A while back I wrote a short piece on the pattern of becoming one’s enemy visible in more or less recent history (https://gordonhahn.com/2024/08/06/becoming-the-enemy/). Little did I know how right I was and what new version of this phenomenon would soon emerge or in fact was emerging as I wrote. We in the West often hear about Iran’s own extreme religious nationalism or Islamic fundamentalism and its own eschatology of Islamist prophecy. We hear far less of Isreal extremist apocalyptical Zionist imperial wing and even less of the new Christian nationalism it is allied with here in the States. These latter two ‘fundamentalisms’ are both enacting prophecy as each sees it in the new Iranian War.
American Messianism: No Longer Just Democratic Eschatology
There has long been a strong strain of democratic messianism in the United States. Since its founding, Americans have believed in a teleological eschatology no less potent than communist messianism’s claim to an ultimate future utopia of a classless society under the dictatorship of the proletariat, where there would be no poverty, no crime, and no violence because these were epiphenomena of capitalist bourgeois states and societies. Americans, though somewhat less utopian, have believed that the superiority of ‘democracy’ (that is, republican governance) made its adoption a universal inevitability. Men are rational, and all will come to see someday the enlightened nature of the democratic choice. The world is in the midst of a universal transition that has one vector alone — towards democracy – as Francis Fukuyama told us. ………… . . . . . . .
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About the Author –
Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, www.canalyt.com. Websites: Russian and Eurasian Politics, gordonhahn.com and gordonhahn.academia.edu
Dr. Hahn is the author of the new book: Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Thought, Culture, History, and Politics (Europe Books, 2022). He has authored five previous, well-received books: The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, 2021); Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the “New Cold War” (McFarland, 2018); The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland, 2014), Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia’s Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media.
Dr. Hahn taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and was a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group.