As uncomfortable as it may make some tolerant and well-intentioned souls, an intellectually respectable case can be made that radical Islam constitutes the third variant of totalitarian ideology politics in modern history. The first version emerged in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The second was that of modern communism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. While these first two versions succumbed to military might and ideological exhaustion, respectively, the political, ideological and military battle with radical Islam remains undecided.

One way to illustrate the case for radical Islam as Totalitarianism Mark III (and perhaps draw some practical conclusions from it), is to focus on three points of comparison and contrast between the Nazi and communist eras and that of contemporary political Islam: the problem of underestimating the power of ideology; modernity and anti-modernity; and the issue of preemption in context.

Karl Bracher, for many years the leading German historian of the Nazi regime, called attention to what he termed “the problem of underestimation” of the causal impact of totalitarian ideology. Bracher argued that before 1933, during the era of Western appeasement in the mid- to late-1930s, and even during the war itself, many of Hitler’s politically influential contemporaries refused to believe that his ideological assertions were actually the basis of his policy. For varying reasons, Marxists, conservatives and liberals defined sophistication as the ability to see past Hitler’s ideological statements to his deeper, more genuine motivations. Hence these “sophisticated” thinkers underestimated the prescriptive intent of his publicly expressed views in foreign policy. (Churchill’s willingness to take Hitler at his word was, of course, the exception that proved the rule.) The enduring merit of Hannah Arendt’s postwar classic, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), lay precisely in its challenge to the reductionist approaches to ideas common among Marxist, liberal and conservative analysts.