by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n M<\/span>ake no apologies for the use of \u201cIslamic fascism.\u201d 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 \u201canti-fascist\u201d appeasers in the West is just too bad.<\/p>\n First, the general idea of \u201cfascism\u201d \u2014 the creation of a centralized authoritarian state to enforce blanket obedience to a reactionary, all-encompassing ideology \u2014 fits well the aims of contemporary Islamism that openly demands implementation of sharia law and the return to a Pan-Islamic and theocratic caliphate.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n True, bin Laden\u2019s mythical\u00a0Volk\u00a0<\/i>doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n Because fascism is born out of insecurity and the sense of failure, hatred for Jews is\u00a0de rigueur<\/i>. To read al Qaeda\u2019s texts is to reenter the world\u00a0of Mein Kampf<\/i>\u00a0(naturally now known as\u00a0jihadi<\/i>\u00a0in the Arab world). The crackpot minister of its ideology, Dr. Zawahiri, is simply a Dr. Alfred Rosenberg come alive \u2014 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 where \u201cmixing,\u201d either in the racial or religious sense, should instead have enervated the people.<\/p>\n The \u201cwill\u201d of the German people, like the \u201cBanzai\u201d 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\u2019s communiqu\u00e9s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s new Rome, so too Israel, modernism, and America\u2019s ubiquitous pop culture are to the Islamists, confident of a renaissance via vast petro-weatlh.<\/p>\n Such reactionary fascism is complex because it marries the present\u2019s unhappiness with moping about a regal past \u2014 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.<\/p>\n Third, while there is generic fascism, its variants naturally weave preexisting threads familiar to a culture at large. Hitler\u2019s brand cribbed together notions of German will, Aryanism, and the cult of the\u00a0Ubermensch<\/i>\u00a0from Hegel, Nietzsche, and Spengler, with ample Nordic folk romance found from Wagner to Tacitus\u2019s\u00a0Germania<\/i>. Japanese militarism\u2019s 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\u2019s fasces, and the idea of an indomitable Caesarian\u00a0Duce<\/i>\u00a0(or Roman\u00a0Dux<\/i>), 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.<\/p>\n 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,\u00a0 how many in the Middle East actively resist Islamists.<\/p>\n Most people have no ideology, but simply accommodate themselves to the prevailing sense of an agenda\u2019s success or failure. Just as there weren\u2019t more than a dozen vocal critics of Hitler after the\u00a0Wehrmacht<\/i>\u00a0finished off France in six weeks in June of 1940, so too there wasn\u2019t a Nazi to be found in June 1945 when Berlin lay in rubble.<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t matter whether Middle Easterners actually accept the tenets of bin Laden\u2019s worldview \u2014 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 \u2014 or if he got his hands on nuclear weapons and lorded it over appeasing Westerners \u2014 then he too, like the Fuhrer in the 1930s, will become untouchable. The same is true of Iran\u2019s president Ahmadinejad.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Al-Zawahiri in his writings spends an inordinate amount of effort excusing al Qaeda\u2019s 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\u2019s protestations about its \u201cpeaceful\u201d nuclear aims.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 I think a dirty bomb is worth the entire\u00a0Luftwaffe<\/i>, one nuclear missile all the striking power of the Japanese imperial Navy \u2014 but there should be no argument over who they are and what they want. They are fascists of an Islamic sort, pure and simple.<\/p>\n And the least we can do is to call them that: after all, they earned it.<\/p>\n \u00a92006 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On all they’ve done to earn the name. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Make no apologies for the use of \u201cIslamic fascism.\u201d 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[770],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-10v","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3889,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/its-fascism-and-its-islamic\/","url_meta":{"origin":3875,"position":0},"title":"It’s Fascism–and It’s Islamic","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 11, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services George Bush recently declared that we are at war with \"Islamic fascism.\" Muslim-American groups were quick to express furor at the expression. Middle Eastern autocracies complained that it was provocative and insensitive. Critics of the term chosen by the president, however, should remember\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "September 2006"","block_context":{"text":"September 2006","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2006\/september-2006\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3723,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/why-radical-islam-and-why-now\/","url_meta":{"origin":3875,"position":1},"title":"Why Radical Islam–And Why Now?","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 26, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Read any newspaper or turn on any news broadcast and you're bound to encounter stories of Islamic radicals fighting, killing and threatening each other \u2014 and just about everyone else. 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But history demands not merely recognizing the truth post\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "February 2006"","block_context":{"text":"February 2006","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2006\/february-2006\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3899,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-waiting-game\/","url_meta":{"origin":3875,"position":5},"title":"The Waiting Game","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 1, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Do we really need further convincing of the threat we face? by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Hezbollah\u2019s black-clad legions goose-step and stiff-arm salute in parade, apparently eager to convey both the zeal and militarism of their religious fascism. 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