“Rousseau founded the main political and cultural movements of the modern world. Many ‘isms’ of the right and the left – Romanticism, socialism, authoritarianism, nationalism, anarchism – can be traced to Rousseau’s writings. Whether in his denunciation of moral corruption, his claim that the metropolis was a den of vice and that virtue resided in ordinary people (whom the elites routinely conspired against and deceived), his praise of militant patriotism, his distrust of intellectual technocracy, his advocacy of a return to the collective, the ‘people’, or his concern for the ‘stranger’, Rousseau anticipated the modern underdog with his aggravated sense of victimhood and demand for redemption. …

Rousseau was … the prototype of the man who feels himself, despite his obvious success, to be at the bottom of the social pyramid. … He was convinced, like many converts to ideological causes and religious beliefs, that he was immune to corruption. A conviction of his incorruptibility was what gave his liberation from social pieties a heroic aura … In the movement from victimhood to moral supremacy, Rousseau enacted … [what] has become commonplace in our time. …

Rousseau’s first great disciple, Robespierre, seems to have grasped, and embodied, better than anyone the incendiary appeal of victimhood in societies built around the pursuit of wealth and power. …

The Jacobins and the German Romantics may have been Rousseau’s most famous disciples, determined to create through retributive terror or economic and cultural nationalism the moral community neglected by Enlightment philosophes. …: Herder inaugurated the nativist quest – hectically pursued by almost every nation since – for whatever could be identified as embodying an authentic national spirit: literary forms, cuisine and architecture as much as language. … Fichte came to think that Germans were simply superior to everyone else … [and he] gave nationalism its characteristic secular feature: the transposition of religious into national loyalties. … Körner, [then, called the wars against Napoleon] ‘a crusade … a holy war’. This [was the first] ‘holy war’ in post-Christian Europe. …”

aus: Pankaj Mishra: Age of Anger, a History of the Present. o.O.: Allen Lane (Penguin Random House) 2017, S. 110-113, 174, 175, 191, 193.

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“As Engels asserted … ‘Just as Darwin discovered the laws of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.’ Thus, development came to be infused with fresh earnestness and world-historical urgency, and then exalted with the prestige of science. Mere being came to be degraded, thanks to Germany’s special experience, by becoming. As Nietzsche wrote caustically, ‘The German himself is not, he is becoming, he is developing. Development is thus the truly German discovery.’ … All the hopes, transmitted from Marxists to modernization theorists and free-marketeers, of ‘development emerge from nineteenth-century German thinkers: the first people to give a deep meaning and value to a process defined by continuous movement with a fixed direction and no terminus. All our simple dualisms – progressive and reactionary, modern and anti-modern, rational and irrational – derive from the deeply internalized urge to move to the next stage of ‘development’, however nebulously defined.”

aus: Pankaj Mishra: Age of Anger, a History of the Present. O.O.: Allen Lane (Penguin Random House) 2017, S. 204-205.

Abb.: Michel Lafleur / Tom Bogaert: Famasi Mobil Kongolè, Teil von Atis Rezistanz Kollektiv: Documenta15-Installation, Detail, 2022.

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“… Khomeini was actually a radically modern leader. For one, the cleric’s notion that the Iranian nation did not stem from any general or popular will but derived from God‘s mind, which as a charismatic leader he arrogated himself the right to interpret, was wholly novel: an extraordinary deviation, in fact, from a politically quietist Shiite tradition in which all government appeared illegitimate in the absence of the Twelfth Imam.

Khomeini belonged to a long line of revolutionary nationalists that began with Giuseppe Mazzini … Khomeini’s ideas were embedded in modern notions of representation and egalitarism. His notion of state power as a tool to produce a utopian Islamic society was borrowed from the Pakistani ideologue Abu Al-Ala Maududi, whose works he translated into Farsi in 1963. (Maududi’s vision of imposing Islamic order from above in turn was stimulated by Lenin’s theory of an elite as vanguard of the revolution.) …

With its many affronts to dignity and freedom, the Revolution was in this respect like the many self-defeating projects of human liberation since Rousseau started to outline them in the eighteenth century. … The Islamists … offered dignity – often a substitute for freedom in the postcolonial context …

Khomeini … grasped more clearly than modernizing-by-rote monarchs and despots the deeper and transformative potential of the idea brought into being by the Enlightement: that human beings can radically alter their social conditions. …

A religious or medieval society was one in which the social, political and economic order seemed unchangeable. …  The idea that suffering could be relieved, and happiness engineered, by men radically changing the social order belongs to the eighteenth century. …

The idea of a perfectible society … turned into a faith in top-down modernization; and transformed traditional ways of life and modes of belief – Buddhism as well as Islam – into modern activist ideologies. …

Meanwhile, the religious impulse had not simply disappeared in Europe … Europeans simply had erected new absolutes – progress, humanity, the republic – to replace those of traditional religion and the monarchy. … The metaphysical and theological core of Christianity … was often found at the heart of modern projects of redemption and transcendence … Revolution or radical social transformation effected by individuals was increasingly seen as a kind of Second Coming; violence initiated the new beginning; and in the final approximation of Christian themes, history was expected to provide the final judgement … Nearly every major thinker in Europe … also transposed Christian providentialism into would-be rationalistic categories. …

Christian eschatology even suffuses the political ideals of today‘s insistently Islamic radicals and Hindu nationalists – an inescapable irony of history … The cross-currents of ideas and inspirations, … the varied ideological inspirations of Iran’s Islamic Revolution (Zionism, Existentialism, Bolshevism and revolutionary Shiism) – reveal the picture of a planet defined by civilizations closed off from one another and defined by religion (or lack thereof) is a puerile cartoon. …

Radical Islamists or Hindu nationalists insist on their cultural distinctiveness and moral superiority precisely because they have lost their religious traditions, and started to resemble their supposed enemies in their pursuit of the latter’s ideologies of individual and collective success …”

aus: Pankaj Mishra: Age of Anger, a History of the Present. O.O.: Allen Lane (Penguin Random House) 2017, S. 153-159.

Abb.: Ausschnit eines Werkes von Mous Lamrabat, Foto Biennale Oostende 2023, auch im Internet.

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“Political Correctness … ist ein rechtskonservativer Kampfbegriff zur Denunziation von Gruppen, die Rechte für sich einfordern, die man ihnen nicht zugestehen möchte. …

Menschen, die ganz konkret nicht länger sexuell missbraucht oder belästigt, auf der Straße beleidigt oder verprügelt und auch nicht mehr auf Twitter mit Mord und Vergewaltigung bedroht werden möchten. Sie alle fordern Anstand und Respekt.

Bei den Gegnern der Political Correctness scheint das autoritäre Reflexe wachzurufen: Wenn so etwas einreißt, könnte ja jeder kommen und Respekt verlangen! Ein bisschen so, als wäre Respekt eine Unterwerfungsgeste – je mehr ich anderen davon erweise, desto weniger bekomme ich selbst ab. Als hätte man morgens, wenn man aus dem Haus geht, nur eine begrenzte Menge Respekt in der Tasche und müsste sich sorgfältig aussuchen, wie man ihn verteilt. Da darf einem dann kein syrischer Transmensch dazwischenkommen, der Respekt verlangt, dann hätte man ja abends auf dem Heimweg für die liebe deutsche Nachbarin keinen mehr übrig!”

aus: Robin Detje: Political Correctness: Heilige Angstlandschaften, Zeit-Online, 25. Mai 2018, im Internet

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