To call the Islamic State the Fourth Reich is to diminish it. The Islamic State is even more savage and barbaric than the Third Reich was. They just don’t have the means (yet) to commit mass murder on the scale they’d like.
“A grotesque love of propaganda. Unspeakable barbarity. The loathing of Jews – and a hunger for world domination. In this stunning intervention, literary colossus V.S. NAIPAUL says ISIS is now the Fourth Reich,” by V.S. Naipaul, Mail On Sunday, March 21, 2015:
The Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul has warned that Islamic State are the most potent threat to the world since the Nazis.
In a hard-hitting article in today’s Mail on Sunday, the revered novelist brands the extremist Muslim organisation as the Fourth Reich, saying it is comparable to Adolf Hitler’s regime in its fanaticism and barbarity.
Calling for its ‘military annihilation,’ the Trinidadian-born British writer says IS is ‘dedicated to a contemporary holocaust’, has a belief in its own ‘racial superiority,’ and produces propaganda that Goebbels would be proud of.
A long-term critic of Islam as a global threat, he also challenges those who say the extremists have nothing to do with the real religion of Islam, suggesting that the simplicity of some interpretations of the faith have a strong appeal to a minority.
The author of A House For Mr Biswas, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, is known for his sharp views.
He has likened Tony Blair to a pirate whose socialist revolution had imposed a ‘plebeian culture’ on Britain and found himself embroiled in controversy in 2001 by comparing Islam to colonialism, saying the faith ‘has had a calamitous effect’ as converts must deny their heritage.
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Imagine a world in which a young man is locked in a cage, has petrol showered over him and is set alight to be burnt alive.
Imagine the triumphant jeering of an audience that has gathered to witness this. Imagine, also, a 12-year-old child with elated determination on his features shooting at close range a kneeling man with his arms tied behind his back.
Then picture the spectacle of a hundred beheadings of victim after victim in humiliating uniforms, their hands and feet bound, kneeling with their backs to their black-robed executioners who wield knives to cut their throats as though they were sacrificial lambs.
Picture queues of helpless men and women being marched by zealous executioners who nail them to wooden crosses and crucify them, howling and bleeding to death as crowds watch.
Then picture thousands of girls and women, their arms tied, being marched by hooded and armed captors into sexual slavery. And then, if that is not enough, picture men being thrown off cliffs to their deaths because they are accused of being gay.
Yes, all these scenes could have taken place in several continents in the medieval world, but they were captured on camera and broadcast to anyone with access to the internet. These are scenes, of yesterday, today and tomorrow in our own world.
I have always distrusted abstractions and have turned into writing what I could discover and explore for myself.
So I must begin by admitting that I have not recently travelled in those regions threatened by barbarism – the Middle East, the north west of Africa, in pockets of Pakistan and in the Islamic countries of south eastern Asia.
However, in the 1980s and early 1990s I undertook to examine the ‘revival’ of Islam that was taking place through the revolution in Iran and the renewed dedication to the religion of other countries.
I travelled through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia attempting to discover the ideas and convictions behind this new ‘fundamentalism’.
My first book was called Among The Believers and the second, perhaps prophetically, Beyond Belief. Since those books were written, the word ‘fundamentalism’ has taken on new meanings.
As the word suggests, it means going back to the groundings, to the foundations and perhaps to first principles. It is used to characterise the interpretation given to passages of the Koran, to the Hadith, which is a collection of the acts in the life of the Prophet Mohammed and to an interpretation of sharia law.
However, the particular fundamentalist ideology of ‘Islamist’ groups that have dedicated themselves to terror – such as Al Qaeda, Boko Haram and now in its most vicious, barbaric and threatening form the Islamic Caliphate, Isis or the Islamic State (IS) – interprets the foundation and the beginning as dating from the birth of the Prophet Mohammed in the 6th Century.
This fundamentalism denies the value and even the existence of civilisations that preceded the revelations of the Koran.
It was an article of 6th and 7th Century Arab faith that everything before it was wrong, heretical. There was no room for the pre-Islamic past.
So an idea of history was born that was fundamentally different from the ideas of history that the rest of the world has evolved.
In the centuries following, the world moved on. Ideas of civilisation, of other faiths, of art, of governance of law and of science and invention grew and flourished.
This Islamic ideological insistence on erasing the past may have survived but it did so in abeyance, barely regarded even in the Ottoman Empire which declared itself to be the Caliphate of all Islam.
Islamic State is dedicated to a contemporary holocaustBut now the evil genie is out of the bottle. The idea that faith abolishes history has been revived as the central creed of the Islamists and of Isis.
