What is nihilism?

[Triple A]

I've been reading some books and I found references to nihilism.
I searched and I found some websites saying nihilists were russian terrorists.

Is there anyone that can explain me what nihilism really is?

[blake 3:17]

The term has a few different meanings. The Russian terrorists you've heard about were mainly pro-peasant intellectuals who engaged in anti-Tzarist violence. Dostoyevsky was associated with this movement and it landed him in Siberia for many years. He later became a very Right Christian, while at the same time behaving fairly nihilistically(sp?).

Nihilism in the broader sense means a profound doubt about everything and lack of faith in the world, one's self or community, or other greater goods. Nihilism can lead people in weird directions politically, personally, socially and intellectually. One a philosophical level, some relate it to early existentialism and I guess up to Heidegger. For the post-modernists, Baudrillard is probably the most nihilistic.

On political levels I'd see it related to terror and terrorist tactics -- whether from fringe groups, Left or Right, or from terrorist states. The so-called clash of civilizations, between the Juedo-Christian West and Islamic East is less a combination of rivalries of faith, but I think more a fight between whose got the bigger nihilism. The Taliban's brand of Islam is very strict but also anti-life and anti-culture. The attack on Afghanistan by the Western powers should be seen as just as anti-life. The dressings are different but it's all war war war for its own sake, despite some of the liberal window dressing.

On personal and community levels, nihilism or nihistic thoughts or feelings may be expressed by random violence, violence in families, schools or workplaces, drug and alcohol abuse, various forms of self harm or a general deadening of the senses.

"If nothing is true, then everything is permitted." --

[Rooster]

Nihilism, a term invented or popularised by Russian novelist Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (181-83) in his novel Fathers and Sons (1861) for the rejection of all traditional values.

Literally meaning "nothingness", the term can be applied to views saying that all knowledge is impossible, that all alleged metaphysical truths or values are illusory, or that ethical values cannot be given any foundation and so are arbitrary. "Nihilism" has been applied particularly to a movement in Czarist Russia which held that any means were permissible in overthrowing the existing order (the value of overthrowing it being tacitly taken for granted), and so later off-shoots and imitations of that movement elsewhere.

[milk]

In a Russian nineteenth-century context, it was a subcultural soup of the intelligentsia, from which former members would later join other political or social groups.

A very good book to read for background would be Franco Venturi's Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia.