The Anger of Young Men

“In just about every case of a millenarian tyrant,” writes Waller Newell in his 2013 Tyranny, “we find a shattering experience in early life – failure to achieve a respectable career, distant or oppressive parents, shame and disgrace over the family name, a feeling of being excluded by the upper class – that drove these young men to bring everything down in flames in order to avenge themselves for these injustices and insults, a vengeance now extended from the original cruel or neglectful authority figure who treated them so slightingly.” Hitler failed to get into art school, and thought the system had prevented him from exercising his true genius. Lenin’s brother was executed. Mao was mocked for being a peasant. Newell doesn’t dismiss the ideological components of totalitarianism, but argues that “the righteous anger and aggressiveness of the Leader is the crucible in which those totalitarian fantasies are forged and imposed on reality with indomitable will-power.”

And he discerns just these dynamics in jihadism. He asks, “What if terrorism had little if anything to do with economic deprivation or lack of individual opportunity? What if it were rooted in the capacity of young men for righteous zeal, anger, and indignation, harnessed in the service of what they fervently believe to be a righteous, even divine mission to bring justice to the world? . . . what if the bellicose capacities of young men were summoned into existence by the perception of justice and injustice, the conviction that injustice has to be fought and justice upheld?”

In their anger, “young revolutionaries aim precisely to establish a state where they will have absolute power to force others into a collectivist straitjacket.” The hold the rest of society in contempt, perceiving the “bloated softness and weakness of modern society” and demanding that “the masses be purified of their corrupt material pleasures, a kind of monasticism imposed on an entire society.” Their “indignation toward the sloth of the masses, that desire for a totalitarian collective purged of its frivolity and laxity is what drives many of the young men who believe they are waging Jihad.”

In keeping with this theory, Newell traces the connections between Third-World communist movements and the rise of jihadism, both driven by the anger of young men. Jihadism, he says, “is best understood as the direct heir of Third-World Socialism and the other millenarian revolutionary movement.” After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, “the longing for the Caliphate entered a realm of fanatical fantasy divorced from any conception of stable and lawful government, and it remains there today.” Jihadists “display no interest in or knowledge of the actual record of the Ottoman Caliphate or any successful Muslim precedent for orderly government , preferring – like all millenarian revolutionaries since Robespierre – to return to a past behind the past, a mythical collective of total purity, allegedly the first Muslim community founded by the Prophet himself.”

The West is in part reaping what it sowed in the Middle East. After World War I, “the triumphant European powers seized its former satrapies and, suiting their own self-interest, cobbled together a number of ersatz new ‘nations’ including Syria and Iraq . When modernization finally reached these often fragile entities, significantly, they chose the Soviet rather than the European model.” They attempted to force modernization and development from the top, with a one-party state. When the Soviet experiment spectacularly collapsed, “the Baathist and nationalist regimes became what they were on the eve of the Arab Spring – one-party states or dictatorships where the meager economy, its development paralyzed by the absence of genuine market forces and entrepreneurialism.” These are the regimes that rouse the righteous indignation of young Jihadists: ” Jihad became a rallying call for this-worldly, secular revolution against both the West and corrupt, self-professed Muslim regimes that, in the Jihadists’ view, collaborated with the West and are tainted by its selfish materialism and hedonistic degradation.”

Not every angry young man acts on these impulses. But the ones that do have fueled, and continue to fuel, tyrannical movements. When they are not yet tyrants, they are tyrants in the making.