Bin Laden, Dostoevsky and the reality principle: an interview with André Glucksmann

Europe is trapped by complacency and an all too human desire for oblivious contentment, says a leading French philosopher. This helps ensure the success of the nihilistic terror and extremist ideology exemplified by al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. Nobody wants war – but genocide is worse than war.

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: Why do you return to the work of Dostoevsky to explain the terrorism of the 20th and 21st centuries?

André Glucksmann: In Dostoïevski in Manhattan I pose a philosophical question: what is the ‘idea’, the characteristic form of modern terrorism? And my answer is: nihilism.

Socrates asked: what do a beautiful woman, a beautiful vase and a beautiful bed have in common? His answer: the idea of beauty. My question is: what do extremist ideologies like the communism or Nazism of yesteryear and the Islamism of today have in common? After all, they support ostensibly very different ideals – the superior race, mankind united in socialism, the community of Muslim believers (the Umma). Tomorrow, it could be altogether different ideals: some theological, some scientific, others racist. But the common characteristic is nihilism.

The root element is the attitude that anything goes, particularly when with regard to ordinary people: I can do whatever I want, without scruples. Goehring put it like this: my consciousness is Adolf Hitler. Bolsheviks said: man is made of iron. And the Islamists whom I visited in Algeria said that you have the right to kill little Muslim children, in order to save them.

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: And this took you back to Dostoevsky?

André Glucksmann: It is the highest achievement of Russian literature in particular that it has revealed this kernel of human experience in which ‘everything is allowed’. In Dostoevsky’s The Possessed there are atheists and believers (a figure like Shatov for example) who have very different outlooks on the future. But they share one thing in common: the right to kill, to burn, to overturn, in order to achieve tabula rasa.

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: When Dostoevsky talks about the devils, or the possessed, he still seems to be guided by the idea that evil is something which captures man from outside. The main protagonist Stavrogin, for example, even talks about the devil’s appearances.

André Glucksmann: Actually, the beautiful thing about Stavrogin is that you don’t really know him. You don’t know if he believes in God or not. In the end, what surprised me was to find that he is a little like bin Laden; he might be very cynical, or fanatical, nobody really knows.

The inner nature of this nihilistic terrorism is that everything is permissible, whether because God exists and I am his representative, or because God does not exist and I take his place. That is what I find so impressive about Dostoevsky: he is a secret, a riddle.

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: The group of conspirators at the centre of The Possessed seems, from the outside, to have both a coherent programme and a great deal of charisma. From the inside, on the other hand, all that remains is a fascination with destruction. And this fascination develops its own dynamic, pulling everyone under its spell. Destruction takes over as the group’s raison d’etre, while some of those involved still believe it is about the content and messages it offers.

André Glucksmann: Yes, there are several different layers of nihilists. There are the ‘outer’ nihilists who follow and believe, and then there are the nihilists at the centre of the action, the activists who pursue the logic of destruction. Dostoevsky has shown this very well indeed, as has Turgenev, in the persona of Bazarov. Or take Fritz Lang’s Dr Mabuse figure. These destructive personalities have coherence precisely because they are not idealists. Their coherence derives from the logic of destruction. In a linguistic sense it is performative, and therefore self-endorsing.

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: Surely Dostoevsky contradicts nihilism to the extent that he is still arguing for a religious solution, a renewal of belief – a point that would be a bit difficult to make today?

André Glucksmann: This is very arguable indeed, and would require a much longer examination of Dostoevsky’s work. I think you are right from the ideological point of view. Dostoevsky was conservative, he believed in Greater Russia, and he was also an anti-Semite. But in his literary work as opposed to his essays, he is much more subtle and complicated. Dostoevsky completely submerged himself in his writing. His literary work is more difficult, but less dogmatic.

Religion as such is surely not the ‘solution’ in this part of his oeuvre. Take the Grand Inquisitor who is a religious man but a catastrophe at the same time. And someone very much influenced by Dostoevsky, the great theologian Vladimir Soloviev, concludes in his Dialogue of 1900 that there is a strong connection between Orthodoxy, eastern theosophy and Catholicism, one that has been very irritating for all sides.

‘Long live death!’: religious shell, nihilist kernel

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: Let’s go back to nihilism as you have characterised it. If you include Islamic terrorism in nihilism as you have done in Dostoevsky in Manhattan then you must accept the objection that Islamism is peculiar in presenting itself in the cloth of religion, a spiritual mission.

