Could nihilism be the basis of an enduring terrorist movement?

Comics and graphic novels make up one of my weaknesses, and one of my particular weaknesses is the Marvel graphic novel Wolverine: Enemy of the State. This is not because I think it good, but rather because I think it a great example of camp in the Susan Sontag sense. (Her points 19, 33, and 37 are particularly relevant.) In Enemy of the State, we find out that HYDRA is run by moderates who are into the orgiastic blood sacrifice of children, and that radicals displeased by HYDRA's moderation are planning to take over. What do these radicals want? Their leader, the super-centenarian Satanist Baroness Elisbeth von Strucker, is blunt.



Whatever else the Baroness is, at least she is direct.

Over the top as Enemy of the State is, it does contain the seed of an interesting idea. In a world where globalized liberal democracy is hegemonic and has no plausible challenging ideology, what else is left for the radically discontented to do but challenge everything? This would require radical Islam to not develop terrorist offshoots. Could this sort of nihilism possibly sustain a lasting terrorist movement, one akin to HYDRA under the Baroness?
 
It's quite a leap from traditional nihilism ("nothing has any meaning") to "let's kill everyone". Reference to Satan makes it seem religious, as well, more than philosophical.

That said, could there be some sort of "kill everyone" cult? Sure. The idea that the natural and right state of the Earth is for all humans (and/or life) not to exist isn't any crazier than some other things that have achieved religious followings, and is reminiscent of real religions in the past (notably, there seem to have been some Angra Mainyu worshippers in Zoroastrian society, which the Zoroastrian mainstream portrays as having shades of this).

Such a cult could easily arise from the post-WWI world, a reaction to the horrors of the war and the newly demonstrated destructive power of humanity and nature (in the form of the Spanish Flu). WWII, the devastation of the Soviet Union, the Holocaust, nuclear weapons, the Japanese occupation, the Chinese Civil War...all of these things would only fuel a cult who believed that peaceful nothingness was the right thing, and nuclear entente in the Cold War would show them that the complete annihilation of life on Earth was actually achievable!

These people would be incredibly scary, if they were at all competent, seeing mass murder as its own reward. I can imagine them brewing up chemical and biological agents and trying to get their hands on nuclear weapons. How scary they are of course depends on how competent they are, and I can definitely see the FBI and all other security agencies pouncing on them once they make their goals clear, but they'll probably just set up in Paraguay or whatever.
 
@ the OP

I don't think it would be possible to get a mass of people organized around a plot to kill off everyone and leave the Earth in a lifeless state, if there were not going to be humans around to enjoy it.

The closest you have to that I think is groups like Earth First, who want to knock humanity off its pedestal, so to speak, rendering homo sapiens just another life form, whose needs are subservient to those of the Earth. But even they don't want the Earth entirely free of humanity, much less all life.

At most, you might get "groups" with the size and strength of Leopold and Loeb or the Columbine killers, commiting isolated acts of murder out of some vague misanthropy. But they're not gonna attract much of a following, outside their own narcissisitc selves. Maybe a few copycats here and there, that's about it.
 

shiftygiant

Gone Fishin'
We already have a nihilistic movement; Nazism.

Now here me out, because whilst not perfect, there is a reason I bring them up. See, historian Timothy Snyder brings up an interesting thing about the Nazi worldview, namely that it is a reaction to the enlightenment, not an inflation of Nationalism. The Nazi's do not believe in the 'Nation State', but believe in the perpetual struggle of racial supremacy. Everything, be it science, art, religion, borders, morality, all of this is artificial, used by- to paraphrase- the 'Jewish Conspiracy' to pervert mans natural order of the never ending struggle. Basically, Hitler viewed the Jews as an existential threat to human nature and the natural order, who perverted reality by, in Hitlers eyes, imposing artificiality onto the world. By destroying the Jews, and everything they have constructed, Hitler believed he would be able to bring his people back to a time before this, back to a world that is purely the racial struggle, where there is no intrinsic meaning to existence other than the racial struggle. The Reich itself was superfluous and a means to the ends of dismantling an old world order, of removing an unnatural barrier. In the end, nothing has value, nor a moral or objective truth outside of what Hitler and the Nazi's view as the 'natural order'.

/I don't believe in any of this, obviously.
 
The Nazis had beliefs in many things, and were dedicated to a racial order. Although they did advocate for resetting history, they are fundamentally dissimilar to nihilists. It's like trying to call ISIS "nihilist" in any sense beyond the Nietzschean "wants to create a new order through activity" sense.

Speaking as a nihilist, I think creating a nihilist terrorist movement is easy. If other ideologies are weak and worn out, and if you can attract radicals to the idea that the world is generally based upon "spooks", little nothings... I definitely see the potential. Of course, you'd probably have multiple strains: people who attack anyone and everything, because hierarchy is a spook, more materialist and organized nihilists who attack all forms of social structure, but moreso the powerful rather than the commons.

I also think you'd need some kind of decline or collapse to facilitate these actions -- after all, people cling so hard to their little spooks. If they have nothing more left to lose, then they are ready for the hour of the knife, the great action, the permanent state-of-nature in which all that is can be undone...
 
Nihilism was the foundation of a terrorist movement in Russia that lasted decades. It was different to the 'kill everything' reductionist understanding of Nihilism though.
 
Yes. I will also qualify that omnicidal nihilism is much less likely to arise -- outside of a total social breakdown, a la the Corcyraean Revolution or even The Terror -- than the more historical, anti-state, anti-capitalist, anti-culture nihilism.

In many ways, nihilism is the purest materialism, although philosophically one could also say that physical reality is a spook...
 

Pesigalam

Banned
I don't think it would be possible to get a mass of people organized around a plot to kill off everyone and leave the Earth in a lifeless state, if there were not going to be humans around to enjoy it.
You'd be surprised what people will support:
It is a common belief that existing is a good thing. Philosopher David Benatar disagrees. The logic is that while pain is bad and pleasure is good, lack of pain is always good, and lack of pleasure is only bad if people exist to perceive it. The logic follows that having children is morally unjustifiable. While the absence of pain and presence of pleasure are both good, having pain is much worse than not having pleasure. In life, suffering and death are inevitable, while pleasure is contingent on arbitrary factors and is ultimately fleeting.

Having children is seen as ultimately selfish. While you might benefit from having children, in terms of the children’s interest, the harm of existence outweighs any possible benefit. Avoiding existence means avoiding pain, which is great, and although it means an absence of pleasure, that’s not so bad considering that without existing you won’t know what you’re missing. Furthermore, it is more morally important to avoid harming someone than benefiting them. Having children definitely harms them through unavoidable pain and death which outweighs the potential joys of living as a justification for creating them.

The antinatalist ethos can also be combined with moral concerns over human effects on the environment. This fusion of concepts has led to the development of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement or VHEMT (pronounced “vehement”). This group was founded by Vietnam vet Les Knight, a former member of Zero Population Growth, which advocated couples having no more than two children.

The newer group argues that the impact of humanity on the biosphere has been so catastrophic that the best moral solution is to pursue the extinction of the human race through sterilization. The movement is growing as the world’s population continues to increase, natural habitats are destroyed, and resources are depleted. One French antinatalist activist put it succinctly, “We’re on the Titanic, it would be reckless to take more people aboard when the boat is about to sink!”

The group does not advocate forced sterilization or encourage suicide, with the movement’s motto being, “May we live long and die out.” Nor do the views of VHEMT reflect those of all antinatalists. The philosophy has had influence in pop culture through the novels and short fiction of Thomas Ligotti, the music of Zola Jesus, and the character of Rust Cohle on True Detective.
 
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