'Ancestral voices prophesying war': the West must find a way to face them.

FROM the conservative perspective, the last fifty years have been politically successful. The first achievement of this period was to repair the damage done by Nazism, which had been an unprecedented threat to destroy democracy from within. A succession of leaders promoted belief in the society and the values they represented. Churchill, de Gaulle, and Adenauer; Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul II--they were very different personalities, and sometimes at odds with one another, but in various ways they safeguarded that slightly nebulous entity known as the West, which has been in the process of formation for a long time, even though its frontiers remain undefined.

In contrast, their anti-democratic counterparts ranged from Khrushchev, Mao, and Castro, to Nasser, Pol Pot, and Mengistu. These treated the people over whom they had power as samples in a laboratory, to be reshaped into social forms with values that were not only mold-breaking but alien. Opportunism and ideology were indistinguishable. These rulers too were sometimes at odds with one another, but they threatened to overthrow the West from without.

The sudden implosion of Communism between 1989 and 1991 escapes final analysis. Was it the outcome of Western steadfastness in the Cold War? Was the Soviet Union instead doomed by the inherent inhumanity of its ideology, or merely by the quirkiness of Mikhail Gorbachev and the relentless power-drive of his nemesis, Boris Yeltsin? For humanity, at any rate, the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Communist party and its satellites is far and away the most significant event of the second half of the 20th century.

Political victory on a scale defining the age ought to provide confirmation of Western values, and their universality. But this is not so. The West overcame Nazism and Communism, only to compromise victory with a floodtide of cultural insecurity. This phenomenon is another threat from within.

Ordinary people the whole world over are the same: They want a family, the chance to work and play--or just sit around the kitchen table, as Nadezhda Mandelstam puts it in her admirable book, Hope Against Hope. Russians and Chechens, Serbs and Albanians, Hutus and Tutsis--all the dualities apparently vowed to eternal enmity--appear regularly on television to say that they and their opponents were once good neighbors, and that they can't understand how things have come to the hate-filled and murderous present. What in fact has happened is that they and their group--be it ethnic, tribal, or religious--have fallen into the hands of a few people determined enough to enforce their version of the particular identity they think everyone in the group should have.

Western nation-states have evolved national identities settled and secure enough to tolerate diversity. Protecting those identities, and that diversity, has long been the purpose and justification of conservatism. But there has always been a minority of people who for some reason resent what everyone else accepts, and wish to refashion whatever they can in their own image. Rousseau, and after him Robespierre and then all other totalitarians, held that "the imagination" is the driving force of politics. These forefathers of dissent have cast a long shadow. Those with the capacity to imagine, and the skills for self-expression, need only to match up with a grievance, and a cause is born. That was the secret of both Lenin and Hitler.

Generation after generation, this phenomenon repeats in the West. Whatever the society, whatever the regime, there have been intellectuals calling for wholesale rejection and destruction, and then being praised as brave dissenters, rather than condemned as wreckers. Tom Paine spoke for all who share this cast of mind with the famous sentence, "We have it in our power to begin the world over again." (Ronald Reagan happened to love this quote, and George Will identified it as the least conservative thing ever uttered.) Myths and lies of this kind often appeal through their beauty, but they remain myths and lies all the same. Under the ideal is the reality of war, of refugees and people weeping in the rubble of their homes as the world is made over again, and they are unable to explain why or how the neighbors have turned on them in hate.

British intellectuals of the day supported the French revolution, and took the side of France in the Napoleonic wars. Intellectuals from all over Europe flocked to fight in the Greek war of independence, and a century later the same kind of deceivers and dupes volunteered for the International Brigade in the Spanish civil war. The nationalist causes of Arabs, Armenians, Czechs, Persians, Poles, Serbs, Tibetans, Vietnamese, and many others have attracted --and sometimes still attract--supporters who have no natural ties or affinities except in the mind.

The immense tide of Communist fellow-traveling between the world wars, and into the Cold War, is the most startling example of the self-deception that so often and so thoroughly perverts the imagination of intellectuals. Writers, artists, professors, scientists, and bishops chorused that the Bolsheviks were only making the world over again in a peaceful and wondrous form. Marx's Communist Manifesto had promised the forcible overthrow of all social conditions, and Gorky spoke for his master, Stalin, when he said, "If the enemy does not surrender he must be destroyed." Firsthand evidence of Soviet terror prompted too few second thoughts, never mind regrets.

Today a close associate of Osama bin Laden declares, "We are patient and our patience will end only with the collapse of America and its agents." Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, originally from Egypt but at present a political exile in Qatar, is a leading light of the Muslim Brotherhood, and therefore commands authority. In a televised sermon, he uttered a prayer typical of him and his kind: "O God, destroy the usurper Jews, the vile crusaders and infidels. O God, destroy them along with their supporters." Here is a Saudi professor in June 2004: "I have no doubt, not even for a minute, that America is on its way to destruction." A sheikh on television in March 2005 explained to a laughing Arab audience how beautiful it was to be in New York on 9/11 and observe the reaction of the "wretched" American people who, according to him, were quickly embracing Islam.

Abu Bakir Bashir, so-called emir of the Jemaah Islamiyah in Southeast Asia, and in prison for the 2002 Bali bombings, tells an interviewer that everywhere infidels are conspiring to ruin Islam. In his opinion, it is destiny, a law of nature, that Americans and Muslims "will constantly be enemies." The prophet Muhammad apparently taught that "Islam must win and Westerners will be destroyed. If they refuse to be under Islam, it will be chaos. Full stop. If they want to have peace, they have to accept to be governed by Islam."

These regular declarations of intent are what Coleridge called "ancestral voices prophesying war," and they could not be clearer. Islamists are in the grip of an imagination that confuses reality with myths and lies and conspiracies in their heads. Nonetheless 9/11, bombings in Madrid and elsewhere, the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, and numerous other outrages are driving a wedge between Western populations and Muslims, particularly those living in a Western country. And imagination as usual speaks to imagination. In yet another repeat of a historic pattern, a minority of intellectuals internalize the threats and hates of the Islamists, and direct them against their own society.

The likes of Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore illustrate how easy it is to persuade others to believe in myths and lies that issue out of a fertile imagination. Writers, artists, and professors chorus that Westerners are to blame for what Islamists do, exactly as once democrats were to blame for provoking Nazis and then Communists to criminal aggression. British bishops have gathered to pontificate that democracy is "seriously flawed" and they recommend that "a public act of repentance" be made to the Muslim community. In the Middle Ages, King Ferdinand III of Spain fought for 27 years to free his country from Moorish occupation, for which reason the city of Seville now refuses to have him as its patron saint. Hospitals and schools in many European countries have removed crucifixes from their walls for fear of offending Muslims. Saudi Arabia has financed the building of thousands of mosques in Christian countries, but refuses to permit a church, or any Christian rites, in its own country. There seems no limit to the proliferation and acceptance of double standards.

Islamism is not a danger of the same order as Nazism or Communism. But apologias for Muslims in any matters, great or small, arouse feelings of guilt and insecurity in ordinary people, and sap confidence in the culture and faith of their own societies--and furthermore frighten and alienate those Muslims willing to integrate. Conservatives have another cultural war on their hands, and have to muster for success in it, maybe over the next fifty years.