. . . muttered the ogre

Paul Berman in Salon

It becomes ever more obvious that the First World War was the great trauma of modern civilization. Something huge cracked in the First World War and has never been repaired. Out of the First World War came a series of rebellions against liberal civilization. These rebellions were accusations that liberal civilization was not just hypocritical or flawed, but was in fact the single great source of evil or suffering in the world. Then the accusation was followed by the proposal to build a civilization of a completely new kind, which would not be liberal, which would have the quality of a granite rock — eternal and perfect.

. . . .

At some very deep level all these movements were the same — they all shared certain qualities of mythology, all shared a fascination with mass death and all drew on the same kinds of manias.

My argument is that Islamism and a certain kind of pan-Arabism in the Arab and Muslim worlds are really further branches of the same impulse.

(link from Tom Parmenter)