“The vastness and deadly desolation of the field, the long-distance operation of steel machines, and the relay of every movement in the night drew an unyielding Titan’s mask over the proceedings. You moved toward death without seeing it; you were hit without knowing where the shot came from. Long since had the precision shooting of the trained marksman, the direct fire of guns, and with it the charm of the duel, given way to the concentrated fire of mechanized weapons. The outcome was a game of numbers: Whoever could cover a certain number of square meters with the greater mass of artillery fire, won.”
—Ernst Jünger, Sturm, describing the Battle of the Somme, whose centenary is this year.
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“The idea of a revolutionary, ‘post-materialistic’ subject, personified by marginal actors, was popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre, who viewed outcasts and criminals, like the writer and petty criminal Jean Genet, as enlightened critics of bourgeois society. In Germany, Frankfurt School theorists like Claus Offe proposed that in ‘late capitalism’ ever more social groups—the unemployed, the mentally ill, the lawbreakers—would be pushed to the margins and could eventually pose a real threat to the social order. The problem, as one wit put it, was that ‘late capitalism’ kept arriving too late.” —Elliot Neaman, Free Radicals: Agitators, Hippies, Urban Guerrillas, and Germany’s Youth Revolt of the 1960s and 1970s “The human receives a particular historical consciousness from his ‘space,’ which is subjected to great historical transformations. The variegated forms of life correspond to equally differentiated spaces. Even within the same time period, the environment of individual humans for the practice of daily life is already defined differently by their different life occupations. An urbanite thinks the world otherwise than does a peasant farmer, a whale-fish hunter has another living space than an opera singer, and to a pilot the world and life appear otherwise not only in other lights but also in other quantities, depths, and horizons.” —Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation Writing in the journal Contemporary European History, Mia Lee reviews a group of recent books that focus on the historical connections between Nazism, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the rise of al-Qaeda. Included in the review is Matthias Küntzel’s Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11, published by Telos Press. Purchase your copy in our online store, and save 20% by using the coupon code BOOKS20. An excerpt from the review:
“The spectacular Baader escape and the RAF media campaign against the West German state now caught the attention of the Stasi. Wanted posters advertising a reward of 10,000 DM with Meinhof’s photo were pasted ubiquitously in public spaces all across Western Germany. In the early afternoon of August 17, Meinhof surfaced in East Berlin wearing dark sunglasses, knocking at the door of the FDJ headquarters. She asked to be put in touch with the Stasi and mentioned Werner Lamberz and Horst Schumann, two functionaries she had known from an earlier meeting with the FDJ. She viewed East Germany as a promising base from which to launch attacks on the Federal Republic, or at least as a safe haven for when her troop came under surveillance pressure. At first, the Stasi decided not to take any risks with this unknown crowd, but Erich Mielke, longtime head of the Stasi, changed his mind, and on August 20, 1970, orders were given that Meinhof be allowed access to East Germany ‘when she wishes.’ As we have seen repeatedly, the Stasi always played with the idea of using the APO and the student rebellion as a weapon in the fight to destabilize West Germany, and this opportunity looked too promising to ignore…” “Fraternity means that the father no longer sacrifices the sons; instead the brothers kill one another. Wars between nations have been replaced by civil war. The great settling of accounts, first under national ‘pretexts,’ led to a rapidly escalating world civil war.” —Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil |
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