Reasoning out suicidal mass murder
The Second Plane, by Martin Amis

Rob Weatherill
posted 4 March 2008

Martin Amis is one of an increasing number of intelligent independent minds who identify the paralysing malaise at the heart of Western liberalism brought sharply into focus by the paradigm shift created by the Islamist attack on the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001. In his introduction to the current work Amis says that if this had to happen - the wake-up calls to the West - ‘then I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime’. However, he confesses that on 12 September, he felt like Josephine, the opera singing mouse in Kafka’s story, Sing – ‘She can’t even squeak!’

Amis, however, has been smeared by accusations of racism recently, coming from Terry Eagleton, Ronan Bennett, Johann Hari, among others. He got a favourable reception from BBC Radio 5 Live, when asked about this most recent collection of short essays and two fictional pieces, even though his thoughtful commentary was constantly fractured or denatured by rapid-fire traffic updates and ‘breaking-news’ inserts. When interviewed on Andrew Marr’s Start the Week, Marr opens with, ‘Your book Martin…You’re clearly very angry…?’ As if Amis’s anger is a personal thing, maybe a questionable thing belonging to him alone. People are reassessing Amis the man, alleging secret characterological flaws perhaps inherited from his father Kingsley, rather than concentrating on what he actually says and writes.

Returning from living in South America, Amis is shocked about what he calls the ‘moral crash’, the fallout from 9/11. He is amazed by an angry woman on the BBC’s Question Time suggesting that America should ‘bomb itself’ and the loud applause she gets. ‘This was not equivalence’ says Amis: this is symptomatic of ‘hemispherical abjection’, or, ‘a citizenry haunted by a rudderlessly cruising suspicion’, longing for American defeat in Iraq and the humiliating punishment of Blair and Bush.

He writes in a collective style using the first person plural – ‘Don’t we feel that…?’ – hoping to bring fellow independent readers with him, as if they still exist in considerable numbers. His book is not on the front shelves any more than is Melanie Phillips’ Londistan. Instead, he is condemned as Islamophobic. Correcting this slur, he says he is ‘Islamismophobic’. He is trying to find a language to describe a degree of terrorism, of maximum malevolence, that he calls ‘horrorism’, to cut a swathe through the ‘polite fiction’ of contemporary multiculturalism and ‘the lowest common dominator’ of current liberal thinking, or what Paul Berman calls, ‘rationalist naivety’.

Contemplating suicidal mass murder, one is tempted to ask: ‘What are the reasons for this?’ Remember the IRA atrocities, committed by a former generation of fanatics, and the universal response from senior politicians – ‘there can be no possible justification…’. What we didn’t manage then, and manage now less than ever, is ‘an unvarying factory siren of disgust’, summoning instead, ‘a murmur of dissonant evasion’. What we have become accustomed to is, ‘the fetishisation of “balance”, the ground rule of “moral equivalence”’, and the ‘360-degree inability to pass judgement on any ethnicity other than our own (except in the case of Israel)’. For instance, many Western liberals refuse to condemn atrocities by the ‘insurgency’ in Iraq. As Blair tells Amis, ‘Al-Qaeda actions [in Iraq and elsewhere] are treated as morally neutral. They’re treated like natural disasters’. I remember Baudrillard jesting on the temptation for Al Qaeda to claim responsibility for earthquakes and hurricanes. Amis suggests, ‘with the twentieth century so fresh in our minds, you might think that human beings would be quick to identify an organised passion for carnage’.

Amis doesn’t need recourse to a psychoanalytic theory of the ‘death drive’ or jouissance, to explain this ‘thanatism’, but he has singled out a number of key factors. On the Islamist side, firstly, the turn against Reason, the ‘great leap backward’, and, secondly, the radical devaluation of human life – the use of human ‘delivery systems’, right down to, most recently, a terrified Down’s Syndrome delivery system. ‘Throw reason to the dogs’, a Taliban chant opens the way for ‘the illimitable world of insanity and death’, ‘death hunger’ and ‘death oestrus’.

However, Amis does try to account for, yes reason out, the undoubted ‘apocalyptic hurt of the Islamist’. For instance, in attacking Baghdad in the recent war, we were attacking the seat of the Caliphate, thus possibly creating ‘a casus belli that will burn for a generation’. During 1947 and 1948, two imperial decisions pitted Muslim against non-Muslim: the partition of India along religious lines, and the establishment of the state of Israel. During the 1970s, the US attempted to head off political dissent by supporting repressive regimes in the Middle East. During the 1980s, the US backed the Mujahidin against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and helped fund the Pakistani madrasas whose student numbers increased from 30,000 in 1987 to over half a million by 2001.