Their determination to deny, eliminate and erase the past manifests itself in the destruction of the art, artefacts and archaeological sites of the great empires, the Persian, the Assyrian and Roman that constitute the histories of Mesopotamia and Syria.
They have bulldozed landmarks in the ancient city of Dur Sharukkin and smashed Assyrian statues in the Mosul museum. Destroying the winged bull outside the fortifications of Nineveh satisfies the same reductive impulse behind the destruction by the Taliban of the Bhumiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has described this destruction of art, artefacts, inscriptions and of the museums that house them not only as a butchery of civilisational memory but as a war crime.
It is telling that the victims of Wednesday’s barbarous shootings were visitors to the great Bardo Museum in Tunis, a repository of art and material from Tunisia’s rich, pre-Islamic past.
Isis is dedicated to a contemporary holocaust. It has pledged itself to the murder of Shias, Jews, Christians, Copts, Yazidis and anyone it can, however fancifully, accuse of being a spy. It has wiped out the civilian populations of whole regions and towns. Isis could very credibly abandon the label of Caliphate and call itself the Fourth Reich.
Like the Nazis, Isis fanatics are anti-semitic, with a belief in their own racial superiority. They are anti-democratic: the Islamic State is a totalitarian state, absolute in its authority. There is even the same self-regarding love of symbolism, presentation and propaganda; terror is spread to millions through films and videos created to professional standards of which Goebbels would have been proud.
Just as the Third Reich did, Isis categorises its enemies as worthy of particular means of execution from decapitation to crucifixion and death by fire.
Whereas the Nazis pretended to be the guardians of civilisation in so far as they stole art works to preserve them and kept Jewish musicians alive to entertain them, Isis destroys everything that arises from the human impulse to beauty.
Such barbarism is not new to history and every nation has suffered mass murder and barbaric cruelty in the past. That a European country in the 20th Century launched a holocaust on the basis of race is a matter of the deepest shame.
That Isis has revived the religious dogmas and deadly rivalries between Sunnis and Shias, Sunnis and Jews and Christians is a giant step into darkness.
That a European country in the 20th Century launched a holocaust on the basis of race is a matter of the deepest shame
+7That a European country in the 20th Century launched a holocaust on the basis of race is a matter of the deepest shame
The Arab lands, relatively stable under the Ottoman Empire, were divided up by the British and French victors of the First World War into the kingdoms of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria and Jordan at the Cairo Conference of 1920. Borders were drawn in straight lines and the sons of the Mufti of Mecca imposed on the newly carved territories as kings.
Winston Churchill was advised at the Cairo conference by T. E. Lawrence and by Gertrude Bell, who should have known that the Shia would not readily welcome or acknowledge a Sunni king and vice versa.
After upheavals, rebellions and military coups, the region settled down under dictatorships in the 1950s and 1960s.
The Ba’athist Party was, in some senses, a modernising force and Saddam Hussein, though a Sunni, ruled the predominantly Shia and partly Kurd nation of Iraq with a ruthless hand. Wherever two or three were gathered in the name of the Almighty, he sent in his police.
He may not have been a savoury character but his overarching policies were holding on to power and modernising Iraq.
He was the cat that kept the rats of Islamism at bay. His invasion of Kuwait, another artificial sheikdom, poor in territory at the knee of Iraq but rich in oil, triggered the international reaction against him. The Bush-Blair alliance invaded Iraq and the puppet regime they set up executed Saddam. In the absence of the cat, the rats ran riot.
And so it has proved throughout the region. The Libyans, with the assistance of a European alliance, overthrew Gaddafi. The country is now at the mercy of Islamic militants. The same Arab Spring saw democratic protest against the Egyptian dictator and resulted for a while in an elected regime veering towards the repressions of Islamism.
It was overthrown by a military coup whose leader, General el-Sisi, speaking to the clerics and supposed scholars of the authoritative Islamic university Al-Azhar, called on them to denounce Isis as the greatest threat to international peace and exhorted them to declare the ideology of Isis a heresy. The mullahs of Al-Azhar have not as yet complied.
In Syria, the conflict of groups opposed to the government of Bashar Al-Assad resolved itself in the formation of a Sunni Islamicist militia, which in turn evolved – after a significant bloodletting – into Isis.
Are Isis and its followers heretics? The politicians of Europe and America, including David Cameron, Barack Obama and Francois Hollande, after every Islamicist outrage insist on describing them as a lunatic fringe. Their constant refrain is that these perpetrators of murder and terror have as much to do with Islam as the Ku Klux Klan has to do with Christianity or the testament of Jesus Christ. But does such political assurance bear scrutiny?