André Glucksmann: Yes, but you can also find a missionary zeal driving those Russian nihilists who wanted Greater Russia, or at another time the Great Revolution. There are many missions; what is much more difficult to pin down is the actual practice, the approach. For it is in their approach as activists that religious nihilism, dialectical materialist nihilism or Nazi nihilism are the same.

Religion is only the cloth, the excuse and the justification. What is essential is the practice. For there is a direct connection between the Islamic suicide bomber and the general serving under Franco who shouted out in front of the University of Salamanca: “Long live death!” This is the connection that I was trying to grasp.

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: “Long live death!”?

André Glucksmann: At the opening of the University of Salamanca, one General Millán Astray shouted Viva la Morte. Miguel de Unamuno, who was in charge of the occasion, was a conservative, the protégé of Franco’s wife, a philosopher of the right. He reproved the general for this impermissible, unacceptable statement, and added: “You, my general who has lost an eye in the war, are a handicapped man not because you have lost an eye but because you have shouted ‘Long live death’’’.

It is precisely this slogan which you hear from Islamic suicide bombers.

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: Perhaps then, you think that during the course of the 20th and now the beginning of the 21st century, this destructive nihilism has manifested itself in different guises, but remains something like an anthropological constant throughout. Is that your belief – that man carries this trait in his very nature; that he is bound to recurrently submit to it?

André Glucksmann: I would put it the opposite way round. Man is human: therefore, he can be civilised, even if he can’t read or write, because he can master this hubris. Wherever you go, this belligerent hubris is considered lethal. In the huts of the Amazon, young men are taught to conquer this capacity for excessive violence. You can fight together, but you cannot fight in any way that comes to hand, and you don’t set out to fight just anyone. The same idea occurs in the teachings of the Greeks, the paidera. All European education is based on the same principle.

Indeed, all civilisations have two essential taboos in common: the taboo on ‘total sexuality’, the incest taboo, different in individual cases, but ubiquitous, and the taboo on violence. You are not allowed to succumb to ‘absolute violence’. You have to master that hubris in one way or another. In every civilisation you can find the mastering of these two absolute, destructive impulses. And the nature of modernity means that these fundamental taboos are vanishing.

The sleep of reason

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: Let’s go back to your opening statement on the essential values of Europe that have always been established in resistance to evil. The current threat from militant Islamism is not coming from Europe, and Europeans seem to have a problem in perceiving this threat as a threat to their own interests. Is that why it seems so difficult to summon up the necessary resistance?

André Glucksmann: It is not only Islamism: it is nihilism, in its practical manifestation of laying waste to the civilian population. The same approach was to be found in the case of the Russian army when it flattened Grozny, a city of 400,000, and the first capital to be razed to the ground since Hitler’s destruction of Warsaw in 1944. This destructive impulse is not in the nature of Islam; this impulse is integral to the nature of civilisation and it can destroy any civilisation.

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: But these events are not perceived as being played out in central Europe, but in far away and strange locations.

André Glucksmann: It has happened in central Europe too – with Milosevic and his ethnic cleansing, which is also a nihilist activity.

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: Nevertheless, for a long time now, Germany and France have shied away from taking on any responsibility in such situations. They have delayed it as long as possible. And even now, it seems that Europe only wants to safeguard the relative stability that we have achieved in the last fifty years. Everything which falls outside these boundaries, like Chechnya or the Middle East, really shouldn’t bother us.

André Glucksmann: Yes, exactly: but this is wrong. This is exactly the complacency, the crime of complacency, which once made Hitler possible. This complacency has cost us about 50 million lives. It also worked well for Stalin. ‘Better red than dead!’ Pacifism is a kind of complacency. And this complacency continues with Milosevic, with terrorism, with Saddam Hussein; people just want to sleep.

This is nowhere more beautifully invoked than in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, where the protagonists all live together on an old estate, and nobody cares at all about what might happen, even when they already hear the trees falling. (I had just read the play when they showed the twin towers in Manhattan collapsing on television). The equivalent today is the silence that greeted the odd intellectual who drew attention to Afghanistan, Chechnya, or Kosovo. Nobody wanted to listen; people turn away as from the bearers of ill tidings.

