- Carlos [Ilich Ramírez Sánchez]. L'Islam révolutionnaire. Textes
et propos recueillis, rassemblés et présentés par Jean-Michel
Vernochet. Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 2003. ISBN 2-268-04433-5.
- Prior to his capture in Sudan in 1994 and
“exfiltration” to a prison in France by the French DST, Carlos
(“the Jackal”), nom de guerre of Venezuelan-born
Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (a true red diaper baby, his brothers
were named “Vladimir” and “Lenin”) was one of the most notorious and elusive
terrorists of the latter part of the twentieth century.
This is a collection of his writings and interviews from prison,
mostly dating from the early months of 2003. I didn't plan it that
way, but I found reading Carlos immediately after Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies
(above) extremely enlightening, particularly in explaining the
rather mysterious emerging informal alliance among Western leftists
and intellectuals, the political wing of Islam, the remaining dribs
and drabs of Marxism, and third world kleptocratic and theocratic
dictators. Unlike some Western news media, Carlos doesn't shrink
from the word “terrorism”, although he prefers to be referred to
as a “militant revolutionary”, but this is in many ways a deeply
conservative book. Carlos decries Western popular culture and its
assault on traditional morality and family values in words which
wouldn't seem out of place in a Heritage Foundation white paper.
A convert to Islam in 1975, he admits he paid little attention to
the duties and restrictions of his new religion until much later.
He now believes that only Islam provides the framework to resist
what he describes as U.S. totalitarian imperialism. Essentially,
he's exchanged utopian Marxism for Islam as a comprehensive belief
system. Now consider Popper: the essence of what he terms the
open society, dating back to the Athens of Pericles, is
the absence of any utopian vision, or plan, or theory of
historical inevitability, religious or otherwise. Open societies
have learned to distinguish physical laws (discovered through the
scientific method) from social laws (or conventions), which are
made by fallible humans and evolve as societies do. The sense
of uncertainty and requirement for personal responsibility which
come with an open society, replacing the certainties of tribal life
and taboos which humans evolved with, induce what Popper calls the
“strain of civilisation”, motivating utopian social engineers from
Plato through Marx to attempt to create an ideal society, an endpoint
of human social evolution, forever frozen in time. Look at Carlos;
he finds the open-ended, make your own rules, everything's open
to revision outlook of Western civilisation repellent. Communism
having failed, he seizes upon Islam as a replacement. Now consider
the motley anti-Western alliance I mentioned earlier. What unifies
them is simply that they're anti-Western: Popper's enemies
of the open society. All have a vision of a utopian society (albeit
very different from one another), and all share a visceral disdain
for Western civilisation, which doesn't need no steenkin' utopias
but rather proceeds incrementally toward its goals, in a massively
parallel trial and error fashion, precisely as the free market drives
improvements in products and services.
December 2003 