Tourism, Security and Safety From Theory to Practice

party expressed it best with its ironic motto 
¡Viva la muerte!
(Long live death!). The
French writer Camus expressed the idea of anomie in his novel 
The Rebel
. Fascist
Europe, including Stalin, who was in theory part of the left but acted as if he were
a fascist, was unable to reinvigorate the continent’s economy but was able to deliver
on one promise; it succeeded in delivering death to the masses.
The West has exported to the Middle East a great many concepts and ideas, one of
which is the philosophy of death and fascism. While terrorism exists in many parts of
the world, the form of extreme Muslim terrorism may serve as a paradigm or model of
modern terrorism in general. The Middle East is home to great literary traditions.
Nevertheless, some of the ideas that have influenced its greatest writers are Western
imports refitted to meet local Middle Eastern needs. Islamic terrorism should not be
confused with Islam. There are a great many differences between the two. For exam-
ple, Islam is a religious philosophy; Militant Islamism is a political philosophy based
on active nostalgia that seeks world conquest through terror. Based on nostalgia,
Militant Islamism plays a major role in the relationship between tourism and terrorism.
The Russian-American author, Svetlana Boym, in her major study of nostalgia
(2001), notes that although Swiss physicians first coined the word to describe an
ailment affecting Swiss soldiers, nostalgia has now become a necessary concept
in our understanding of terrorism. Terrorism, on some levels, like messianism, began
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as an idea that explains a physical desire to return home and became a spiritual desire
to return to a postmodern world. Today, nostalgia functions as the ideological under-
pinning of terrorism, a seeking to return not to the past but to the future. Viewed in
these terms, nostalgia is another manifestation of Hegelian theory. Understood in this
manner, scientific progress leads to a counterreaction by some groups that seek to
return to the past (or what they perceive to be the past). In a like manner, tourism
helps to unite past with future turning it into a constant present. From the perspec-
tive of tourism and terrorism, Boym’s paradigm defining and delineating restorative
versus reflexive nostalgia is extremely helpful. The reader will note in Table 1 that
terrorism is based on a misguided form of restorative nostalgia. This is a form of nos-
talgia that seeks a mystical past as the road map for a desired future. Restorative nos-
talgia is postmodern in thought and often reflects in political terms what postmodern
historically built villages reflect in cultural tourism.
Boym’s ideas are supported by the work of Roland Robertson. Robertson pre-
dicted that in our post-historical interconnected age fits of nostalgia would develop
both within nations and individuals. In Robertson’s words, “national societies are
increasingly exposed internally to problems of heterogeneity and diversity and at
the same time are experiencing both external and internal pressures to reconstruct
their collective identities along pluralistic lines” (Robertson, 1990, p. 57).
As Hegel might have predicted, restorative nostalgia, like terrorism, when mixed
with the political will to destroy the present so as to advance to the past, is the search
for the particular over the universal (Boym, 2001, p. 11). The Mujahad, the Baathist