But in the end, the reality principle will catch up with us. We believe that we can live in a world where there are only little wars in the peripheries, the suburbs, ‘low-intensity conflicts’, as the political strategists like to call them. When Ahmed Shah Massoud, Afghan leader of the Northern Alliance and enemy of the Taliban, came to Paris four months before his assassination on 9 September 2001, only a small circle of perhaps five or six intellectuals met him. None of our ministers could find the time; only Nicole Fontaine, the president of the European Parliament, came.

When the twin towers fell the day after Massoud’s murder, I told myself, “Maybe now men will learn that what happens to women in distant Afghanistan should also be of interest to the people in New York. If Massoud and his troops had gone into Kabul earlier, the twin towers might not have been destroyed”.

But I misjudged mankind’s need to sleep. And now we are saying that this only happens to the Americans, not to Europe. But the first time it nearly happened was in Europe. In 1994, a plane was hijacked in North Africa and landed in Marseille. The hijackers had wanted to crash the plane above Paris. But these GIA hijackers (Groupe Islamiste Algérien), who were also in some kind of contact with bin Laden, did not know how to fly a plane. That is how the pilots managed to bring the plane to Marseille. For their part, the hijackers clearly learnt from this that they have to be able to fly planes themselves. They have learnt their lesson. But we, we have learnt nothing at all.

The reality principle

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: But there is a lot of resistance out there to combining anticipation with the use of force, even where it is necessary.

André Glucksmann: Yes, of course. This is simple enough to understand. If someone is ill then you are afraid of this illness: you feel sorry for the sick person but you tell yourself at the same time that this could only happen to him, not to yourself.

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: What was your response to the French government’s thinking on the Gulf conflict and their strict ‘no’ to a forceful removal of Saddam Hussein?

André Glucksmann: I am in a minority on this, and not for the first time. When I spoke up in leftist circles about Solzhenitsyn I was regarded as some kind of devil. When I supported the boat people, it was scandalous. And when it came to Milosevic in 1991, just four of us in France said we have to finish with Milosevic; and if this is possible by peaceful means, good, if not, then by force. But they waited for another eight years before taking action and that cost 200,000 lives. In the beginning you are in the minority, but in the end there is the reality principle.

I have discussed these problems a lot with Joschka Fischer whom I have known since 1968. We became friends because when I supported Solzhenitsyn, he and Daniel Cohn-Bendit agreed with that position, and criticised Russia. Even though they didn’t endorse my criticism of Marxism, at least they understood it.

In these pacifist times, we have had long debates in Die Zeit. Joschka Fischer did not agree with me for a long time. In the end he conceded that after Srebrenica there is something worse than war, and that is Auschwitz. What I cannot now understand is how he has turned into a pacifist once again in the face of Saddam Hussein – who is much worse, bloodier and more dangerous than Milosevic, and who has gassed people, partly with German gas.

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: Maybe Germany and France are so opposed to war because of the war-torn history they have shared. Can’t you accept that this is also part of the common inheritance of European humanism? The loathing of war is understandable after all, isn’t it?

André Glucksmann: Of course everything can be understood. Nobody wants war, me included. The question is, is there something worse than war?

I have been answering ‘yes’ for years. One thing that is worse than war is genocide – that is, the extinction of a whole people. Many people said this before Auschwitz. In Greek tragedy, it is revealed in the destruction of Troy. This is indeed the horizon of western history.

That is why I don’t believe that the refusal to take part in a war against Saddam should be seen as an expression of humanism, but of a blindness that exists not only in Europe, but in all civilisations. We all want to live peacefully, oblivious and happy. That wish already existed in ancient Athens, and there is nothing wrong with it as such, except that it is not very realistic.

Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: Do you think France will stick to its opposition against the US?

André Glucksmann: Longer than in Germany. Here in our country, the rivalry with America is more prominent. But at the moment, the people in the street are only asking themselves, how can we stand up against Bush? Saddam Hussein doesn’t come into the equation, and that is where my whole objection lies. Because the issue here is actually Saddam.

Bush is a challenge for American democracy; Aznar, the challenge for Spanish democracy. Why are there fewer protestors in France than in Spain, England or Italy? Because in Italy they fight Berlusconi, in Britain they fight Blair – and in France they fight nobody.

But the overriding question remains: what about Saddam Hussein? If I may be a little moralistic here: I could not look at myself in the mirror if Saddam Hussein were still in power because I have been to a demonstration against Bush, and as a result, the people in Iraq had to live in this totalitarian regime for another twenty years.

The threat of nihilist barbarisms.

