Bin Laden, Napoleon and the Dynamics of History
Date posted: April 20, 2010 | by Richard Koenigsberg | Comments
What does it mean to “make history”? A certain kind of history is created when a group initiates acts of violence in the name of valorizing or defending a sacred ideal. In the 1990s, some hypothesized that we had reached the end of history. On September 11, 2001, Osama Bin Laden sought to demonstrate that this was not the case. He acted in order to introduce himself—as representative of the will of Allah—into the historical process. What followed in the wake of September 11 might be called the resurrection of history.
According to Assaf Moghadam and other scholars of Islamic radicalism, Bin Laden’s ideology grows out of the thinking of his mentor, Abdullah Azzam. Azzam, Moghadam says, was the first theoretician to succeed in “turning martyrdom and self-sacrifice into a formative ethos for future al-Qaida members.” It is largely because of Azzam that self-sacrifice has become a “moral code that al-Qaida has used to justify suicide missions against its enemies.” Indeed, Azzam’s essay, “Martyrs: The Building Blocks of Nations,” contains a full-blown philosophy of history.
Azzam writes that the life of the Muslim Ummah is solely dependent on the “ink of its scholars and the blood of its martyrs.” The map of history is colored with two lines: One of them black, “what the scholar wrote with the ink of his pen.” And the other red, “what the martyr wrote with his blood.” Glory, Azzam says, does not build its lofty edifice “except with skulls.” Honor and respect cannot be established except on a foundation of “cripples and corpses.”
Founders of nations and the “architects of glory,” Azzam says, are few. Those who think they can change reality without “blood sacrifices and invalids, without pure, innocent souls,” do not understand. Those who wish to achieve glory must pay its price: sweat and “seas of blood.”
Azzam’s treatise articulates what is required if Islam and Allah are to transform societies and create history. However, the passages above also contain a narrative that has guided the course of the Twentieth Century. Men like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler and Mao established their ideologies and reputations on a “foundation of cripples and corpses.” By building an edifice of skulls, they sought glory for themselves, their ideologies and their nations.
David Starr Jordan discusses a painting from the time of Napoleon called “A Scene in Hell” (Une Scene dans l’Enfer) depicting the great marshal with “arms and face unmoved.” The picture is filled with the faces of soldiers—men “sent to death before their time by Napoleon’s unbridled ambition”—expressing “every form of reproach.”
Four millions there were, Jordan says, more than half of them French, youth without blemish, made “flesh for the cannon.” Over Napoleon’s career, campaign followed campaign—against enemies, against neutrals, against friends. Conscription followed victory, conscription followed defeat, again conscription and conscription. “Let them die with arms in their hands,” Napoleon said. “Their death is glorious. You can always fill the places with soldiers. A great soldier like me doesn’t care a tinker’s damn for the lives of a million men.”
Napoleon—like Azzam’s ideal terrorist—acted to create history building an edifice of blood and skulls upon a foundation of cripples and corpses. Napoleon dreamt of greatness for himself and France—and was willing to pay the price. He was one of those rare founders of nations who became the architect of glory—created history—by generating a sea of blood.
Michael Roberts proposes a comparative study of “sacrificial devotion.” What are we to call people who have died—been slaughtered—in the name of glorifying a sacred ideal? Shall we call these human beings martyrs, or heroes; people who have died for their country, or sacrificial victims, or simply victims?
What shall we call political leaders who generate slaughter in the name of propagating a societal ideal? Shall we call them conquerors, great leaders or mass-murderers?
What is the nature of those entities that have generated slaughter? In the First World War, they were given names like France and Great Britain and Germany. Moving forward, slaughter was undertaken in the name of words such as Communism and Nazism and the Emperor. Names change, but the dream remains the same.
A certain kind of history comes into being when a societal group initiates slaughter in the name of a sacred ideal. Historians (colluding with those who generate slaughter) establish the significance of historical events by “counting skulls.” The purpose of death and destruction is to confer reality upon leaders, nations and ideologies. Surely, human beings imagine, that which can generate such carnage must be real.
