The
Big Lie About 'Islamic Fascism'
By Eric S. Margolis
30 August 2006
Ericmargolis.com
The latest big lie unveiled by
Washington’s neoconservatives are the poisonous terms, `Islamo-Fascists’
and `Islamic Fascists. They are the new, hot buzzwords among America’s
far right and Christian fundamentalists.
President George W. Bush
made a point last week of using `Islamofacists’ when recently
speaking of Hezbullah and Hamas – both, by the way, democratically
elected parties. A Canadian government minister from the Conservative
Party compared Lebanon’s Hezbullah to Nazi Germany.
The term `Islamofascist’
is utterly without meaning, but packed with emotional explosives. It
is a propaganda creation worthy Dr. Goebbles, and the latest expression
of the big lie technique being used by neocons in Washington’s
propaganda war against its enemies in the Muslim World.
This ugly term was coined
- as was the other hugely successful propaganda term, `terrorism’
– to dehumanize and demonize opponents and deny them any rational
political motivation, hence removing any need to deal with their grievances
and demands.
As the brilliant humanist
Sir Peter Ustinov so succinctly put it, `Terrorism is the war of the
poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.’
Both the terms `terrorism’
and `fascist’ have been so abused and over used that they have
lost any original meaning. The best modern definition I’ve read
of fascism comes in former Colombia University Professor Robert Paxton’s
superb 2004 book, `The Anatomy of Fascism.’
Paxton defines fascism’s
essence, which he aptly terms its `emotional lava’ as: 1. a sense
of overwhelming crisis beyond reach of traditional solutions; 2. belief
one’s group is the victim, justifying any action without legal
or moral limits; 3. need for authority by a natural leader above the
law, relying on the superiority of his instincts; 4. right of the chosen
people to dominate others without legal or moral restraint; 5. fear
of foreign `contamination.’
Fascism demands a succession
of wars, foreign conquests, and national threats to keep the nation
in a state of fear, anxiety and patriotic hypertension. Those who disagree
are branded ideological traitors. All successful fascists regimes, Paxton
points out, allied themselves to traditional conservative parties, and
to the military-industrial complex.
Highly conservative and militaristic
regimes are not necessarily fascist, says Paxton. True fascism requires
relentless aggression abroad and a semi-religious adoration of the regime
at home.
None of the many Muslim groups
opposing US-British control of the Mideast fit Paxton’s definitive
analysis. The only truly fascist group ever to emerge in the Mideast
was Lebanon’s Maronite Christian Phalange Party in the 1930’s
which, ironically, became an ally of Israel’s rightwing in the
1980’s.
It is grotesque watching
the Bush Administration and Tony Blair maintain the ludicrous pretense
they are re-fighting World War II. The only similarity between that
era and today is the cultivation of fear, war fever and racist-religious
hate by US neoconservatives and America’s religious far right,
which is now boiling with hatred for anything Muslim.
Under the guise of fighting
a `third world war’ against `Islamic fascism,’ America’s
far right is infecting its own nation with the harbingers of WWII totalitarianism.
In the western world, hatred
of Muslims has become a key ideological hallmark of rightwing parties.
We see this overtly in the United States, France, Italy, Holland, Denmark,
Poland, and, most lately, Canada, and more subtly expressed in Britain
and Belgium. The huge uproar over blatantly anti-Muslim cartoons published
in Denmark laid bare the seething Islamophobia spreading through western
society.
There is nothing in any part
of the Muslim World that resembles the corporate fascist states of western
history. In fact, clan and tribal-based traditional Islamic society,
with its fragmented power structures, local loyalties, and consensus
decision-making, is about as far as possible from western industrial
state fascism.
The Muslim World is replete
with brutal dictatorships, feudal monarchies, and corrupt military-run
states, but none of these regimes, however deplorable, fits the standard
definition of fascism. Most, in fact, are America’s allies.
Nor do underground Islamic
militant groups (`terrorists’ in western terminology). They are
either focused on liberating land from foreign occupation, overthrowing
`un-Islamic’ regimes, driving western influence from their region,
or imposing theocracy based on early Islamic democracy.
Claims by fevered neoconservatives
that Muslim radicals plan to somehow impose a worldwide Islamic caliphate
are lurid fantasies worthy of Dr. Fu Manchu and yet another example
of the big lie technique that worked so well over Iraq.
As Prof. Andrew Bosworth
notes in an incisive essay on so-called Islamic fascism, `Islamic fundamentalism
is a transnational movement inherently opposed to the pseudo-nationalism
necessary for fascism.’
However, there are plenty
of modern far rightists with neo-fascist tendencies. But to find them,
you have to go to North America and Europe. They advocate `preemptive
attacks against all potential enemies,’ grabbing other nation’s
resources, overthrowing uncooperative governments, military dominance
of the world, hatred of Semites (Muslims in this case), adherence to
biblical prophecies, hatred of all who fail to agree, intensified police
controls, and curtailment of `liberal’ political rights.
They revel in flag-waving,
patriotic melodrama, demonstrations of military power, and use the mantle
of patriotism to feather the nests of the military-industrial complex,
colluding legislators and lobbyists. They urge war to the death, fought,
of course, by other people’s children. They have turned important
sectors of the media into propaganda organs and brought the Pentagon
largely under their control.
And now they are furiously
whipping up war fever against Syria and Iran as a last desperate effort
to keep themselves in power after the debacles they created in Afghanistan,
Iraq, Somalia and Lebanon.
copyright Eric S. Margolis 2006