We are in the presence of a planetary insecurity without precedents.
Every morning could be the eve of the end of times.
Terrorism puts into practice a rational political tactic of conquest and conservation of power.

We publish the preface to the Italian edition of "Dostoevskij in Manhattan", the latest book by André Glucksman about the attack to the Twin Towers

A year is already passed. The ruins of Ground zero have been smoothed but still they grip to us, dark and alarming, the moral and psychological consequences of the greatest terroristic attack of all times.
"Our own future is in our hands", declared the President of the United States, Harry Truman, announcing Hiroshima.
The public opinion and intellectuals chorused: "we return to year One Thousands, every day could be the eve of the End of the times" (J. P. Sartre).
All mortals, all in the same boat, everyone responsible of the collective survival. All this will very soon be forgotten.
In the course of nearly fifty years the fate of the world has been in the hands of the governors of the little nuclear powers.
The future of the species has been played behind closed doors, in the tight circle of the great ones and the supergreat ones, while five billions of earthlings minded their own buissnesses.
The rumble of Manhattan, September 11 of 2001, changes it all. We discover that everything it takes is a knife, a minimum of madness and modest means (the price of six rooms in Rome or Paris, according to the Fbi) in order to repeat the operation.
The destiny of the planet is to the capacity of all the hands and numerous purses: it takes an airplane hijacked and crashed on a nuclear power plant and that's it, mouthful after mouthful, humankind devours itself.

Manhattan shows an Hiroshima-round-two with the power of radically democratized annihilation.
The absolute arm is not anymore safely locked into the silos, that are seemingly controlled by powerful pseudo-controllable ones.
Also our neighbour could by now being planning an unforeseeable killing operation that would leave us with our jaws hanging, like those students in Hamburg after acknowledging one of their companions deliberately crashed against the Twin Towers.
This planetary insecurity is without precedents. Emphasizing this is a short phrase of George Bush, in the famous speech on the State of the Union in which he vituperated the "axis of the evil". Nearly unnoticed by his critics and supporters alike, those little words admit what no president of the United States has never dared to say neither to conceive: "Time is not on our side", the time does not work for us.
Until that day the Americans walked in the history "with God on our side", as Bob Dylan hironically sung. Finished. It's over as Mr. Number One recognizes, perfectly impermeable to the sound of the critics.
Children in the schools will keep singing "God Bless America" and the dollar will continue to make reference the Supreme Being, but nothing to make: the divine, technological Providence or financial institution does not guarantee more, against all and all, the way of the America and the planet towards the happiness: every morning we will be to the eve of the end of the times.
Thus a great shaking of the secular certainties provokes panic reactions and desperate tries to relieve the anguish and to escape from the truth.

First delirium of negation: the one of the anti-Americans, who explain scholarly that "the Empire" is punished for its sins of pride, that it can only blame itself, that the common citizens do not have anything to fear from terrorism, it has nothing to do with them.

A second delirium, this time anti-muslim, condemns a billion and three hundred persons in block for not having benefitted of the "Christian Revelation", like if Muslim integralism did not attack Muslims before everybody else, and Afghanistan and Algeria are there to testify it. It is forgotten that Al Qaeda mobilises sons from good families recruited in the more westernized layers of Arabia and Egypt. Bin Laden deceives us, Oriana Fallaci and Samuel Huntington are wrong when they evoke a conflict of civilization or a religious war.
The integralist terrorism is not an archaism inherited from a remote past. The death angels rise to planetary level from the dark, murderous and nauseous face of our ipermodernity.
The "Muslim Brother" ready to sacrifice himself and the others is the twin of the bolscevik steel-man ", a riedition of the fascist hero crying "hail to death!".

Third delirium, that one of the statesmen who cultivate the naivety to believe that terrorism is exclusive appanage of the irregular ones without State. It means to forget what it has happened hardly yesterday, our near past, in the bloody Twentieth century with its devastating ideologies, its terrorist states.
It means not to accept the truth, the burnt lands, the exterminations, just look at the palmarès of the Russian Army in Cecenia. It means not to face that the terrorism, not limiting itself to maniac pulsions, puts into practice a rational political tactic of conquest and conservation of the power. The intention of Bin Laden is to command in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan; with or without Allah, that opens the road to many post-modern Princes that think themselves more clever than he is.
We had to wait until July 2002 for Amnesty International, usually very keen in matter of rights violations, to brand the Palestinian human bombs like criminals against humanity. The same delay (that it is worth as much as not having opportunely dealt with the Algerian murders of the Gia) shows to what point the ideological blinders risk to leave us without neither voice nor reaction in front of the galopping and borderless nihilist barbarity.

