** FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 663 19 January 2016 ISIS: COULD IT WIN?

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COMPARING ISIS WITH THREE MAJOR REVOLUTIONS, IS IT REASONABLE TO IMAGINE IT COULD WIN?
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Could the Caliphate boys actually win? A provocative thought French anthropologist Scott Atran mooted in a BBC interview.
ISIS promotes a violent Islamist revolution in the Middle East. Atran compared it to the epochal subversions caused by three major European revolutions: the French, the Russian and the National-Socialist.
The French revolutionaries overthrew the Bourbon monarchy and abolished feudal privileges. Ruthless and fanatical, they beheaded thousands of enemies, including scientists like Lavoisier and poets like Andrea Chenier. Inventing the word ‘terrorism’, they waged war of extermination against internal opponents, women and children included. Outside France, they became agents of furious political change throughout Europe.
The Russian revolution meant Bolshevism. Seizing power with a coup d’état in October 1917, the Bolsheviks massacred the Tsar and the royal family and emerged victorious in a bloody civil war. Later Lenin in Moscow founded a Communist International aimed at fomenting worldwide upheavals. Stalin then proceeded to kill or starve to death millions of hostile peasants.
In 1933 the National-Socialist revolution achieved power in Germany, after democratic elections. Purporting to repair the injustices of the Versailles treaty, Hitler replaced the democratic Weimar republic with the totalitarian Third Reich. In WW2 he tried to establish Aryan, pro-German supremacy across Europe, along with the destruction of Jewry and other enemies.
What are the similarities between ISIS and the three revolutions?
First, they were all prepared by powerful ideologies. Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and Rousseau created a cultural hegemony – e.g. Rights of Man, egalitarianism, denigration of revealed religion - that allowed French revolutionaries to triumph intellectually before winning by force of arms. The Bolsheviks revered Marx’s writings as their Bible and Lenin’s works as a Talmud, the true guide to Marx’s inerrant prophecies. And the Nazis also had their turgid script, Mein Kampf, preceded by a vast literature of nationalist fervour, from Fichte and Hegel to H.S. Chamberlain’s Foundations of the XIX Century.
ISIS, like all Muslims, boasts the inimitable Qur’an and the teeming hadiths of the Prophet Muhammad. More distinct doctrines go back to extremist luminaries like Ibn Taymiyya and Abd al-Wahhab. Salafi-Wahhabi texts lend ISIS heaps of intellectual backing.
Second, unbridled, no-holds-barred violence. Caliphate Jihadis fight and terrorise people by brutal executions, torture and enslavements. (One even killed his own mum, guilty of ‘apostasy’.) Similarly, the European revolutionaries slaughtered and instilled fear in order to win. The revolution’s enemies were demonised and declared sub-human. ‘Enemy of the human race’, the Jacobins declared the British Prime Minister, William Pitt. England was compared to Carthage, hence to be annihilated.
Third, the goal of a political state. ISIS’ theological-political paradigm is the Caliphate.  For centuries the Ottoman sultans were also caliphs-rulers of Islam. Under them Muslims reached the gates of Vienna. It all collapsed in 1924, when Kemal Ataturk terminated the Ottoman caliphate. ISIS has brought it back. Its Khalifa is the shadowy Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, based in squalid Raqqa, on the bank of the Euphrates.
A state needs a territory and this Caliphate has one in Iraq and Syria, as large as Britain. Like the French and Russian revolutions, its appeal is not limited to Arabs but extends to Muslims from all nations. Thousands of jihadi fighters have flocked to its banners from the world over.
Oddly, Scott Atran did not mention a fourth revolution: the Iranian one. Was it because it embarrasses the European secular mind? Khomeini’s triumph, motored by religion, was ‘against history’, Western liberal commentators claimed. Nonetheless, the Ayatollah toppled the Shah’s regime and sought to spread its message abroad. He inspired Muslims everywhere.
So, could the ISIS revolutionaries win? Looks like an empirical, military question. The armies of the European revolutions scored remarkable victories. France repelled all invading monarchist forces and went on to conquer and revolutionise much of Europe. The Bolsheviks defeated the White armies and their many foreign allies. National-Socialism nearly made it. It was only crushed and annihilated by a concerted alliance of East and West. It evinced the desperate strength of a revolution against overwhelming odds.
ISIS cannot match the military might of the West. It has no air power, for one thing. Its land fighters look like a ragtag and bobtail bunch. However, ISIS has is a formidable revolutionary will, fuelled by its religion, to fight on and beat the infidels. Contrary to Western opinion, it is not a death cult but it celebrates life as jihad, as struggle, suffering and martyrdom.
On the other hand, it seems the liberal-democratic West lacks the guts to fight. Alain de Benoist has noted how French politicians proclaim the nation is at war with ISIS but many Frenchmen don’t get it. Apart from the decolonising wars of Algeria and Indochina, France has known nearly 70 years of peace. Neither young people nor their parents, like other Western Europeans, have experienced being at war. They assume that peace is the natural state of society but in reality peace is a fragile thing. War is a lurking possibility and to win it you need the will to power, the obduracy to master your foe – never mind the dismal body bags’ count.
Time back at Chatham House I raised the matter of ISIS with Francis Fukuyama, the notorious apologist for Western liberal supremacy. Proud of America’s mega-fire power and technological wizardry, he scoffed: ‘A few kids armed with Kalashnikovs!’ Thus he arrogantly dismissed my question
Time will tell, insh’allah…

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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