes his excesses: he is a virtuous person trying to cleanse, purge the world of unclean influences. All this leads me to think that the most hard-core terrorists are compulsion-driven individuals - a purification compulsion perhaps. The common themes may be that the world is a polluted place and he is trying to clean it up by just, sometimes holy, means. If so the terrorist has much in common with the conventional religious fanatic. It is a scenario which makes predicting politically motivated fanatical acts extremely difficult.

The prognosis for terroristic fanaticism The prospects for the vitality of fanaticism are disturbingly healthy. The world is full of suffering, injustice, unresolved economic, ethnic, cultural, religious, and political tensions and fault-lines. It is entering an unprecedented ecological and demographic crisis. Meanwhile, the human longing to transcendent, inhabit time remains an integral part of our psyches. It is a structural situation that cannot but generate myriad causes, holy wars, private epiphanies and missions, and pretexts for martyrdom. Certainly it is one which makes Fukuyamian rumours of the imminent death of History a decade ago seem greatly exaggerated. Indeed, in Eliadean terms it is precisely the perennial terror of History which assures that History as Fukuyama understood it in his original best-seller will survive as long as perfect equality and social justice in a sustainable economic and ecological system has not been achieved on planet Earth. For those in the North granted the luxury of never having recourse to fanaticism to give their lives meaning, there is no shortage of outlets for our need to commute between profane and sacred time and fate. From poetry, metaphysics, philosophy, and high art to world cup football and video games, there are endless sources of divertissement. But we should not be surprised if some souls are not satisfied by simulated epiphanies, and are driven by the urge to be the Lara Croft of their own inner drama into the arms of higher causes in a bid to break through to a realm where dreams become reality. It is a human urge that has arguably done much to produce the debris which Benjamin’s Angel of History sees pile up relentlessly before him. It seems that whether in a religious or secular society human beings cannot help breeding fanaticism. It is a dilemma which the Romanian philosopher, E. Cioran, once, like Mircea Eliade himself, an admirer of Iron Guard and hence once himself an abuser of mythopoeic rather than psychedelic drugs, summed up with devastating clarity in a section of his neglected masterpiece A Short History of Decay, or more precisely: Un précis de décomposition. The section is entitled appropriately ‘Genealogy of fanaticism’. Idolaters by instinct we convert the objects of our dreams and our interests into the Unconditional. History is nothing but a succession of false Absolutes, a series of temples (fanum!) raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable. Even when he turns from religion, man remains feverishly subject to it, depleting himself to create fake Gods, he then feverishly adopts them: his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike. His power to adore is responsible for all crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse. Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer….No wavering mind, infected with Hamletism, was ever pernicious: the principle of evil lies in the will’s tension, in the incapacity for quietism, in the Promethean megalomania of a race which bursts with ideals, that explodes with convictions, and that, in return for having forsaken doubt and sloth - vices nobler than all its virtues - has taken the path to perdition, into history, that indecent alloy of banality and apocalypse.

Reproduced gratefully from: "Troy Southgate" National Anarchist e-mail.