Qué Barbaridad

Flag of the Islamic State 
(formerly known as ISIS or ISIL)

One of Nietzsche's concerns in his later writings is with the question of how a stronger species of man might arise from out of modernity, which he regards as a form of corruption. A people possessing the ability and the desire to impose themselves upon others can, he says, grow up only out of terrible and violent beginnings. And so he awaits those he terms the new barbarians ...

But just as the Nazis were not those whom he anticipated and called forth, neither are the militants of the Islamic State - presently fueling chaos and committing a series of grotesque atrocities across Syria and Iraq. For whilst these jihadis may display some of the traits that Nietzsche admired, they nevertheless remain barbarians of the depths, rather than those who come from the heights and who, like Prometheus, bring something genuinely new into the world.

Unfortunately, their asceticism remains tied to a spirit of revenge and is born of sickness and inferiority, rather than a union of spiritual superiority, well-being, and an excess of strength. For all their sincerity and violent enthusiasm, they're essentially decadents full of all the same modern vices - such as an addiction to modern technology and social media - as the rest of us. This is why when, not praying or fighting, they seem to spend most of their time tweeting, or posting vile images on YouTube and Facebook.

 

Ultimately, if holy war can be the source of stimulation in a mankind grown soft via the resurrection of the most savage energies "in the shape of the long-buried dreadfulness and excesses of the most distant ages", it can do no more than this. Significant change requires something else. Not something bigger or more catastrophic, but, on the contrary, something much more modest; something requiring not just cruelty, but the exercise of great caution.

Ultimately, we will reflect on the attempt by these Islamofascists to trigger a revaluation of values as Nietzsche looked back on the French Revolution; i.e. as nothing more than "a pathetic and bloody piece of quackery". They might inspire believers with their neo-archaic fantasy of a global caliphate, but, the attempt to reterritorialize upon the ruins of a despotic state machine and fragments of a seventh century Arabic text is, thankfully, doomed to failure.     

Notes:

For Nietzsche's thinking on the question of barbarism and the new barbarians, see, for example, notes 868, 899 and 900 in The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, (Vintage Books, 1968), pp. 464-65, 478-79. 

The line quoted from Nietzsche in paragraph four is from Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), I. 8. 463, p. 169.

The line quoted from Nietzsche in paragraph five is from Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), V. 534, pp. 211-12. 

For a more extensive discussion of this topic see my study of Nietzschean and post-Nietzschean politics, Outside the Gate, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), particularly part three.