In the individual Shadow model, once we re-integrate the part of ourselves we left behind, the Shadow loses its "dark side" (yes, this idea was co-opted for Star Wars).
Just a quick overview. Fire away.
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Posted on 09/25/2006 5:22:07 AM PDT by RKV
Make no apologies for the use of “Islamic fascism.” It is the perfect nomenclature for the agenda of radical Islam, for a variety of historical and scholarly reasons. That such usage also causes extreme embarrassment to both the Islamists themselves and their leftist “anti-fascist” appeasers in the West is just too bad.
First, the general idea of “fascism” — the creation of a centralized authoritarian state to enforce blanket obedience to a reactionary, all-encompassing ideology — fits well the aims of contemporary Islamism that openly demands implementation of sharia law and the return to a Pan-Islamic and theocratic caliphate.
In addition, Islamists, as is true of all fascists, privilege their own particular creed of true believers by harkening back to a lost, pristine past, in which the devout were once uncorrupted by modernism.
True, bin Laden’s mythical Volk doesn’t bath in the clear icy waters of the Rhine untouched by the filth of the Tiber; but rather they ride horses and slice the wind with their scimitars in service of a soon to be reborn majestic world of caliphs and mullahs. Osama bin Laden sashaying in his flowing robes is not all that different from the obese Herman Goering in reindeer horns plodding around his Karinhall castle with suspenders and alpine shorts.
Because fascism is born out of insecurity and the sense of failure, hatred for Jews is de rigueur. To read al Qaeda’s texts is to reenter the world of Mein Kampf (naturally now known as jihadi in the Arab world). The crackpot minister of its ideology, Dr. Zawahiri, is simply a Dr. Alfred Rosenberg come alive — a similar quarter-educated buffoon, who has just enough of a vocabulary to dress up fascist venom in a potpourri of historical misreadings and pseudo-learning.
Envy and false grievance, as in the past with Italian, German, or Japanese whining, are always imprinted deeply within the fascist mind. After all, it can never quite figure out why the morally pure, the politically zealous, the ever more obedient are losing out to corrupt and decadent democracies — where “mixing,” either in the racial or religious sense, should instead have enervated the people.
The “will” of the German people, like the “Banzai” spirit of the Japanese, should always trump the cowardly and debased material superiority of decadent Western democracies. So al Qaeda boasts that in Somalia and Afghanistan the unshakeable creed of Islam overcame the richer and better equipped Americans and Russians. To read bin Laden’s communiqués is to be reminded of old Admiral Yamamato assuring his creepy peers that his years in the United States in the 1920s taught him that Roaring Twenties America, despite its fancy cars and skyscrapers, simply could not match the courage of the chosen Japanese.
Second, fascism thrives best in a once proud, recently humbled, but now ascendant, people. They are ripe to be deluded into thinking contemporary setbacks were caused by others and are soon to be erased through ever more zealotry. What Versailles and reparations were to Hitler’s new Germany, what Western colonialism and patronizing in the Pacific were to the rising sun of the Japanese, what the embarrassing image of the perennial sick man of Europe was to Mussolini’s new Rome, so too Israel, modernism, and America’s ubiquitous pop culture are to the Islamists, confident of a renaissance via vast petro-weatlh.
Such reactionary fascism is complex because it marries the present’s unhappiness with moping about a regal past — with glimpses of an even more regal future. Fascism is not quite the narcotic of the hopeless, but rather the opiate of the recently failed now on the supposed rebound who welcome the cheap fix of blaming others and bragging about their own iron will.
Third, while there is generic fascism, its variants naturally weave preexisting threads familiar to a culture at large. Hitler’s brand cribbed together notions of German will, Aryanism, and the cult of the Ubermensch from Hegel, Nietzsche, and Spengler, with ample Nordic folk romance found from Wagner to Tacitus’s Germania. Japanese militarism’s racist creed, fanaticism, and sense of historical destiny were a motley synthesis of Bushido, Zen and Shinto Buddhism, emperor worship, and past samurai legends. Mussolini’s fasces, and the idea of an indomitable Caesarian Duce (or Roman Dux), were a pathetic attempt to resurrect imperial Rome. So too Islamic fascism draws on the Koran, the career of Saladin, and the tracts of Nasserites, Baathists, and Muslim Brotherhood pamphleteers.
