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Edited on Wed Jun-23-04 09:12 PM by troublemaker
To me Islamofascism is currently the most irritating nut-right buzzword.
I've been thinking about why this term irritates me so much. It has a 'big lie' quality to it; for right-wing cranks it's exhilarating to call our enemies fascists because a) they enjoy lying, and b) it implies that right-wing cranks are not themselves fascist sympathizers. (Nice try, but no sale!) It also has the forced quality of a linguistic loyalty oath, like when Klansmen on TV go out of their way to call black people "nigger" even in contexts where they'd more normally say black or colored. It's a word of gratuitous difference or defiance, implying that the reader is soft on terrorism if he uses a less aggressive term. Worst of all, it's intellectual sabotage, a term designed to be flung into the cogs of reason. It embodies every vice of advertising and propaganda.
Everybody calls everything they don't like "fascist." So much so that both Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden are referred to as fascists. What's up with that? It seems simple racism on its face; aside from being Arabs the two men have very little in common. Both are monomaniacal murderers, but that describes half the notable leaders of history. Nobody ever calls Ramses II a fascist.
I'll assume the term Islamofascist is intended to connect certain Islamic people to Hitler--not much domestic propaganda value in associating them with Franco--so I'll use Nazism and fascism interchangeably here. The Third Reich was national suicide cult laden with quasi-religious symbolism and self-defined in terms of its enemies; primarily Jews and Bolsheviks. The religious death-cult part sounds a lot like Osama Bin Laden except he doesn't have a state, a dispositive discrepancy in my eyes.
If one plays the footnote game with sufficient skill it would be easy to write a book "proving" Bin Laden is a fascist, a communist or a Wendell Wilkie Republican. After a while the exercise will resemble those lists of eerie similarities between Lincoln and JFK. Like Hitler, Bin Laden made his reputation fighting communists and hating Jews. Like Hirohito he directed suicide pilots into American assets. Like Lincoln he's tall, skinny and mentally ill. Like Elizabeth Taylor he gets married a lot.
Whatever the heck Bin Laden's essence is, it's not likely to be merely a pastiche of 1919-1945 European politics. Islamic culture is certainly rich enough to spawn distinctively Islamic pathologies. We all, of necessity, use similes when pressed to define something alien. Hitler's pathology does provide instructive parallels to any pro-violence, pro-death movement but that doesn't justify the sloppiness of calling every sociopath a fascist.
Terrorist Jihadism does have an obvious western analog, not in fascism but in anarchism. The anarchists invented terrorism as we understand it, turning technology against the technological world. Since they seemed to have no moral sense and seemed to live only for destruction they were sometimes called "nihilists," still a useful term for someone like Osama bin Laden.
The first anarchists were at least as dramatic and successful as al Qeada. They were feared by all monied interests and in their heyday (1881-1901) anarchists managed to assassinate the leader of almost every western nation, including Czar Alexander II of Russia, French President Carnot, Humbert I, the King of Italy and American President William McKinley. ( for a real simple overview: www.crimelibrary.com/terrorists_spies/assassins/mckinley/2.html) The fictional bomb-maker in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent even invented the modern suicide bomber's explosives rig; he went through life with explosives strapped to his torso beneath his bulky overcoat and a detonator button at his waist.
But calling someone an Islamo-anarchist has no propaganda punch, so here we are.
A caution: The above link leads to a Court TV essay on anarchism and the McKinley assassination. It's pretty good, but at one point says, "In Chicago in 1886, during the Haymarket Square Riot, a demonstrator tossed a bomb into the crowd and killed seven police officers." The reality was more like an ambiguous variant of the Amritsar Massacre. 176 police officers were sent to the Haymarket to break up the roughly 200 person remnants of an "eight-hour day" labor rally. An explosive device was thrown at a policeman, killing him. The police responded by opening fire on the crowd so wildly that they ended up shooting dead six of their own and four bystanders. Between the police and the crowd about 100 were wounded. The police claimed they were fired on from the crowd, but it was never proven that anyone in the crowd was even armed. The fact that six dead police were riddled with police-issue bullets caused some to question the overall clarity of the police's perceptions of the event. I am generally sympathetic to police over-reactions because we cannot put ourselves in their shoes, but this went way beyond understandable error. In the aftermath eight anarchist leaders were sentenced to death despite none of them being connected in any way to the bomb. Some weren't even there. Some were sentenced to death for writing pamphlets that may have somehow inspired the Haymarket riot; the only American death sentences for publishing I know of. Of the eight men, four were hanged by the State, one took the civic initiative to hang himself in prison, and the other three were eventually released when everyone calmed down.
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