Contemporary history puts us in the precence of a swarm of religious, ethnic, national extremist terrorist, not connected to each other but similar and complementary. We ask ourselves the question of Socrates: which common horizon, which common shape (idea, eidos) unifies this variety of murderers? My answer is: nihilism. Present in all great destructive ideologies (nazism, communism, radical islamism) but from none of them reassumed in its entirety.
The axiom of "all is allowed" governs at the same time the Fsb (former Kgb) Colonel who declares "get what you want" and the Emir of the Gia who rapes and kills the girls after using them.
The nihilist easily commits evil in the name of a God that allows everything in its name or in the absence of a God, which thing is like having a do-whatever-you-want-without-consequences card - if he assumes that evil does not exist. Let me put the Italian version of this book and the conceptual revolution that it proposes under the aegis of Machiavelli, without concessions to the beautiful spirits that close their eyes in front of the cruelty and whisper that it is to bad to talk bad of evil ("he is bad to say bad of the evil ", Speeches over the first decade by Titus Livio, L. III).

La minaccia della barbarie nichilista.

Siamo di fronte a una insicurezza planetaria senza precedenti. Ogni mattina alla vigilia della fine dei tempi

Il terrorismo mette in atto una tattica politica e razionale di conquista e conservazione del potere

Pubblichiamo la prefazione all'edizione italiana di "Dostoevskii a Manhattan", l'ultimo' libro di André Glucksman che prende le mosse dall'attacco alle Twin Towers (Liberal libri, traduzione di Pietro Del Re e Nicoletta Tiliacos, pagg. 255, euro 16,50) in libreria l'11 settembre.

E' già passato un anno. Le rovine di Ground Zero sono state spianate ma ancora ci attanagliano, oscure e inquietanti, le conseguenze morali e psicologiche del più grande attentato terroristico di tutti i tempi. «Il nostro avvenire è nelle nostre mani», dichiarò n presidente degli Stati Uniti, Harry Truman, nel dare l'annuncio di Hiroshima. Pubblica opinione e intellettuali gli fecero coro: «eccoci tornati all'anno Mille, ogni giorno potrà essere la vigilia della Fine dei tempi» (J. P. Sartre). Tutti mortali, tutti nella stessa barca, ognuno responsabile della sopravvivenza. Tutto questo sarà ben presto dimenticato. Nel corso di quasi cinquant'anni la sorte del mondo è stata nelle mani dei governanti delle poche potenze nucleari. Il futuro della specie si è giocato a porte chiuse, nella stretta cerchia dei grandi e dei supergrandi, mentre cinque miliardi di terrestri si dedicavano ai fatti propri. Il fragore di Manhattan, l'l1 settembre del 2001, cambia tutto. Scopriamo che basta qualche taglierino, un briciolo di follia e un capitale modesto (Il prezzo di sei stanze a Roma o a Parigi, secondo l'Fbi) per ripetere l'operazione. Il destino del pianeta è alla portata di tutte le mani e di numerose borse: basta che un aereo sia dirottato su una centrale nucleare ed ecco che, boccone dopo boccone, l'umanità si autodivora.

Manhattan mette in mostra una Hiroshima bis con un potere di annientamento radicalmente democratizzato. L'arma assoluta non è più saggiamente riposta nei silos che si presume siano controllati da potenti pseudo-controllabili. Anche il nostro vicino di pianerottolo potrebbe ormai rimuginare un'imprevedibile operazione suicida che ci lascerebbe basiti, come quegli studenti di Amburgo dopo aver saputo che uno dei loro compagni si era deliberatamente schiantato contro le Twin Towers.

Questa insicurezza planetaria è senza precedenti. A sottolinearne la portata è una breve frase di George Bush, nel famoso discorso sullo Stato dell'Unione in cui egli ha vituperato l"'asse del male". Quasi inavvertite dai critici come dai sostenitori, quelle poche parole ammettono ciò che nessun presidente degli Stati Uniti ha mai osato dire né concepire: «time is not on our side», il tempo non lavora per noi. Fino a quel giorno gli americani camminavano nella storia «with God on our side», come cantava (ironicamente), Bob Dylan. Fine. E finita, come riconosce un Numero Uno, perfettamente impermeabile alle sirene dei sorrisi di contestazione. I bambini nelle scuole potranno anche intonare «Godbless America» e il dollaro continuare a far riferimento all'Essere Supremo e ad averne rispetto, ma niente da fare: la Provvidenza divina, tecnologica o finanziaria non garantiscono più, contro tutto e tutti, il cammino dell'America e del pianeta verso la felicità: ogni mattina saremo alla vigilia della fine dei tempi.