Fourth, just as it was idle in the middle of World War II to speculate how many Germans, Japanese, or Italians really accepted the silly hatred of Hitler, Mussolini, or Tojo, so too it is a vain enterprise to worry over how many Muslims follow or support al Qaeda, or, in contrast, how many in the Middle East actively resist Islamists.
Most people have no ideology, but simply accommodate themselves to the prevailing sense of an agenda’s success or failure. Just as there weren’t more than a dozen vocal critics of Hitler after the Wehrmacht finished off France in six weeks in June of 1940, so too there wasn’t a Nazi to be found in June 1945 when Berlin lay in rubble.
It doesn’t matter whether Middle Easterners actually accept the tenets of bin Laden’s worldview — not if they think he is on the ascendancy, can bring them a sense of restored pride, and humiliate the Jews and the West on the cheap. Bin Laden is no more eccentric or impotent than Hitler was in the late 1920s.Yet if he can claim that his martyrs forced the United States out of Afghanistan and Iraq, toppled a petrol sheikdom or two, and acquired its wealth and influence — or if he got his hands on nuclear weapons and lorded it over appeasing Westerners — then he too, like the Fuhrer in the 1930s, will become untouchable. The same is true of Iran’s president Ahmadinejad.
Fifth, fascism springs from untruth and embraces lying. Hitler had contempt for those who believed him after Czechoslovakia. He broke every agreement from Munich to the Soviet non-aggression pact. So did the Japanese, who were sending their fleet to Pearl Harbor even as they talked of a new diplomatic breakthrough.
Al-Zawahiri in his writings spends an inordinate amount of effort excusing al Qaeda’s lies by referring to the Koranic notions of tactical dissimulation. We remember Arafat saying one thing in English and another in Arabic, and bin Laden denying responsibility for September 11 and then later boasting of it. Nothing a fascist says can be trusted, since all means are relegated to the ends of seeing their ideology reified. So too Islamic fascists, by any means necessary, will fib, and hedge for the cause of Islamism. Keep that in mind when considering Iran’s protestations about its “peaceful” nuclear aims.
We can argue whether the present-day Islamic fascists have the military means comparable to what was had in the past by Nazis, Fascists, and militarists — I think a dirty bomb is worth the entire Luftwaffe, one nuclear missile all the striking power of the Japanese imperial Navy — but there should be no argument over who they are and what they want. They are fascists of an Islamic sort, pure and simple.
And the least we can do is to call them that: after all, they earned it.
"There's no reason why it could not have recovered...except for their policy of "Self reliance" and (it goes without saying) Communism."
That phrase should read:
"There's no reason why it could not have recovered...except for their policy of Communism."
"So then you have a hunch, a theory, about this autarchy thing, that the US could make it work if we tried real hard. I don't think so. One antidote for that kind of thinking to read Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations."
You are obviously too young to remember the period between roughly 1945-1960 when the US was, essentially, economically self-sufficient. Everything you bought whether it was a TV set, radio, automobile, toy, clothing, footwear, home appliance, flatware etc etc etc was MADE IN THE USA. Only exception would have been the diamond in the engagement ring you offered to your girlfriend after the sock hop was over!
Oh, and even the gasoline you put in your De Soto or oil to heat your home came from petroleum extracted in the USA.
In the individual Shadow model, once we re-integrate the part of ourselves we left behind, the Shadow loses its "dark side" (yes, this idea was co-opted for Star Wars).
Just a quick overview. Fire away.
"islam is our Shadow, our repressed spiritual life knocking hard on our door."
Some would say that Islam is the hornet's nest we obsessively insist on poking with a stick.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/country_profiles/1131421.stm
After the Korean War, Kim Il-sung introduced the personal philosophy of Juche, or self-reliance, which became a guiding light for North Korea's development.
I have studied Economics at the graduate level (got A's by the way) so I am familiar with the Mercantilist arguments that paleo-cons such as yourself make. With respect to the falsehood you attempt to foist on us about the period 1945-1960, here are the stats. http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/past_years.html We had both trade surpluses and deficits during the period 1945-1960. Here's the more recent data - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_payments You are confusing your experience (and memory) with the actual facts. Puting an "American label" on a product does not tell the whole story as to where the raw materials and compents which made it up came from.
