Found via Charles Johnson, Hans Magnus Enzensberger has a long, detailed essay on "The Radical Loser" that first appeared in early November in Germany's Der Spiegel. Enzensberger places what Freud would call the Death Drive of Islamofascism into the context of 20th century history. Here's but a sample:

At this point, alongside many other examples from history, one cannot help being reminded of the National Socialist project in Germany. At the end of the Weimar Republic, large sections of the population saw themselves as losers. The objective data tell a clear story. But the economic crisis and mass unemployment would probably not have been enough to bring Hitler to power. For that to happen, it took propaganda aimed at the subjective factor: the blow dealt to people's pride by the defeat of 1918 and the Treaty of Versailles. Most Germans sought to blame others: the victorious powers, the "global Capitalist-Bolshevist conspiracy" and above all, of course, the eternal scapegoat, Judaism. The tormenting feeling of being in the position of the loser could only be compensated for by pursuing an offensive strategy, by seeking refuge in megalomania. From the outset, the Nazis entertained delusions of world domination. As such, their goals were boundless and non-negotiable. In this sense, they were not only unreal, but also non-political.

Consulting a map was never going to be enough to persuade Hitler and his followers that the struggle of one small European country against the rest of the world was hopeless. On the contrary. The radical loser has no notion of resolving conflicts, of compromise that might involve him in a normal network of interests and defuse his destructive energy. The more hopeless his project, the more fanatically he clings to it. There are grounds to suspect that Hitler and his followers were interested not in victory, but in radicalizing and eternalizing their own status as losers.

Their pent up anger discharged itself in a war of unprecedented destruction against all those others who they blamed for their own defeats. First and foremost, it was a matter of destroying the Jews and the opponents of 1919. But they certainly had no intention of sparing the Germans. Their actual objective was not victory, but elimination, downfall, collective suicide, the terrible end. There is no other explanation for the way the Germans fought on in World War II right to the last pile of rubble in Berlin. Hitler himself confirmed this diagnosis when he said that the German people did not deserve to survive. At a huge cost, he achieved what he wanted – he lost. But the Jews, the Poles, the Russians, the Germans and all the others are still around.

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In one respect, however, the Islamists are without doubt a twenty-first-century phenomenon: where their understanding of the media is concerned, they leave their predecessors far behind. Earlier disciples of terror also relied on "propaganda through action", but the kind of worldwide attention achieved today by a nebulous grouping like Al Qaida was not granted to them. Trained by television, computer technology, the Internet and advertising, Islamist terror now gets higher viewer ratings than any football World Cup. The all-important massacres are staged in Hollywood-inspired style, modelled on disaster films, splatter movies and science fiction thrillers. This too is evidence of a dependency on the hated West. In the media output of terrorism, the Society of the Spectacle as described by the Situationists comes into its own.

More momentous still, however, is the strategic use of suicide attacks, an invincible weapon that cannot be seen by surveillance satellites and which can be deployed practically anywhere. It is also extremely cheap. In addition to these advantages, this form of terror also exerts an irresistible attraction on the radical loser. It allows him to combine destruction and self-destruction at the same time as acting out both his megalomaniac fantasies and his self-hate. Cowardice is the last thing he can be accused of. The courage that is his hallmark is the courage of despair. His triumph consists in the fact that he can be neither fought nor punished, since he takes care of that himself.

Contrary to what the West appears to believe, the destructive energy of Islamist actions is directed mainly against Muslims. This is not a tactical error, not a case of "collateral damage". In Algeria alone, Islamist terror has cost the lives of at least 50,000 fellow Algerians. Other sources speak of as many as 150,000 murders, although the military and the secret services were also involved. In Iraq and Afghanistan, too, the number of Muslim victims far outstrips the death toll among foreigners. Furthermore, terrorism has been highly detrimental not only to the image of Islam but also to the living conditions of Muslims around the world.

The Islamists are as unconcerned about this as the Nazis were about the downfall of Germany. As the avant-garde of death, they have no regard for the lives of their fellow believers. In the eyes of the Islamists, the fact that most Muslims have no desire to blow themselves and others sky high only goes to show that they deserve no better than to be liquidated themselves. After all, the aim of the radical loser is to make as many other people into losers as possible. As the Islamists see it, the fact that they are in the minority can only be because they are the chosen few.

The project of the radical loser, as currently seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, consists of organizing the suicide of an entire civilisation. But the likelihood of their succeeding in an unlimited generalization of their death cult is negligible. Their attacks represent a permanent background risk, like ordinary everyday deaths by accident on the streets, to which we have become accustomed.

In a global society that constantly produces new losers, this is something we will have to live with.