Roger Griffin

The Total Enemy

Ethics, Culture & Social Issues

“In an age where the Enlightenment project for an ideal world without violence now seems as distant as the nearest star, Mikkel Thorup's exhilaratingly depressing The Total Enemy explores the paradox that it is precisely the continued pursuit of that utopia at all costs that has made modernity a permanent habitat for political extremism. It can lead to a Manichean mindset within the defenders and opponents of the status quo alike, spawning ideologized worldviews in which the enemy is totalized and terror is seen as a legitimate weapon for both sides in a permanent war whether to protect or transform the state. The battle, it reveals, is not between modernity and barbarism, but liberal and extremist modernity, a battle in which civil society itself now finds itself in the front line, and totalitarian hearts of darkness can spring from leafy suburbs at any point to wreak havoc in ways which Orwell's 1984 could never have anticipated.”