No Matter the Cause

...In order for fanaticism to exist, there must be an upheaval within a faith...

...unfortunately, the dawn quickly clouded over...

...Several elements have been ignored, however...

...Majority or minority...

...as for the motivations, Andre Haynal observes in his chapter on "The Psychology of Fanaticism": "The behavior of Robespierre and Saint Just closely follows the psychological models characteristic of fanaticism...

...They study fanaticism as a psychological development within a historical context, independently of its various vehicles...

...In the Middle Ages and the Reformation, for example, it was part of the fabric of everyday life: The Cathari and the Bogomils and the Anabaptists were excommunicated by the Catholic Church for constructing their heresies, but persecutors and persecuted shared the same pattern...

...his suspicion is limitless, his hatred of dissidents infinite...

...The fanaticized live in fear: fear of being executed, fear of being rejected and excluded to the Great Babylon, fear of being informed upon, and fear of conspiracies directed against the sect...

...Nonetheless, the authors remind us: "From April 6, 1793 to July 29, 1795, 2,831 persons were guillotined for political reasons in Paris...

...Left or Right...

...Gerard de Puymege, in his chapter entitled "From Priest to Philosopher: The Origins of a Concept," explains: "An essentially religious phenomenon...

...The aim was to do away with anyone outside the circle of accepted tenets...

...other countries, like Stalin's Russia, have been terrorized into acquiescence by ruthless zealots seeking to literally destroy every dissenter, and even potential dissenters...

...Haynal, Molnar and Puymege write in this tradition...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock Author, "The Writer and Politics," "Anarchism," "The Canadians" "Order or subversion...

...In fact, the wholesale elimination of opponents during the revolutionary terror in France (like the killings in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Khomeini's Iran) revealed a mentality, if not an ideology, akin to that of the medieval inquisitors and Protestant witch-hunters...

...and never becomes profane...

...Meanwhile, recognizing the sickness helps...

...And on some days in Lyons batches of more than 200 people at a time were blasted to pieces by cannon...

...Fanaticism was never clearly distinguished from faith in those days...

...As early as Bakunin and other anarchists, for example, some have condemned Marx and other "scientific" socialists for focusing on economics and neglecting the subjective side of politics, especially the psychology of power...

...omnipotence, narcissism and persecution feelings set these messianic revolutionaries on a course of action not necessarily dictated by society's needs...

...Indeed, it was only defined and its dangers detected in the rational interlude of the 18th century, when the philosophes and their associates recalled an ancient ecstatic cult, the fanatici (who were the soothsaying and self-mutilating priests of the obscure Roman goddess Ma Bel-lone), and applied the name to religious enthusiasts so obsessed that any other viewpoint became intolerable...

...In order not to attach their arguments to any particular ideology or movement, the authors pick case histories almost at random from a variety of periods...

...Faith in the party, the leader, or the family leads to fanaticism by virtue of its exclusivity and the unique saving function it invests in its object...

...It is true that from time to time both historians and psychologists have served the huge dogmatisms of our age...

...fanaticism cannot become secular...

...Fanaticism is produced and spread by the frustrated expectation of the millenium, hic et nunc, whether it is to be ushered in by free trade, progress, equality, the class struggle, whatever, according to the circumstances...

...There was little difference between the tortures of the Inquisition and John of Leiden liquidating his opponents in the Holy city of Munster...

...Repression or revolt...

...One thing is constant in fanaticism, and that is that the object to which the fanatic devotes his jealous, vindictive and monomaniacal faith must acquire in his eyes an exclusively sacred character...

...Fanaticism, they point out, dominated whole cultures long before it was identified...

...The Age of Reason had dawned...

...The French Revolution has been so idealized for its ideological aspects that some chroniclers tend to minimize the accompanying slaughter...

...With these words the authors of the work under review, two historians and a psychoanalyst, suggest the nature and extent of an insidious phenomenon that they consider-in my view correctly-uncivilized...

...The " reasons" may have been political...

...Fanaticism contributes notably to this end...

...The quasi-religious mind-set in mass movements with eschatological goals (such as Communism and Nazism) has long been recognized...

...It appears outside the sphere of the traditionally sacred when an area generally thought of as profane-political, economic, scientific, or technological?suddenly comes to be regarded as sacred...

...The cure perhaps lies in the dissolution of fear, an objective no less elusive than a cure for cancer...

...Nevertheless, only by intensive historical and psychological scrutiny can we begin to understand this strange mental plague that strikes so unpredictably and seems impervious to reason-as the atrocities inspired by Pol Pot in Cambodia and Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran have again recently shown...

...Fanaticism has no camp...

...That might explain the sketchy, provisional tone of the book...

...It is always a perversion of faith, even when it assigns supreme value to realms usually deemed far from religion...

...Still, the fanatical personality does emerge sharply here, or rather its dual character, embodied in the "fanaticizer" and the "fanaticized": "The fanaticizer sees plots everywhere...

...Ironically, it now infected those who claimed to be the spiritual children of Voltaire...

...Fanaticism, hitherto almost entirely religious in its manifestations (even the English Fifth Monarchy Men, despite their radical social doctrines, talked extravagantly of God), came back in a secular guise...

...The 20th century has seen entire nations-such as Nazi Germany and today's Iran-willingly allow themselves to be engulfed by extremist passions...

...faith in God, but also in the race, the nation, the state, progress, the revolution, production...

...The authors seek to provide a background for answering this question...

...A worldly appearance is often deceiving, for there is no such thing as a genuinely temporal fanaticism...

...No community, perhaps no person, appears entirely safe from contagion...

...But students of totalitarianism generally have been slow to heed Bakunin and pay attention to the recurring traits of fanatics-with rare exceptions like the much maligned Wilhelm Reich in his Mass Psychology of Fascism, Eric Hoffer in that slender, penetrating essay, The True Believer, and Norman Cohn in his excellent treatment of revolutionary messianic fervor in the Middle Ages, The Pursuit of the Millennium...

...Yet one wonders whether it is entirely a matter of "There, but for the grace of God, go I." Exactly how do societies or individuals fall under the spell of creeds so violent that all naysayers are condemned to extermination as if they were vermin...

...Either by living in some land we thought of as advanced that was suddenly swept by bigotry and persecution, or by watching a seemingly rational friend get caught up in the irrationality of a cult, many of us have felt the hot breath of blind believers at uncomfortably close range...