"After the Korean War, Kim Il-sung introduced the personal philosophy of Juche, or self-reliance, which became a guiding light for North Korea's development"
I'm well aware of Juche, but that is not what lead to the downfall of North Korea's economy. What did destroy it was:
1. Stalinism, which destroys agriculture via collectivization, and instills a primitive concept of industry and technology.
2. Total lack of any entrepeneurial class--it all fled south.
3. A brutal and thouroughly corrupt regime which discouraged any sane person from investing in it.
4. The Korean War didn't help matters any; but the ROK was able to recover from the devastation economically because it lacked the first three handicaps (and had the US as a sugar daddy of sorts)
There were a number of foodstuffs even then that Americans did not produce in their raw form:
1. Chocolate (cocoa beans)
2. Bananas
3. Coffee (some is grown in HI, IRRC)
4. Cola nuts
5. Chicle (sp?) for chewing gum
6. Natural rubber (not a foodstuff but grown from plants)
7. "Botique" foodstuffs (caviar, anchovies etc.)
No doubt this accounted for much of those deficits.
Ping!
Hanson NEVER disappoints! This is as clear and wellwritten as ANYTHING i have ever read by him, or anyone else!
Unfortunately he doesn't note that Bush backed down a day or two later from using the term, after heat was applied.
"early 50s Stalinist-style smokestack rubbish, producing nothing worthwhile"> You hit the jackpot! That is one of the most vivid phrases I have read to sum up the entire iconic futility of Communism. I am going to use it and never fail to credit the name katyusha. I always wondered just what was going on in those factories, and what their purpose was besides pollution: I think they were just there for the photographs, mainly, and also to test out
the procedural complexities of smelting, refining, etc etc,
just sort of a massive photo-op for industrialization.
Those countries basically never produced anything that worked. Well, maybe samovars, and those little nesting egg-dolls.
Confront Ahmadinejad about his cognitive dissidence -- if Ahmadinejad believes the Holocaust happened then it shoots down his theory that "the Joos" are powerful beyond words and run the world.
A race of people can't be at one and the same time, more powerful than all others, and victims burned to death in ovens.
In Ahmadinejad's mind, he has to believe the story of the powerful "Joo" - the "Joo" who keeps all Arab and Persian cultures broken, poor, and humiliated. If Ahmadinejad were to look closely at reality, he would see that dictatorships all over the world are poor - and their citizens unhappy. When that's mixed with politically powerless women, 7th century ideas, a total lack of freedom, the results are the same: backward, ignorant, helpless, poor, angry countries. It's not the US, it's not the "joos" it's their choices. It's Muslim choices that are their own downfall.
The recipe for failure? An oppressive religion, thuggy men, powerless women and limited to nonexistent freedom. They create the failure. Their choices make Muslim countries into the totalitarian failures they are -- Ahmadinjad and Islamic fascism are lies -- lying to themselves -- lying to us. We must not buy into it.
Please add me he's brilliant.
I agree on the eery parallels. Frankly, it is frightening me.
I just finished reading "Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives", a historiography of the careers of Hitler and Stalin, year by year. Highly recommended, though it could do with a tougher editor in places. One of the main themes is that everybody underestimated these characters or chose to ignore them. Hitler was once a sideshow joke, but within 14 years he had conquered most of Europe and brought destruction onto Germany.
The same attitude of "looking away" exists today, eg with that guy who heckled our Home Secretary the other day. We cannot affored to ignore these people.
75 million Europeans lost their lives between 1910 and 1953 in the various wars and famines. That is why I am frightened. The next war will be worse, there are a lot more people on the planet, especially south of the Mediterranean.
Well, the T-34 and the Katyusha rocket worked pretty well :-).
The industrialization of Russia under Stalin *did* happen, but this is not the place to argue on the effectiveness of that program.
THe T-34 and the katyusha rocket , I dunno, just sound like things that would eventually drain an economy rather than stimulate it, and also like the FEATURED STARS in those endless "parades" through Moscow, with all the missiles positioned at an angle as if ready for launching.
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