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󰁡󰁧󰁥 󰁯󰁦 󰁡󰁮󰁧󰁥󰁲
4called a ‘dense poisonous atmosphere of world-wide suspi-cion and greed and panic’. In Italy, the invasive bureaucracy of the new state, and its brazen indulgence of a rich minority, made the young in particular more vulnerable to fantasies of  vengeful violence. As
The Futurist Manifesto
, produced in 1909 by D’Annunzio’s admirer the poet Filippo Marinetti, proclaimed:
 We want to glorify war the worlds only hygiene militarism, patriotism, the destructive act of the anarchists, the beauti-ful ideas for which one dies, and contempt for women.  We want to destroy museums, libraries and academies of all kinds.
For fifteen months in Fiume, D’Annunzio rabble- roused through his experiment in ‘beautiful ideas’, in contemptuous defiance of all the world’s great military powers. His occupa-tion ended tamely, after the Italian navy bombarded Fiume in December 1920, forcing D’Annunzio to evacuate the city. But a whole mass movement – Mussolini’s fascism – carried on where he had left off. The poet-imperialist died in 1938, three years after Italy had invaded Ethiopia – a ferocious assault that he predictably applauded. Today, as alienated radicals from all over the world flock to join violent, mis-ogynist and sexually transgressive movements, and political cultures elsewhere suffer the onslaught of demagogues, D’Annunzio’s secession – moral, intellectual and aesthetic as well as military – from an evidently irredeemable society seems a watershed moment in the history of our present: one of many enlightening conjunctures that we have forgotten.Savage violence has erupted in recent years across a broad swathe of territory: wars in Ukraine and the Middle East,
 
󰁰󰁲󰁯󰁬󰁯󰁧󰁵󰁥: 󰁦󰁯󰁲󰁧󰁯󰁴󰁴󰁥󰁮 󰁣󰁯󰁮󰁪󰁵󰁮󰁣󰁴󰁵󰁲󰁥󰁳
5suicide bombings in Belgium, Xinjiang, Nigeria and Turkey, insurgencies from Yemen to Thailand, massacres in Paris,  Tunisia, Florida, Dhaka and Nice. Conventional wars between states are dwarfed by those between terrorists and counter- terrorists, insurgents and counter- insurgents; and there are also economic, financial and cyber wars, wars over and through information, wars for the control of the drug trade and migration, and wars among urban militias and mafia groups. Future historians may well see such un-coordinated mayhem as commencing the third – and the longest and strangest – of all world wars: one that approxi-mates, in its ubiquity, a global civil war.Unquestionably, forces more complex than in the previ-ous two great wars are at work. The violence, not confined to any fixed battlefields or front lines, feels endemic and uncontrollable. More unusually, even this war’s most con-spicuous combatants – the terrorists – are hard to identify. Attacks on Western cities since 9/11 have repeatedly pro- voked the questions: ‘Why do they hate us?’ and ‘Who are
they
?’ Before the advent of Donald Trump, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) deepened a sense of extraordinary crisis in the West with its swift military victories, its exhibi-tionistic brutality, and its brisk seduction of young people from the cities of Europe and America.ISIS has seemed to pose to many even more perplexing questions than al- Qaeda did. Why, for instance, has Tunisia, the originator of the ‘Arab Spring’ and the most Westernized among Muslim societies, sent the largest contingent among ninety countries of foreign jihadis to Iraq and Syria? Why have dozens of British women, including high- achieving schoolgirls, joined up, despite the fact that men from ISIS have enslaved and raped girls as young as ten years old, and
 
󰁡󰁧󰁥 󰁯󰁦 󰁡󰁮󰁧󰁥󰁲
6have stipulated that Muslim girls marry between the ages of nine and seventeen, and live in total seclusion? An anonymous writer in
The 
 
 New York Review of Books 
, a major intellectual periodical of Anglo-  America, says that ‘we should admit that we are not only horrified but baffl ed’ and that ‘nothing since the triumph of the Vandals in Roman North Africa has seemed so sudden, incomprehensible, and diffi cult to reverse’.Some of the Islam- centric accounts of terrorism have translated into the endless ‘global war on terror’, and no less forceful – or quixotic – policies aimed at encouraging ‘mod-erate’ Muslims to ‘prevent’ ‘extremist ideology’, and ‘reform’ Islam. It has become progressively clearer that political elites in the West, unable to junk an addiction to drawing lines in the sand, regime change and re- engineering native
moeurs 
, don’t seem to know what they are doing and what they are bringing about. They have counterbalanced their loss of nerve before the political challenge of terrorism with overreaction, launching military campaigns, often without bothering to secure the consent of a frightened people, and while supporting despotic leaders they talk endlessly of their superior ‘values’ – a rhetoric that has now blended into a white- supremacist hatred, lucra-tively exploited by Trump, of immigrants, refugees and Mus-lims (and, often, those who just ‘look’ Muslim). Meanwhile, selfie- seeking young murderers everywhere confound the leaden stalkers of ‘extremist ideology’, retaliating to bombs from the air with choreographed slaughter on the ground.How did we get trapped in this
danse macabre
? Many read-ers of this book will remember the hopeful period that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. With the collapse of Soviet Communism, the universal triumph of liberal

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