Following the equivalence argument, therefore, Islamists wearied of seeing the battles fought on their own soil and visited destruction on the West in 9/11. This then suited the neocons and Zionists who could them militarise their own homeland and push for Islamic oil reserves and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. The so-called ‘terrorists’ are responding in kind to the ‘state terrorism’ of the US and its clients. The attack therefore are political not messianic – the oppressed struggle against the oppressor. From this equivocalist viewpoint, to call Islamists ‘nihilistic fanatics’ is an ‘orientalist smear’. Terrorism is, according to Arundhati Roy, the ‘diabolic twin of the System’. Baudrillard has a similar notion of symmetry, whereby ‘the system itself will commit suicide in response to the multiple challenges posed by deaths and suicides’. He sees the collapse of the Twin Towers as precisely this symbolic suicide. Moral equivalence is mathematical: plus and minus cancel to zero - Ground zero. In The Spirit of Terrorism, Baudrillard says, ‘Every zero-death system is a zero-sum-game system. All the means of deterrence and destruction can do nothing against an enemy who has already turned his death into a counterstrike weapon’. The Islamists now fulfil that role.

Clearly, the Left in sympathy with the Islamists still has a taste for Hegelian ‘absolute negativity’ – the radical shattering of the complacent isolation of ordinary lives. And although Slavoj Žižek is generally critical of the Left’s response to 9/11, he says in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, ‘After their [Taliban] ghost was concocted to fight communism, they turned into the main enemy. Consequently, even if terrorism burns us all, the US “war on terrorism” is not our struggle, but a struggle internal to the Capitalist universe. The first duty of a progressive intellectual (if this term has any meaning left in it today) is not to fight the enemy’s struggles for him’.

Memories are short. Paul Virilio in Ground Zero, says, ‘Thus, on the first day of total war, Hitler…could at last sign the death sentences of millions of human beings who were decreed irredeemable. After the pathogenic races (Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, etc.), it would quickly be the turn of the mentally ill, of sexual deviants, of the disabled, then the tubercular, those suffering from heart disease, the aged, whom the regime planned to marginalise before slaughtering them’.

However, faced with such unendurable truth, we resort to ‘numbing’ and or 'doubling' (or splitting), where we ‘know’ and ‘don’t know’ at the same time. Amis is not referring to confusion among Western liberals, but to the Bush administration and its ‘Yes-man’s-land’ ‘miscalculation’ of the Iraq war and its aftermath, which he believes has possibly ignited the Muslim fratricide, not between moderate and extreme, which is already over, but between Sunni and Shia, ‘which has been marinating for one and a half millennia’.

We have to contend with another problem, facilitated by the internet – fabulation -. the desire for complex deceit masquerading as fact. 9/11 and 7/7 being blamed on their respective governments. 42% of Americans, for instance, believed that Americans caused 9/11. On the other side, ‘the weaponised fabulist’ and the notion put about everywhere on several thousand jihadi websites that it is possible, simultaneously, ‘to be a random mass murderer and a good Muslim’.

Amis’s generalised critique disposes what he calls, the ‘incuriosity of the dependent mind’, his global term for the passive attitude of religious believers. As an agnostic he deplores the ‘nullity of the non-conversation we are having with the dependent mind’. He is referring in the current context, not just to the head banging rigidity, the ‘de-enlightenment’ that can pass for Islamist education/indoctrination, but by implication and extension, he implicates all religion. This is the standard clichéd critique of the self-satisfied and self-righteous! ‘Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful’. One could make the same generalisation about Atheism.

Martin Amis clearly would have no time for Alasdair McIntyre’s, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Being Need the Virtues (London, Duckworth. 1999). For McIntyre, disability and vulnerability mark every period of all human life, especially early childhood and old age. We should acknowledge our mutual indebtedness and dependence and lead virtuous lives accordingly. Amis may be reflecting accurately a neurotically dependent fixation to an allegedly protecting God, á la Freud, but to condemn all religious sensibility in the same breath betrays the same autistic incuriosity that he condemns. Why, for instance, has the liberal so-called independent free mind been so catastrophically unable to confront nihilism? Why has it embraced moral relativism and why is it no longer able to distinguish right from wrong? Why has it abandoned its Judeo-Christian heritage so comprehensively?

We can link these questions to a second theme touched on early in The Second Plane, namely, Amis’ deprecation of masculinity. In a recent interview, he said, ‘I am a gynocrat, I think the world would be better if women ruled it. Feminism today is only in its second trimester, and when it reaches delivery it will make the world an even better place’. While we can concede that the Islamic radical is a new subterranean low point in the ‘male idea’ and that Islam, as he says, is generous to ‘male needs’. Under the Shah of Iran, for instance, the age of concent was 18, which after the Revolution was halved, legalising male predation. However, this ‘dead white male’ rhetoric is accepted everywhere today, in universities and the media, with some amusement. Maybe Amis is just trying to get onside again, but it tends to blow a large hole below the waterline in his otherwise cogent thesis returning us, alas to the dreamy make-believe world of rational naivety that he so successfully excoriates in the most ungynocratic language.

Rob Weatherill is the author of two books on the Death Drive. His website is
www.criticalpsychoanalysis.com.