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.
“Islamic fascism” is the exact choice of words to describe Muslim Terrorists.
Well, the T-34 and the Katyusha rocket worked pretty well :-).
T-34 is to the Russians what the Spitfire is to the Brits
"Katyusha rocket"
That's BM-13 to you, fella. :-) Towed by a Studebaker truck of course. (much nicer than that POS Zil). The recent war in Lebanon/Northern Israel shows that "little Kate" still has legs!
I am a great admirer of Hanson and his felicitous writing style, and above all his perspective and sense of historical range, which goes way, way, back. And I think you're accurate in the way you've assessed his mindset as being of the "TR/Wilsonian style.". And I too, have, especially lately dreamed wistfully of retreat, working on becoming self-sufficient economically, and a revised form of isolationalism. But I think the genie has been too long out of the bottle, and there has been too much economic interpenetration globally, too many deals made, too many favors owed,etc. for us EVER to be able to disentangle ourselves. We would have to start in a thousand different places, or work on them one at a time: let's start by looking at all American real estate owned by foreign powers or interests not American, let's look at all American businesses whose manufacturing, assembly or simple phone bank outsourcing exist in other countries, (providing employment there), let's look at the BILLIONS made here by Mexicans that never get invested and re-circulated here, but instead go back to Mexico in the form of remmittances (nearly as much as comes into the mexican economy from PEMEX). By extension, let's examine how the Mexican government , regardless of how their current election winds up getting resolved, might become infinitely more corrupt by having 10 or 20 million less unemployable citizens THERE, but having them work HERE, and continuing to send 30,40,50 billions $$ in remittances back, eventually taking ALL the pressure off the Mexican government and its structures: they have the potential to become corrupt in an entirely new way. The preceding is just off the top of my head, but you get the picture, the genie is out of the bottle, the toothpaste is out of the tube, and the prognosis for isolationism does not look good, no matter how commonsensical it is.
You have many good points, of course. I wonder if the next up and coming economic power will make the same mistakes we and so many who've gone before have made.
What's even funnier is that Hanson ramblingly invokes Hitler, which would only make sense if we were talking about Islamonazis.
Hanson's become a bad joke. Does he understand religion at all? I think he's at least half-blinded by secularism, so he has to cram violent Islam into secular-political categories, rather than theological-political.
He should go back to tending his vineyards.
Thanks.
"Yeah, Mussolini is the first thing I think of when I think of bin Laden and Iraqi insurgents.
What's even funnier is that Hanson ramblingly invokes Hitler, which would only make sense if we were talking about Islamonazis.
Hanson's become a bad joke. Does he understand religion at all? I think he's at least half-blinded by secularism, so he has to cram violent Islam into secular-political categories, rather than theological-political.
He should go back to tending his vineyards."
Amen to all that! Actually, you're pretty smart for a bovine. :-)
Along with this we should not be swayed by the fact that 99% of Muslims appear to be Allah fearing good Muslims.
The 99% are enabling the 1% by providing cover and anonymity to the terrorist who hide among them.
By refusing to become "involved" they are in effect helping the terrorists.
It may be that Hanson invokes WW2 models (while also offering their more ancient Islamic equivalents) because
that's all our collective historical sense may still be able to relate to: he may or may not "understand religion"
as such, but he is not talking so much about the 8 or 9 hundred million "peaceful" Muslims, but the ones who have now made that religion more "political" than any religion on earth. And if were are talking about 1 or 2 hundred million potential ready-to-be-activated Jihadists out of a billion "co-religionists", that is ENOUGH for me.I have no problem with historical analogies whether they hold a pint, quart or gallon of water. We need some terms and reference points WE can understand to help us get a grip on the enemy, because he is otherwise so difficult to understand, and so intractable, and intransigent. I do not look forward to the prospect of massive carnage, but part of me still expects it. And history, unfortunately is full of it, and may not be revisable by hopeful idealism or denial.
Yep. Islam is built that way. The so-called moderates end up helping the hardliners in any event and we buy into their line. They don't take out their own trash and expect us to do the dying for them.
Well put.
"The preceding is just off the top of my head, but you get the picture, the genie is out of the bottle, the toothpaste is out of the tube, and the prognosis for isolationism does not look good, no matter how commonsensical it is"
It would take a second American Revolution ... just a thought, though Thomas Jefferson would approve. There's a line from an old Steve Miller tune: "You got to go through hell before you get to Heaven." Seems like an appropriate philosophy in this case.
My sense of where we are is 1) either we help them deal with the totalitarians in their societies (and I can barely work up any enthusiasm for risking our sons lives to do that) or 2) we destroy Islam militarily. I would prefer number 1 to work, and want to give Islam a chance to reform itself. That said, I give it less than a 50-50 chance of working. After another major attack on the US it will be time for number 2. No one gets to change my religion by force or threat of force.
I find myself in your corner.
"And I too, have, especially lately dreamed wistfully of retreat, working on becoming self-sufficient economically, and a revised form of isolationalism. But I think the genie has been too long out of the bottle, and there has been too much economic interpenetration globally, too many deals made, too many favors owed,etc. for us EVER to be able to disentangle ourselves."
It's like wishing one could be six again.
Thanks for the ping.
"It's like wishing one could be six again"
Pope Benedict opened the door and there's a fresh new wind blowing through the argument.
Personally, I prefer the term "Sand-Nazi." It is shorter (rolls off the tongue easier), slightly more accurate, and avoids the offensive "Islamo" part (though I hardly think Muslims would find "Sand-Nazi" a particularly flattering term).
Do it! Seriously. I have 5 grandchildren now. For them, suburbia has replaced the mountain I grew up on. Some call the changes over the past 40 years progress. To me those changes denote a watering down of humanity. These are trying times we're going through and we can no longer count on our neighbors, schools, or even our places of worship for support. I may have grown up under the "threat" of the cold war, but it was nothing like this. I've never been so afraid for future generations.
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