Free The Assassins' Gate by George Packer Page A

and the ideology that held them and millions of others across the Islamic world in its ecstatic grip had been produced by the modern world—in fact, by the West. It was the same nihilistic fantasy of revolutionary power and mass slaughter that, in the last century, drove Germans and Italians and Spaniards and Russians (and millions of others across the world) to similar acts of apocalyptic death. This ideology had a name: totalitarianism. Its great explainers were Orwell, Camus, Koestler, Arendt, Solzhenitsyn. In Europe its feverish mood had long since broken by 1989, but in the Islamic world, where modernity failed successive generations, the sickness had been spreading. Berman was saying that the Islamist movement is one that Westerners should be able to recognize—except when they are so blinded by a wishful belief in rationality that only an event on the scale of September 11 alerts them to its existence. Even then, for some, the urge not to see remains overpowering.
    Totalitarianism is a revolt against liberalism. And the answer to it is liberalism—liberal ideas (Berman never ceased to talk about the war of ideas) but also liberalism armed, liberalism without the dream of paradise. Berman was a member of the generation of 1968, and he still spoke fondly of his comrades in the tiny anarcho-syndicalist movement. But by 1989 he had made his peace with liberalism, and his politics had grown close to that of certain liberals during the early Cold War—that is, antitotalitarian and prodemocratic. In the decade after the revolutions of 1989, the clarity of this politics faded a bit. The humanitarian disasters in Africa, the skirmishes in the no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq—these were hard to understand in terms of the Hegelian movement of history toward human freedom. Even the wars of Serb fascism felt like aftershocks, radiating outward from the last place in Europe that hadn’t received the news. After September 11, Berman (and others, among liberals and leftists as well as on the right) found his way back into the twentieth century, the age of ideology and the tremendous intellectual excitement it stirred up. Suddenly all the books of modern history and politics crammed into Berman’s apartment sprang back to life on their shelves or in their stacks on the floor—along with new ones, by the likes of Sayyid Qutb.
    Berman set about his project with a fierce and solitary intensity. There must have been weeks on end when he never emerged from his apartment. He called it “war duty”—after all, New York had become a front line. Berman believed strenuously that it was the job of intellectuals to explain and mend the rent that had just been made in the fabric of our world. For him, the answer lay in literature and philosophy as much as politics, let alone policy. One night, upon leaving his post long enough to share a late meal at the bistro, he announced, “I’ve found a master text!” It was Camus’ The Rebel, subtitled An Essay on Man in Revolt. Nihilistic terror was nothing new; the hijackers went back to the French Revolution. “Here, murder and suicide are two sides of the same system,” Camus wrote, giving Berman an epigraph. His conversation those nights had the quality of annoying and yet undeniably thrilling excess under the pressure of a justifiable obsession. He almost visibly trembled with his discoveries, though the work was hard, even discouraging, and Berman was personally given to grim self-assessment. He would order his cheeseburger and red wine (the waitresses all knew him) and, drumming a finger on the table to a rhythm only he could hear (he played jazz viola), or wagging the same finger in the air for emphasis, he would begin an account of Victor Hugo’s plays and the bombings of the late nineteenth-century Russian nihilists, which on the inexorable curve of Berman’s thinking would lead us forward to the most recent