By Jeffrey Herf · Wednesday, November 19, 2008 Jeffrey Herf’s “An Age of Murder: Ideology and Terror in Germany” appears in Telos 144 (Fall 2008). An excerpt follows below. Click here to read the full article (in PDF format).
It is best to begin with the obvious. This is a series of lectures about murder, indeed about an age of murder.[1] Murders to be sure inspired by political ideas, but murders nevertheless. In all, the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction, hereafter the RAF) murdered thirty-four people and would have killed more had police and intelligence agencies not arrested them or prevented them from carrying out additional “actions.”[2] Yesterday, the papers reported that thirty-two people were killed in suicide-bomb attacks in Iraq, and thirty-four the day before, and neither of those war crimes were front-page news in the New York Times or the Washington Post. So there is an element of injustice in the amount of time and attention devoted to the thirty-four murders committed by the RAF over a period of twenty-two years and that devoted to the far more numerous victims of radical Islamist terror. Yet the fact that the murders of large numbers of people today has become horribly routine is no reason to dismiss the significance of the murders of a much smaller number for German history. Along with the murders came attempted murders, bank robberies, and explosions at a variety of West German and American institutions. The number of dead could have been much higher. If the RAF had not used pistols, machine guns, bazookas, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), remote-controlled bombs, and airplane hijackings, and if the West German radicals of the 1970s through the 1990s had only published turgid, long-winded communist manifestos, no one would have paid them much attention at the time. I doubt that the German Historical Institute would have decided to sponsor a series about Marxist-Leninist sects of the 1970s.
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By Margarita Mauri · Tuesday, November 18, 2008 The philosophical thought of Iris Murdoch proposes that no ethical tradition has ever adequately fashioned a picture of human beings as they truly are, and in the course of her career this was what she used her writing in philosophy and literature to illustrate: a personal vision of man’s morality. If we consider ethicists’ preoccupations in recent history, we might argue that these have mainly been the examination of moral being to justify why humans choose what they choose in particular circumstances, rather than the development of any concept of a “moral character” that might constitute the essential source of all the moral choices that ordinary human beings make. If we acknowledge that such a character does indeed exist, then it will naturally follow that we as humans have an important inner life characterized by a certain degree of essential unity. In the end, what is certain is that our “moral character” becomes apparent in the moment we act, and is itself the result of something that began long ago. And for Murdoch, this was the importance of virtue.
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By Timothy W. Luke · Saturday, November 1, 2008 Telos Press Publishing is proud to announce the newest addition to our book list: Ernst Jünger’s On Pain, translated and introduced by David C. Durst and prefaced by Russell A. Berman.
Originally published in 1934, this remarkable essay provides valuable insights into the cult of courage and death in Nazi Germany, but also throws light on the ideology of terrorism today.
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By Moishe Gonzales · Tuesday, October 28, 2008 From the Anchorage Daily News, Oct. 10, 2008:
One of the nation’s best-known retired Army generals, Colin Powell, described Sen. Ted Stevens in court today as a “trusted individual” and a man with a “sterling” reputation.
“He was someone whose word you could rely on,” said Powell, secretary of state in President Bush’s first term, who self-deprecatingly described himself as someone who retired as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and then “dabbled a bit in diplomacy.”
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, October 20, 2008 As opposition to the Iraq War mounted on the Left, a myth began to circulate about the purported secret influence of the political philosopher Leo Strauss in some of the inner circles of the Bush administration. To explore the origins of the allegation would be an adventure in itself: there is some indication that the thesis was first promulgated by Lyndon LaRouche and then amplified in the mainstream media, in Europe and the United States (Le Monde and the New York Times). Is journalism just serial plagiarism? To be sure, there were some kernels of truth: Paul Wolfowitz did truly study at the University of Chicago, where Strauss taught, and . . . well, that’s where the hard evidence abruptly ends and the narration begins. The half-knowledge that Strauss was a conservative thinker (though hardly a “neo-conservative”) and that he had something to do with esoteric philosophizing in relation to political power: this was enough to impute the workings of a nefarious Straussian cabal as a red-blooded conspiracy theory of the Bush administration. It was a great story for everyone who preferred not to think. The paranoid style in American politics, the anxiety about secret plots and shadow governments, had finally moved from the kooky right to the center-left.
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By Moishe Gonzales · Friday, October 17, 2008 In an editorial titled “Following [in] Afghanistan’s Footsteps,” published October 8, 2008 in the London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, editor-in-chief Tariq Al-Homayed warned that under Hamas’s rule, Gaza was becoming like Afghanistan—a hotbed of poverty, violence and strife among armed factions. He called on the Arabs to take a firm stand against Hamas, saying that it was undermining the Palestinian cause and was also a real threat to Egypt. Following are excerpts from the article, as it appeared in the English-language edition of the paper.
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