Doomsday prophets see opportunities

At a time when only people who lack an instinct for self-preservation are saying “things are turning around,” there is at least one industry that appears to have the future to itself: eschatologists and doomsday prophets. 

The utopists who have led a languishing life over the last few decades – and who at their peak cobbled together something aspiring about the need for more women in the boardroom – have recently had a wind in their sails that has not been this strong since about 1970. The future, which neoliberals had apparently staked their claim to in the 1990s, with dreams of eternal growth and capitalism’s ultimate victory in the world, has suddenly turned out to be completely open. And in this situation, it seems inevitable that people are once again beginning to look toward the ends of the spectrum, toward the extreme. 

On the left, revolutionary romantics are sensing new opportunities, which will be expressed not just in cultural-leftist declarations of sympathy for 1970s terrorist groups like the Baader-Meinhof Gang but to an even greater extent in loud demands, heard with increasing frequency, that the state needs to own and control ever more sectors in society. 

On the other end, there is a new right-ring extremism growing strong. This new kind of Fascism, which sprang to life in the guise of Islamism, has divided right-wing extremists into two camps depending on whether one sees Muslims or Jews as the main enemy. The anti-Semitic right-wing extremists, through their connection with these Islamist groups, have suddenly become acceptable in a way that no one could have dreamt just a few years ago.

It is clear, for instance, from Matthias Küntzel’s study Djihad und Judenhaß: über den neuen antijüdischen Krieg (2002) that it is impossible from a historical perspective not to see the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood as being closely linked to Fascism and National Socialism. These movements originated at the same time; they all emerged from the crises arising in the aftermath of the first world war. Of course, National Socialism was not the force behind the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood, but it supported the incipient Islamic movement economically and ideologically. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and one of the 20th century’s most influential Muslim leaders, had intensive contact with Adolf Hitler.

In his 2006 investigation, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust, Jeffrey Herf showed that the Nazis, Amin al-Husseini and the Muslim Brotherhood all shared the conviction that the American and British governments were controlled by Jews and that Jews were behind not just the first but also the second world war, making enormous profits from trade and war materiel, a position also taken up in Hamas’ charter. 

It no doubt says a great deal about the social climate that there were no reactions when (the leader of the Social Democrats) Mona Sahlin and the former minister for foreign affairs Jan Eliasson joined a demonstration in which Hamas banners were fully visible. Or that the cultural section of Dagens Nyheter features writers expressing their support for movements like Hamas and Hezbollah, movements whose ideological foundations constitute an upgrade of anti-Semitism to a level where all the evils of the world are attributable to Jews. Such an attitude, when extended, leads to the view that all Jews must be eliminated in order to save the world. 

It must be possible to express criticism of this kind of right-wing extremism without being accused of belonging to the other camp of right-wing extremists, which is also gaining strength in Sweden today. It is a right-wing extremism based on the demonisation of Muslims and a monolithic view of the Muslim world. However, it is important to realise that an Islamic ideology with Fascistic tendencies is in no way an inevitable consequence of Islam but is rather a deviation from the modernisation of Islam that took place, for instance, in Egypt during large parts of the 19th century (up until the emergence of Islamism in the 1930s) – and which today characterises large Muslim populations in Turkey or Indonesia, who live with their religion in roughly the same way as Christians live with theirs.

What unites these kinds of extremist movements both on the right and the left is that they are all highly critical of an open, liberal society. As the current crisis grows more severe, it is certainly not unlikely that the economic problems will be seen as being caused by certain systemic weaknesses in the liberal world as such. In a situation like this, where there is a risk that these extreme positions will grow even stronger, it is vital to keep one’s cool and safeguard values like democracy, the rights of the individual, universalism and enlightenment with even greater insistence.