Un così grande scuotimento delle certezze secolari suscita reazioni di panico e tentativi disperati per tamponare l'angoscia e sfuggire alla realtà.

Primo delirio di negazione: quello degli antiamericani che spiegano dottamente che «l'Impero» è stato punito per i suoi peccati d'orgoglio, che non può prendersela che con se stesso, che i semplici cittadini, lavoratori-lavoratrici, non hanno niente da temere da qualcosa che non li riguarda.

Un secondo delirio, stavolta antimusulmano, condanna in blocco un miliardo e trecento milioni di persone che non hanno beneficiato della rivelazione giudaico-cristiana, come se l'integralismo islamico non attaccasse prima di tutto i musulmani, e lo provano l'Afghanistan e l'Algeria. Ci si dimentica del fatto che Al Qaeda mobilita i figli di buona famiglia reclutati negli strati più occidentalizzati dell'Arabia e dell'Egitto. Bin Laden imbroglia, Oriana Fallaci e Samuel Huntington si sbagliano quando evocano un conflitto di civiltà o una guerra di religione. Il terrorismo integralista non è un arcaismo ereditato da un passato remoto. Gli angeli sterminatori sorgono a livello planetario dalla faccia oscura, massacratrice e nauseabonda della nostra ipermodernità. Il "fratello" islamico pronto a sacrificare gli altri e se stesso è il gemello dell"uomo d'acciaio" bolscevico, una riedizione dell"'eroe" fascista che proclama «viva la morte!».

Terzo delirio, quello degli statisti sradicatori che coltivano l'ingenuità di credere che il terrorismo sia appannaggio esclusivo degli irregolari senza Stato. Significa dimenticare quello che è successo appena ieri, il nostro passato prossimo, il sanguinoso Ventesimo secolo, le sue ideologie devastatrici, i suoi stati terroristi. Significa non accettare la realtà, le terre bruciate, gli stermini, basta guardare il palmarès delle armate russe in Cecenia. Significa non tenere conto che il terrorismo, lungi dal limitarsi a pulsioni maniacali, mette in atto una tattica politica e razionale di conquistai conservazione del potere. L'intenzione di Bin Laden è di comandare in Arabia Saudita e in Pakistan; con o senza Allah, egli apre la strada a molti principi post-moderni che si credono più furbi di lui.

Bisognava attendere il luglio 2002 perché Amnesty International, di solito così attenta in materia di diritti violati, definisse le bombe umane palestinesi come criminali contro l'umanità. Lo stesso ritardo (che vale quanto non aver trattato come tali a suo tempo gli assassini algerini del Gia) prova fino a che punto i paraocchi ideologici rischino di lasciarci senza voce né reazione di fronte al contagio galoppante e senza frontiere della barbarie nichilista. La storia contemporanea ci mette a confronto con uno sciame di estremismi terroristi religiosi, etnici, nazionali, non riducibili gli uni agli altri ma coniugabili e complementari. Facciamoci la domanda di Socrate: quale orizzonte comune, quale forma comune (idea, eidos) unifica questa molteplicità di massacratori? La mia risposta è: il nichilismo, presente in tutte le grandi ideologie distruttrici (nazismo, comunismo, islamismo) ma da nessuna interamente riassunto. L'assioma del «tutto è permesso» governa altrettanto bene il colonnellodell'Fsb (ex Kgb) che dichiara «get what you want» o l'Emiro del Gia che rapisce, violenta e uccide le ragazze dopo averle usate. Il nichilista commette tanto più facilmente il male in nome di un Dio che tutto consente in suo nome o di un'assenza di dio che vale a sua volta come licenza assoluta - se suppone che il male non esiste. Mi sia consentito di mettere la versione italiana di questo libro e la rivoluzione concettuale che esso propone sotto l'egida di Machiavelli, senza concessioni alle anime belle che chiudono gli occhi di fronte alla crudeltà e sussurrano che è maledire male del male («egli è male dir male del male», Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, L. III).