Of course the politicians, church leaders and others who say ‘these atrocities have nothing to do with Islam’ are not making a researched or considered theological statement. They are attempting, quite rightly, to prevent civil discord in a world in which there are considerable Muslim immigrant populations in most countries of Europe and in the US.
So what impels the tiny minority of young men and women from immigrant communities to volunteer themselves to ‘jihad’ and to almost certain self-destruction, or young women to abscond from their families and from European reality to become jihadi brides.
When I visited Pakistan, I discovered what I have characterised as the effects of an ideological nurture. The Pakistani or Bangladeshi Muslim is taught that he or she has no historical antecedents before the conquest of parts of India and its conversion to the faith.
The pressures of poverty and promise bring this Muslim to Britain. He and his family don’t speak English.
They are confined to work and live in an exclusively immigrant area of an inner city – say Bradford, Tower Hamlets or parts of Greater Manchester or Birmingham.
Their children are raised as Muslims, some strict some not so strict, and are sent to the normal city schools which soon become almost exclusively immigrant.
Some find that the values that traditionally inform them are at variance with those of the lives they see around them. This is true for even those Muslim young men and women who are being educated, through Britain’s by-and-large egalitarian system, to be surgeons or computer programmers.
Islamism is simpler. There are rules to obey, a jihad to fight against the civilisation you can’t comprehend, a heaven to go to when you martyr yourself and now a real fighting force in the world which you can join to simplify and solve your existence: no history to complicate your self-awareness, no art to distract you, no ambivalence and choices that ‘Western’ civilisation offers you, no doubt about the fruits of martyrdom, no allegiance to the country in which you were brought up and which gave you a free education and perhaps welfare benefits. A gun, a half-understood prayer and the simplicity that a simple and singular upbringing craves.
That is why they go. And volunteer for death, and die.
In the past three or four centuries since Descartes, Leibniz and Newton, Islam remained encrypted in the revelations of the Koran and the Hadith of a 6th Century life.
The expansion of the scientific enquiry coincided with or possibly caused the maritime expansion of European colonialism. Empirical science, the progress of liberal religion and the germination of modern democratic ideas coincided with European colonial dominion over Asia and Africa.
The process of decolonisation in the 20th Century gave rise to the idea that every advance in civilisation, scientific or democratic, was to be condemned as ‘colonial’. There may be no ideological answer to such bigotry.
The Islamic world does contain currents that are opposed to the interpretations that Isis gives to the Koran, the Hadith and to sharia. These are yet to declare themselves….
tilda says
Nice to see another crack appearing in the dam.
ECAW says
Here’s another:
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/03/tom-holland-we-must-not-deny-relgious-roots-islamic-state
roger says
V.S. Naipaul considered a literary giant may find himself banished to the fringes of this so called enlightened society where his kind of truth becomes just a festering sore to those that worship the new doctrines of obeisance to all things Islamic, and paradoxically, anti Christian.
The Left was always anti Christian but is more so now because Islam says so,
V.S. Naipaul has to learn to pull himself into line, and get with the program, he has to learn to say ” there is no religion but Islam , global warming, income equality, gay rights and CNN is the messenger.
Brian Hoff says
Global warming and climate change is takeing place so you are than climate change denier.
Westman says
Very well written and containing all the elements and reasons for the conflict of regressive fundamental Islam with modern society.
A nefarious outcome is talented youth being drawn into Jihad against the very nations that invested in them.
I could be in error, however, it seems to me that having a purpose for one’s life is a very strong need for early adults. The West seems to be unable, when there is peace in the home country, to provide that purpose in an increasingly secular and global world.
In Israel, groups of youth are taken to Germany to see what happened to Jews in WWII. There is nothing like it in the US, say, to Pearl Harbor. Israeli youth are expected to serve in the armed forces. American youth are expected to consume and follow the Kardasians. Most US Senators sons will never see military service.
How are these vital virtues of love for country and fellow citizens to be derived from disengagement? Is this not the hole into which Islamic Jihad creeps?
Joseph Campbell in his work, The Hero With A Thousand Faces, writes about the need of youth for the hero’s experience, the vision quest. He describes this as an essential rite of passage found in most societies. Is this is where the West fails and Fundamentalist Islam provides?
What happened to the Peace Corps? Military service for all? Where are today’s youth getting their sense of pupose for something grand; beyond themselves? Who is telling them that they matter?
icarus says
If one is intelligent enough to undertake the intellectual travails necessary to become a surgeon or computer scientist then how come one cannot find a purpose in one’s life. If Stephen Hawking with his very unfortunate disability, Mother Teresa, Sigmund Freud, Richard Dawkins, etc. can find purpose in their lives then why not all others? Stephen Hawking never joined the military nor did he ever migrate to the U.S. to join the Peace Corps–yet he is OK.
