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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

about "Islamo-fascism" « Previous | |Next »
October 29, 2006

In this article in the News and Notes section of Telos James V Schall explores the word 'Islamo fascism' with regard to the 'war on terrorism". I must admit to being uneasy about the term, as I'm not sure it helps us much to understand what is going on. It may even mislead us in linking us back to the 1930s and thinking that it is the same as German or Italian fascism, which is appropriately understood as 'corporatism' because it is a merger of state and corporate power..

So I am glad that the term is being analysed. Schall says:

The war in which we are currently engaged confuses us, in part because many will not admit it is a war. We do not know what to call it. Nor do we know what to call the self-declared enemy who has been attacking us in one form or another for some twenty-five years, ever more visibly and dangerouslysince September 11, 2001, with subsequent events in Afghanistan, Iraq, Spain, London, Bombay, Bali, Paris, Lebanon, and Israel ..... More recently, the term "Islamo-fascism" has been coined in an effort to describe the source and nature of "terrorism." I want to examine the appropriateness of this term, as I think it serves to get at the core of the problem. Is "Islamo-fascism" really accurate for what the reality is?

Schall says that initially, the term obviously is not a product of Islamic thinkers thinking of themselves, though some more recent Muslim thinkers have studied the Marxists and the fascists. No Imam in Iran or Egypt, however, suddenly wakes up in the middle of the night and shouts, "That's it! I am an Islamo-fascist; why did I not think of that before?" No pious youth in Mecca reads the Collected Works of Benito Mussolini and muses to himself, "Yes, this is what Mohammed was about in the Koran."

Schall says that the term comes from Western politicians and writers. They are desperately seeking a word or expression that they can use, one that avoids suggesting that the war in fact has religious roots, as the people who are doing the attacking claim it does. To say that war has "religious" roots violates a code, a constitutional principle as wars are political not religious.

Update: 30 October
How useful is the term 'Islamofascism' when the political program is to establish an Islamic theocracy? Or more accurately, to describe it in James Weeldon's words, as the programe of the 'Wahhabis, Salafists, and other violent jihadists who would seek to establish, by force if necessary, a utopian system of government based upon sharia law and the values and cultural ethic of seventh century Arabia.'

Schall says that:

My only point in following this question of the use of the word "Islamofascism" is that it does not describe what these men think they are doing. Nor does it help that some thus far ineffective Muslim apologists do not think that the term describes what the religion means. It is what these men think and evidently practice. What has to take place, in response, is some more adequate confrontation with the incoherence of this claim to world-subjection to Allah as an inner-worldly political mission powered by a quasi-mystical devotion to its cause. In this sense, in the minds of the ones carrying out the attacks, it is religious, not ideological, in origin.

James Weeldon says that it is correct to say that there is a totalitarian impulse in radical Salafism and Wahhabism that is akin to fascism. But he adds:
I fear that thinking of radical Islamism as just another form of fascism will lead the West to conclude that what worked to defeat European fascism (namely, superior military force) will also work to defeat so called "Islamofascism". While I agree that the Salafists and Wahhabists would like to see established a system of government that is as intrusive and controlling – as totalitarian – as Nazi government, the symbolism and ideology of the radical Islamists depends on images of victimhood and subjugation to almost as great an extent as the Nazis relied on images of strength and domination.

Weeldon says that the strategies that worked against fascism will not be the strategies that will work against violent Islamist extremism. Fascism was defeated militarily. But as the example of Iraq shows, military defeat does not deflate but rather inspires radical Islamism.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:52 PM | | Comments (5)
Comments

Comments

Gary,

I did a lengthy post on this topic a couple of weeks ago over at
James Weeldon

J.

James,
good comments about a snappy catch-phrase. Your conclusion is spot on:

I don't mean to suggest that there is no role for the military to play in the "war on terror"; the military option had to be used, for example, in Afghanistan. But I do think that combining some sort of Marshall Plan for the Islamic world together with discrete police actions against terrorist organisations is likely to provide a better, more effective means of waging this war than through the simple application of brute military force.

As you conclude the catch-phrase blinds us to strategic reality: we are being led to draw the wrong inferences about the threat, and we are being led to make the wrong conclusions about how to meet it.

What about, oh, I dunno... leaving them alone? If the people of the middle east want to be ruled by Godbothering Islamic clerics, then let them... they still need to sell the oil, and no one cares a fig for the place apart from that.

Simon,

fair enough. However, we still have the flinging of the word "fascism" in reference to radical
movements and leaders of the Muslim world. It is designed to be offensive and inflammatory, given that the fascism stands for the merger of state and corporate power.


I don't know that most people think of fascism stands for the merger of state and corporate power. Ask most people what 'fascism' is and they'll tell you about black-clad goose stepping stormtroopers or the comic Nazis from 'allo allo'.

It has some use in terms of demonstrating the totalitarian nature of what it is like to the average punter. And if the West left people alone, I doubt they'd know or care what we called them.