so here's a little train of thought. one way to understand 'islamism' or 'terror' as it works in the mental economy of our rulers is that it performs for now the function that communism performed for a few previous generations; it unites what we oppose into a monolith, or returns us into history understood as a clash of forces, an opposition, a dialectic. leave aside the bullshitty quality of this whole (hegelian) structure of thought for a moment.
now there is one big way that islamism is not like communism: communism took the form of mega-states, squaring off against our mega-states: huge militarized institutions, immobile as mountains. islamism consists of rag-tag tiny groups of weird fanatics, hiding in caves somewhere. now one might think that islamism on that ground is a poor opponent, inadequate to drive history: the conflict is too "asymmetrical" etc.
however, the conflict is not that asymmetrical after all. they can knock down our huge buildings. the soviet union could vaporize our capital in a few minutes. al-qaeda can do that too, if they can work up the nuke. we could have vaporized moscow in retaliation, but now - as is extremely plain every day - we don't know who or what to vaporize, exactly; the enemy is diffuse, elusive, mobile.
now one thing to ask yourself: who invented all these means by which bearded weirdos could smash the pentagon? who unleashed nuclear weapons on the world, e.g.? well, liberal democracy etc: or more widely the modern mega-state. but when the technology becomes mature, it becomes cheap and commonplace and easy. i just bought an iphone for $49.99. and if the united states government were to be vaporized by its own terrible inventions, that would be justice, true?
at any rate, here's the deal: the means of destruction invented and deployed by the mega-state end up making the mega-state impossible. there could be hundreds of tiny angry groups out there bent on destroying this or that; controlling nuclear technology or the anthrax organism etc is getting to be like record companies controlling intellectual property: over.
in a situation like that, the megalithic state is impossible. you can't build pentagons: they just sit there gigantically, begging to be blasted. you can't build skyscrapers, etc. the supersize that shows your endless power is the way you get transposed into the role of victim.
so perhaps the modern mega-state really is at the edge of its end. not because of globalized capitalism or the fact that we're all uniting to save the himalayan glaciers through international regulatory regimes, etc, but because with the diffusion of the capacity for destruction, nothing really big can survive: the dinosaurs were impressive, but their hugeness made them extremely vulnerable to extinction.
al qaeda etc are taking us down a road to necessary decentralization. you put all the power in one implacable, albeit unbelievably inefficient and ineffective institution, or man. right. then you're utterly vulnerable to a thousand strange pissed off freaks. you have to distribute power. you have to respond to the mobile, distributed, multiple threats of a thousand tiny groups with mobile, distributed, multiple institutions.
so that, more or less, is how we go from the hugeist welfare/military nation/state to something resembling anarchy. however, the process is going to be unbelievably difficult as we cannot even imagine or want this sort of decentralization: the concentration of extreme power over ourselves in the hands of huge institutions seems to us inevitable. we love it and want it and cannot imagine our world without it. and yet it is becoming impossible.
the twentieth century was the era of the infinite state, of an architecture as big as nature. the destruction of this architecture is a nightmare of pain and death, and of feeling lost. but that idea, those people, that approach, destroyed itself: it purposefully but inadvertently created its own destruction, as in a greek tragedy. its end is going to suck. but it itself sucked: the modern mega-state was a holocaust, now finally being re-visited upon itself.