Naipaul’s analysis of Islam and the attractions that ISIS holds for some is perhaps the best of 2015.
Westman says
Icarus,
I agee there are a minority of youth who find their own calling at an early age, the Newton’s, Alexander’s, Jobs, Dawkins, Desraeli’s, Edison’s, etc. But, again, they are a distinct minority. Perhaps some of those highly-skilled Jihadists didn’t choose their profession by inspiration.
An obvious place to look is the workplace. Why do most work for others and not themselves in a capitalist system?
The obvious conclusion is that most people are followers to something that inspired them or just that which allows survival. Since most are followers, a nation that does not inspire its youth to a cause, benefitting the nation, leaves the youth vulnerable to opposing influences.
TheCountess says
How true. I have always felt that if anyone wants American citizenship, they must agree to two years in civil service. 1. To learn English. 2. The laws. 3. The ‘idea’ behind the word ‘freedom’ and 4. Our history. Isn’t that funny, could this apply to all Americans? We are a ‘soft’ people, and time will end for us who hide behind technology. I always get back to the ‘value’ system. And the greater purpose of Life. When a gun replaces a toy for a child, something is wrong with that society. And it is much easier to hate, than to love. You would think it was the other way around.
No Fear says
Nazism: Leader = Hitler, Manifesto = Mein Kampf, Methodology = subjugate non-nazis, kill the jews
ISIS: Leader = Mohammed, Manifesto = Quran, Methodology = subjugate non-muslims, kill the jews
bicky says
Proud of you sir
Crixus says
How much would I like to see Naipul on Channel 4 news demolishing Mehdi Hasan and dhimmi apologists.
Mr vice president could finish the patronising conversation he stated with Hirsi Ali by having Naipul demolish his position in public.
Well done Vs Naipul
IQ al Rassooli says
Naipaul has put in a single lucid unforgiving and unchallengeable article the pure essence of Muhammadan Islam. Nothing more should be added to this remarkable article except that it should be mandatory reading by our clueless and criminally negligent leaders.
A CULT belief system that feeds on all the most negative and depraved human characteristics possible in full emulation of the author of the Quran called Muhammad bin Abd Allah
Muhammad, his Quran, his Sunna (Quran & Sunna are the foundations of Sharia) and his Fundamentalist followers are (to put it mildly)~
Hatemongering Warmongering Misogynist Duplicitous Racist Intolerant Disloyal Dissolute Hypocritical Vile and hence totally Ungodly
IQ al Rassooli
Kafir & Proud!
ECAW says
Where do you get the rascist bit IQ? All I see in the Koran and Sunnah is the incidental rascism of Arabs of the time. The nearest I can find to racism in Mohammed’s teachings is the bit about Allah having chosen the Qureish over others.
It seems clear to me that Naipaul is wrong when he says:
“IS is ‘dedicated to a contemporary holocaust’, has a belief in its own ‘racial superiority,”
Surely they believe in their own religious superiority.
On our side we don’t like it when people accuse us of racism for opposing a religion. Isn’t Naipaul just doing the same in reverse?
TheCountess says
No. Barbarism makes the difference. Hatred makes the difference. Destruction makes the difference. Cruelty make the difference. All these adjectives makes the difference. Hatred, barbarism, destruction, cruelty. Sexual abuse is abuse. Abuse. No words can take these truths away, with the exception of looking away and/or denying them. What is wrong is still wrong.
Paul Freeman says
“Of course the politicians, church leaders and others who say ‘these atrocities have nothing to do with Islam’ are not making a researched or considered theological statement. They are attempting, quite rightly, to prevent civil discord in a world in which there are considerable Muslim immigrant populations in most countries of Europe and in the US.”
This is the well-meaning but mistaken belief upon which civil society threatens to founder.
Apostate says
Well said and thank you sir.
stephen says
What penetrating, intelligent insight here! Naipul’s critique needs to be read, re-read, broadcast and shouted from the rooftops everywhere to get some sense into people before it’s too late. The festering psychological and cultural nihilism he points to draws out the frighteningly apocalyptic nature of this scenario……..
Jaladhi says
“Tell it like it is” – is VS Naipaul’s style!! If you read his two books on Islamic countries that were not Islamic before Muslims invaded and converted, you will understand how truth telling this guy is. The two books : “Among the Believers” and “Beyond Belief” are worth reading!! Once you start reading you may not want to put down until finished!!