Dead and mangled bodies—cripples and corpses—attest to the reality of some “thing” that has produced them. What could generate such frenetic activity, such prodigious expenditures of human energy and material capital? Each episode of societal violence testifies to the reality of that “thing” in whose name violence was undertaken. Surely, that for which tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of people have died could not be no-thing.
The “logic” of mass killing in order to confer “reality” on a cause or state is clearly laid-out here. But cannot a similar result be brought-about by militant nonviolent action? The liberatory mass movements led by Gandhi, ML King ,Lech Walensa, Aung San Suu Kyi, etc. legitimated just causes without committing mass murder. They did entail great self-sacrifice including nonviolent martyrs…but overall much less dying than armed uprisings…
First you make one freeze and think about what so much that we just sheepishly accept really means and then you encourage one to go out and contemplate one’s own perspective. I cannot tell you how much thought-provoking you are responsible for. Where were you when I was a lot younger and so much more able to cope with such intellectual stimulation? Ah well, better late than never. I will ponder this text for it should not be commented on in first read. There’s too much there but I assure you that you captured my attention and my inquiry gland, as usual. Thank you. You make the word “intellectual” very respectable.
You have omitted Woodrow Wilson, who took a country and involved it in a war, where there was no material interest, and led the United States into a a long disastrous history of involving itself in affairs of other people.
paul streitz
Most of humankind has become fatalistic and apathetic on matters of war. Protests against the making of war seem to have no effect; geopolitical intrigue and international power struggles grow ever more costly from century to century. Citizens are persuaded that they must trust their leaders to know what is best, and sheep-like, the people mostly bow and scrape before their leaders. Molding of our public mind is seen as knowing the truth, acceptable in the service of our nation’s gory glory, but the same thing is perceived as proof of evil in “our enemies”. We interpret this ghastly tradition of double standards simplistically as a battle between good and evil. Even while recognizing that it is an endless horror story, most people don’t seriously stop to think how there might be practical alternatives. The expression of alternative thoughts is commonly discouraged or stifled in favor of the national mantra of the day, orchestrated by the major media organs. And so, history repeats itself, over and over. George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, a fantasy of totalitarian tyranny, narrowly escaped charges of treason by skating around the fact that tyranny was already established and growing in our midst as he wrote during WW2. In the names of FREEDOM, Democracy and Free Enterprise, we practice tyranny on a global scale. But such scurrilous talk is un-American, maybe treasonous, so don’t listen to it!!
Very interesting article and very true. Sometimes it seems like war is everywhere, even when we take antibiotics to fight a virus. It is one form of life against another. The more complex one usually survives. Yes, in my view all these people were mass murderers, but it is because a number of them, that many of us live today. Humanity and in fact, creation, to be more accurate, is heading towards something. We are still in a very primitive stage. What we are heading towards, I don’t know. It could be just a meteorite, opening the gate to another form of existence.
Surprisingly, our history has taught us that bloodshed at the expense of many “abject enemies” is patriotic and BRAVE. The justifications of mass-murders places the governments own interest before the people-before humanity. The goals of bloodshed are centered around materialism, wealth, land and prestige. Surely there are alternatives, but alternatives without embedding fear in the lives of others (ie. mass murders) will not allow the United States to be on top. Unfortunately its a realistic ideology of those in power. I am not arguing that it is just, but I am arguing that we place the power in selfish, crude, hands while glorifying our government’s corruption by doing nothing in opposition to their control.
I just read your article, its content is as clear as true, i.e. it speaks the Truth! I watched “Austerlitz”, I found/find it horrendous! Brainwashed soldiers, mostly teenagers, abused physically and mentally, condemned to death -along with their families!- replaced like pawns in a bloody poker game in the name of a big Ego serving evil avenues, all too ready to dictate what is round and what is square even if it’s the other way around, at all cost! Where does this tendency come from, who is incline to be a caricature of it. Famous or notorious, is that the target at all price? La fin justifie t’elle les moyens? Au Génie de la guerre, je préfère le génie de la paix. Selon moi, le premier a volé son titre…