OPEN UNIVERSITY SEPTEMBER 1, 2006
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September 1--the day Nazi stormstroopers overran Poland in 1939, igniting World War II--seems an appropriate day to meditate on fascism, the word President Bush used yesterday in a major speech to explain to Americans whom we are fighting against. The word was given a place of honor in a sentence summoning up the worst hobgoblins of the past century:
"As veterans, you have seen this kind of enemy before. They're successors to fascists, to Nazis, to communists and other totalitarians of the twentieth century, and history shows what the outcome will be."
But are our enemies Fascists, or Nazis, or communists? Do those words have anything in common with each other beyond their ability to frighten people? Is it right to use 1930s language to describe a threat that might have more to do with the 1130s?
There are many definitions of Fascism floating around and easily available on the Internet. One was composed by an impressive authority, Benito Mussolini, who in 1932 defined the term for an Italian encyclopedia. Mussolini wrote "Fascism [is] the complete opposite of ... Marxian Socialism." In a few bombastic paragraphs, he elevated the idea of the omniscient state, the perpetual expansion of the nation, and the glorification of the act that achieved it: war.
Clearly this is not quite right to describe the people we are fighting against--we have so many enemies in the region that it is increasingly difficult to use the word "enemy" as well. They seek no state, and in fact their statelessness partly explains their effectiveness (as it does Hezbollah's). They have no Panzer divisions or tanks or bombers--the key to Hitler's thrust 67 years ago. They are anything but fascist, or "Islamo-fascist," the tortured neologism gaining currency.
"Fascism" has been misused many times before. FDR's critics sometimes invoked the term, along with communism (conveniently, for FDR-haters, the Roman fasces are on the back of the dime). And it is sometimes used on the left, to attack President Bush. That is hardly fair. But some of the thunder of yesterday's speech--particularly its saber-rattling toward Iran--summons disturbing historical ghosts. While most commentators still doubt that an attack on Iran is imminent, it is conceivable that we are heading toward a confrontation, fueled not by President Bush
4 comments
"Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion." Paxton's definition fits both the Qutbist and Khomeini-ist variants quite nicely.All the classic themes are there: humiliation, decline, revival through purification, an obsession with the "propaganda of the deed." The caliphate they yearn for is certainly analogous to the European territorial nation-state.Of course, there is no need to "abandon" democratic liberties since these never existed.
- balaam
September 1, 2006 at 11:44am
I think it's a major mistake to conflate fascism with Islamic extremism. The two have little in common except that both are crazy, vicious ideologies (a trait also shared by communism and a few other ideologies, but that's beside the point).
- litwinski
September 5, 2006 at 12:36pm
Right. It fits the definition However, I don't think it works as strategy to be lobbing this buzz word around if we are serious about keeping our people safe. It's meant to fire up the Rush Limbaugh crowd for November, but I can't see how a naive Texas Christian insinuating things about Islam can be construed as anything other than tasteless and ultimately harmful in the larger war. It's very sad that we as a country cannot rise above this sort of pettiy name-calling and race baiting. Global jihad and European anti-Americanism are fueled by these Bushisms.
- grm211
September 5, 2006 at 1:55pm
The question, it seems to me, is whether you want to equate Islamic extremism to fascism as we saw it after Mussolini and Hitler came to power, or before. The difference is quite critical, if you want to understand how to respond. Presumably we would and should respond to a government that has come to absolute power over a states' economy, military, and social system, differently from the way we respond to disaffected and radicalized thugs in the street. For one thing, it is clearly possible to destroy a fascist state via purely punitive measures. State's are fragile things, compared to ideologies. On the other hand, purely punitive actions are probably counterproductive in combating extremism on the part of those out of, but agitating for, power. Radicalism feeds on repression. The diffuse, nihilistic character of radical underground groups is such that violence against them can in fact strengthen them. Hitler understood this quite well. He used Roehm's brownshirt thugs quite effectively to come to power, and then disposed of him and his leadership cabal, recognizing quite fully that they were equally a threat to his National Socialist regime, as to Weimar. So who are we dealing with here?
- sdemuth
September 5, 2006 at 2:38pm