PJG says
So true, Jaladhi. And after reading them they are worth dipping into sometimes to get a reminder of what Hugh Fitzgerald calls the “atmospherics” of Islamic societies.
dumbledoresarmy says
Yes, I have read both.
They are excellent.
He may not get some of the fine detail, but one of the big things he “gets” at a very deep level is the way in which Islam drives its adherents to annihilate their own pre-Islamic history and culture. In “Among the Believers” the section on Pakistan actually includes a chapter entitled “Killing History”.
sidney penny says
One of the foundations of the Islamic idea is that pre-Islamic civilizations, and non-Islamic civilizations, are all jahiliyya — the society of unbelievers, which is worthless. Consequently, any art, literature, or architecture that any non-Islamic culture produces has no value whatsoever: it is all simply a manifestation of that ignorance and barbarism.
V. S. Naipaul encountered this attitude in his travels through Muslim countries.
For many Muslims, he observed in Among the Believers, “The time before Islam is a time of blackness: that is part of Muslim theology. History has to serve theology.” Obviously this cuts against the idea of tourism of ancient sites and non-Muslim religious installations.
Naipaul recounted that some Pakistani Muslims, far from valuing the nation’s renowned archaeological site at Mohenjo Daro, saw its ruins as a teaching opportunity for Islam, recommending that Qur’an 3:137 be posted there as a teaching tool.
Many were the Ways of Life that have passed away before you: travel through the earth, and see what was the end of those who rejected Truth. (Qur’an 3:137)
AJ Liberphile says
I read this in the Mail this morning. Excellent article. The truth is trickling through to the mainstream; people are not as stupid as current ‘leaders’ think. We have a smattering of articles now in the Atlantic, Daily Mail and others; the Spectator and its readers have no illusions.
We see a lot of Muslim opinion polls places like Muslim statistics blog; there are not so many of non-muslims – I’d be fascinated to see graphs of wakefullness.
Andrew Sapia says
Excellent analysis! In the end they must be defeated and I am certain the next US president is going to change tactics. Conventional warfare will not solve the problem we will be fighting them forever. There is a reason God made nuclear weapons.
Jay Boo says
Muslims claim to respect Jesus.
But when the sh-t hits the fan they will say the same claims about Jesus that they make against the Jews.
Islam’s doctrine is meant to be used as a weapon though it poses as a religion.
Wellington says
Rather puts a damper on Hirsi Ali’s call in a very recent Wall Street Journal article (based on a new book by her) for Islam to reform. I admire Hirsii Ali but I think her idea that Islam is capable of reform is definitely wishful (and simply erroneous) thinking. Islam can only be discarded. It cannot be reformed. Way too much rot in it, which begins with its founder. Reading this article by Naipaul only further confirms this conviction of mine.
Huck Folder says
“Islam can only be discarded. It cannot be reformed. Way too much rot in it, which begins with its flounder.”
So islam is a fish?
Kepha says
Naipaul is one of the great English stylists and writers of our time and all but peerless as a reporter. He is is greatly to be commended for his willingness to expose the ferocities and follies of the post-colonial world, especially in his observations in _Among the Believers_.
However, I will continue my objection to the use of the term “fundamentalist” to describe the radical Muslims. “Fundamentalist” is completely a Protestant Christian term, used to describe those who, in the early 20th century, argued for certain fundamentals that could not be discarded without the the churches ceasing to be meaningfully Christian. Perhaps the best statement of the case was John Gresham Machen’s _Christianity and Liberalism_. But men like Machen and other 1930’s-vintage Christian fundamentalists were not out to commit assassinations, terrorism, or armed insurrection; nor did they think themselves above civil laws. Mosti mportantly, if you take a look at how most fundammentalist denominations mahage church government, you will see a very strongly democratic element in the role of the congregation in selecting its elders and deacons and in issuing a call to its pastors.
“Islamic fundamentalism” as a term was coined by the American media in the late 1970’s during the Iranian revolution. One of its purposes was to identify Evangelical Christians, who were then abandoning the Democratic Party in droves over abortion and state interference in private education, as something horribly un-American–especially in Jimmeh Cah-duh’s hour of need. Ironically, now that the Islamic world is on fire with politico-religious ferment, the MSM is shying away from the terminology it gave us in the 1970’s, while at the same time refusing to recognize that there is something very destructive and violent in Islam itself.
TH says
The interpretation of the Qur´an is so tied up that those who try to interpet it in any other way besides its literal meaning plus the abrogation clause have about a snowball´s chance in hell of success.