But it was Nietzsche who eventually came from central casting, as a fierce detractor of both liberal capitalism and socialism, to make Zarathustra's enticing promise a magnetic Holy Grail to Bolsheviks (Lenin, though, hated it), the left-wing Lu Xun in China, fascists, anarchists, feminists and hordes of disgruntled aesthetes.
Mishra also reminds us how "Asian anti-imperialists and American robber barrons borrowed eagerly" from Herbert Spencer, "the first truly global thinker" who coined the "survival of the fittest" mantra after reading Darwin.
Nietzsche was the ultimate cartographer of Resentment. Max Weber prophetically framed the modern world as an "iron cage" from which only a charismatic leader may offer escape. And anarchist icon Mikhail Bakunin, for his part, had already in 1869 conceptualized the "revolutionist" as severing "every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world ... He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose -- to destroy it."
Escaping the Supreme Modernist James Joyce's "nightmare of history" -- in fact the iron cage of modernity -- a viscerally militant secession "from a civilization premised on gradual progress under liberal-democratic trustees" is now raging, out of control, far beyond Europe.
Ideologies that may be radically opposed nonetheless grew symbiotically out of the cultural maelstrom of the late 19th century, from Islamic fundamentalism, Zionism and Hindu nationalism to Bolshevism, Nazism, Fascism and revamped Imperialism.
Not only WWII but the current endgame was also visualized by the brilliant, tragic Walter Benjamin in the 1930s, when he was already warning about the self-alienation of mankind, finally able to "experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order." Today's live-streaming DIY jihadis are its pop version, as ISIS tries to configure itself as the ultimate negation of the pieties of -- neoliberal -- modernity.
The Age of Resentment
Weaving savory streams of politics and literature cross-pollination, Mishra takes his time to set the scene for The Big Debate between those developing world masses whose lives are stamped by the Atlanticist West's "still largely acknowledged history of violence" and the liquid modernity (Bauman) elites yielding from the (selected) part of the world that made the crucial breakthroughs since the Enlightenment in science, philosophy, art and literature.
This goes way beyond a mere debate between East and West. We cannot understand the current global civil war, this post-modernist, post-truth "intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness," if we don't attempt to "dismantle the conceptual and intellectual architecture of history's winners in the West," drawn from the triumphalist history of Anglo-American over-achievements.
Even at the height of the Cold War, US theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was mocking the "bland fanatics of Western civilization" in their blind faith that every society is destined to evolve just as a handful of nations in the West -- sometimes -- did.
And this -- the irony! -- while the liberal internationalist cult of progress glaringly mimicked the Marxist dream of internationalist revolution.
In her 1950 preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism -- now a resurgent mega-best seller on Amazon -- Hannah Arendt essentially told us to forget about the eventual restoration of the old world order; we were condemned to watch history repeat itself, "homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth."
Meanwhile, as Carl Schorske noted in his spectacular Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, American scholarship cut the "cord of consciousness" linking the past to the present; bluntly sanitized history; and then centuries of civil war, imperial ravage, genocide and slavery in Europe and America simply disappeared. Only one TINA (there is no alternative) narrative was allowed; how Atlanticists privileged with reason and individual autonomy made the modern world.
Enter master spoiler Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, born in 1928 in poor south Tehran, and the author of Westoxification (1962), a key reference text of Islamist ideology, where he writes about how "Sartre's Erostratus fires a revolver at the people in the street blindfolded; Nabokov's protagonist drives his car into the crowd; and the stranger, Mersault, kills someone in reaction to a bad case of sunburn." Talk about a lethal crossover -- existentialism meets Tehran slums to stress what Hanna Arendt called "negative solidarity."
And enter Abu Musab al-Suri, born in 1958 -- one year after Osama bin Laden -- in a devout middle class family in Aleppo. It was al-Suri -- not the Egyptian Al-Zawahiri -- who designed a leaderless global jihad strategy in The Global Islamic Resistance Call, based on "unconnected cells" and "individual operations". Al-Suri was the Samuel "clash of civilizations" Huntington of al-Qaeda. Mishra defines him as "the Mikhail Bakunin of the Muslim world."
That "syphilis of revolutionary passions"
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