The new nihilists

During the last year’s final week and the new year’s first week, we saw a number of new poster children born: Munir Awad, Israel Shamir, Jared Lee Loughner, Taimour Abdulwahab. Despite different political affiliations and practices, there are some interesting similarities between the recent months’ most discussed political activists. Similarities that bring to mind some of the main characters in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s great novel The PossessedI think this is the most common title for this book in English – please check.I think this is the most common title for this book in English – please check..

Where we follow a group of revolutionaries in 1860s’ Russia, led by Piotr Verchovjenskij and Nikolai Stavrogin. In Dostoyevsky, the revolution’s charismatic and subversive leadership moves freely between different continents and countries. They seek compulsively those places where subversive ideas are formulated and taught. They are drawn to cities where the potential to create chaos is the greatest.

And they exercise an almost magnetic influence on young, unstable people who want to feel that they belong to the future rather than to history. The subversives’ methods can be compared to a kind of nihilistic virus in the body of society, seeking to evoke the tensions and conflicts between different groups, individuals and establishments. So that one, with violence, sabotage, and fires, can create a revolutionary state.

In the case of Dostoevsky’s characters’ modern counterparts, it can be noted how they are united in their resentment against liberal society. They see its institutions and rulers as being engaged in destructive conspiracies. As in the Moscow of the 1870s, the sole objective seems often to be the creation of chaos and destruction – and thereby, eventually, to optimise the conditions for a new utopian world order – beyond the nation state, beyond capitalism, beyond the existing democratic systems.

But the subversive nihilists of 2011 act, just as the revolutionaries of 100 or 150 years ago, in a vacuum. On the contrary, there are plenty of Swedish opinion leaders who constantly see it as necessary to give support to those who today want to implant the virus of disintegration in the social body of the West. It is argued that the emotions, which terrorists claim to be the cause of terrorist crimes, are perfectly legitimate. It justifies the terrorists’ actions through their alleged experience of living in a deeply racist and fundamentally unjust society. We believe that the threat from subversives is exaggerated; that the terrorists are not terrorists, that the terror is carried out more by the rulers of democratic society.

The reasons for these types of responses are mainly two: first, there is, among Swedish journalists and cultural journalists, a widespread belief that it is stranger to defend the liberal, Western democracy and market economy than to want to overthrow the present system. Secondly, there is a somewhat legitimate fear that the prominence of terrorists with religious beliefs other than Christian could stir up racism and xenophobia.

The theme of this issue of Axess may be perceived as an attempt to strike a blow for a tolerant attitude toward the strange and different, without lapsing into the kind of cultural relativism which has led to political extremism growing strong and coming to be regarded as an intellectually sophisticated approach.

But what remains for those who are unable to ignore the links between, on the one hand, political extremism and terror and, on the other hand, dreams of a utopian ideal world and a new type of human: a religiously pure and sinless man, a man whose sexuality is unproblematic and rational, a man from who selfish desires and competitive thinking have been purged? Must opposition to such utopianism mean ending up with a static and self-contained view of man and the concepts of ethics, culture and quality? Is there no other alternative to utopianism and cultural relativism than a reactionary attitude, which seeks at all costs to defend the existing order and fight against any kind of change?

In this issue we draw up guidelines for a cosmopolitan-oriented cultural view, which has its roots in an alloy of cultural conservatism, liberalism and enlightenment thinking. Can one at once affirm the nationally unique, the culturally advanced, the artistically significant and ethically valid? And at the same time strike a blow for the dynamically changing concepts of quality and culture? And at the same time fight for the individual’s ability to break free from ethnic, cultural and biological constraints? These questions I hope will come to be seen as significant both during and after reading 2011’s first issue of Axess Magazine.