Hanson’s latest is filled with a few such outlandish statements that I don’t understand why anyone, neoconservative or not, takes him seriously:
First, Islamic fascism is already the creed of the government of an oil-rich and soon to be nuclear Iran.
Well, no, the creed, so to speak, of the Iranian government is Jafari Shi’ism, which is a religious creed and which is the religious source of the government’s theocratic legislation. There is no meaningful sense in which the label fascist applies to the current Iranian government. That does not mean that they are not committed to using whatever kind of violence will advance their interests or that they are not committed to jihad.
It means that Iranian theocrats committed to jihad are not fascists, just as communists are not, properly speaking, fascists, though they possessed enough similarities with each other to be recognised as sharing many common traits of totalitarianism. Sometimes observers at the time would call fascists brown communists while calling communists red fascists, trying to emphasise that they were two sides of the same coin, but the differences remained clear and stark nonetheless. The incidental or tactical convergence between the two inside Germany in the 1930s or in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was surprising not because the two were diametrically opposed, but because they were competing revolutionary ideologies that despised the other as a competitor can despise his rival for pursuing a similar goal by different means.
The jihadis do not really fit this mould of having similar goals but pursuing them by different means; their vision is of an entirely different kind of order from the one imagined by other totalitarians, and one that is not easily confused with the vision of fascists. We call them fascists at the risk of completely misunderstanding the nature of that vision and fighting the kind of conventional war focused on toppling regimes that we fought in 1941-45. The inclusion of Tehran as one of the centers of “Islamic fascism,” which identifies Iran as an enemy in spite of the fact that it has never had anything to do with the Wahhabi or Salafi jihadism that motivated the 9/11 attackers and Al Qaeda, is a perfect example of how our strategy and definition of the main war are being partly dictated by the stupid formulations of propagandists and fascist-obsessed ideologues.
The entire “Islamic fascism” meme comes from a refusal to make distinctions and a refusal to acknowledge differences between the theocratic government in Tehran, the secular government in Damascus, the Shi’ite militia in Lebanon, the jihadis in Waziristan and the insurgents in Iraq. If Hizbullah is “fascist,” so are the Badr Brigades in Iraq–but, wait, the Badr Brigades are attached to a party in the Iraqi government, which we support. Shall we go after them as well in the great anti-fascist crusade? These various governments and groups are not fighting for the same thing, nor are they on the same “side,” nor do they necessarily have anything to do with each other. If we conjure up some mythical international alliance of “Islamic fascism,” we might very well succeed in forcing all of these disparate, distinct and unconnected forces to join together out of common cause against their common enemy, but what we will surely not achieve is any sort of success in combating any one of the threats that each one may or does pose. This is coming from the same kinds of people who thought that we would win gratitude in the Islamic world by helping Muslims and Islamic terrorists in Yugoslavia (no worries about Bin Laden or Iranian sponsorship of jihad when it involved killing a few Serbs, right, Hanson?), and comes from the same kinds of people who still agitate on behalf of Chechen terrorism. Do they really have any credibility to speak on these questions?
Regardless, this is the same sort of short-sighted, unperceptive, clumsy thinking that classified Nehru as vaguely pro-communist because he wanted to keep India non-aligned, which later resulted in our allying with India’s enemies and forcing India into the arms of the USSR. It is the same thinking that labeled Mossadegh as possibly pro-Soviet because he didn’t want to play ball with British imperialism over Iran’s oil resources and led us to depose Mossadegh and embitter an entire generation of Iranians against the United States thanks to our support for the Shah’s misrule. This in turn prepared the way for the revolution and created the deep hostility between Iran and America that has only gotten worse with time. Brilliant stuff. Let’s just keep replicating that kind of success with more conceptual confusion and failures of strategic thinking!
Well, after 60 years since Orwell, it’s good that the term “fascism” — which has become as meaningless as certain other “f-words” — is getting some serious attention to its subtleties and particularities.
That said — and this will sound like the ultimate back-handed defense — that lack of previous serious discourse on fascism is probably why the administration used it. It’s the ultimate political f-word. And let’s face it — people who know about the Romanian Legion of the Archangel Michael and the pros and cons for calling it fascist — are very few and very far between. We are judging public political rhetoric, not political philosophy term papers (though I agree with virtually everything you say on those “term paper” terms.)
The fundamental problem obviously is in trying to understand Muslim politics in Western terms. Every concept in Western politics exists in, because of and through Western history, and took the political contours it did because of the way Western history unfolded and the way Western persons acted in, through and against that history. Obviously, Islam has been on a completely different civilization track, the issues are completely different, etc. And so any term we use that has meaning for us (like “fascism,” prescinding from its usefulness in this case) will likely have some severe problems in understanding them.
So stipulating these serious problems with using any Western term, I still don’t think using some form of the f-word in this context is worthless. Michael Kinsley wrote the following about Ross Perot, ca. summer 1992, when it looked like he might pull off the impossible (quote is from memory; I couldn’t find it online quickly).
Now does that mean Kinsley was saying Perot was equivalent to Hitler, or the Perotistas were Brownshirts using clubs to break up Clinton and Bush Sr. rallies? No … the key phrase is … “a recognizable political flavor.” I think that metaphor in more helpful in typologizing ideas than searches for perfect correspondence across the vagaries of history. I mean, where exactly DOES authoritarian conservative nationalism end and fascism begin, or fascism end and clerical fascism begin (I know you don’t like the term, but bear with me for a moment). After all, Slovakia’s collaborationist regime was headed by a cleric; Croatia’s was not, but had quite a bit of Church sympathy. Yet both were set up by a secular millennialist “flavor” of fascism. And one of them would later be overthrown by that secularists and the other backed in internal struggles between secularists and clericalists (no, it doesn’t break the way it “should”).
But I see I’m already getting buried in the details of 1940s European history. I would propose the following term, I’ll just call X for now — “a peculiarly modern form of often-wantonly violent rebellion against modernity, led by a charismatic figure, seeking to create chaos so as to impose an authoritarian government that will reinstantiate and restore an idealized past where the whole people were one under god.”
OK first, is X an accurate enough description of Qutb or the aims of the general run of Muslim terrorists? There are localized aims and particularities of course (as there were with fascism in the 30s and 40s), and some exceptions (particularly from the 60s and 70s, when the Soviet Union sponsored secular Middle East terrorists from Arafat on down and such terrorist-backing dictators as Assad, Nasser, Qaddafi and Saddam). But I would say it is accurate enough.
And second, does X have a “recognizable political flavor” in Western terms. Obviously so — fascism. The greatest difference of course is that Western fascism was secular, but note that I lower-cased the word “god,” meaning I understand “god” functionally (I think this is generally a good idea when studying politics). Especially in its highest forms, fascism divinized the state and or the people, thus developing a functional “god” to restore to Its rightful place that faithless modernity has thrown away and torn into tatters. Now obviously a secular “god” in the form of a divinized state is rather a nonstarter among Muslims because Islam doesn’t accept the separation of church and state (though Saddam’s naming mosques after himself, contrary to all Muslim practice, is suggestive. “The George Bush Catholic Church”? Please.) But that actually proves less than it might. An ideology can only try to divinize a particular state within a political culture that has separated God and politics in the first place. In Islam, there is at least theological unity that the only real state is the Muslim Ummah. Western fascism was responding to an issue in Western discourses (secular authority and, more loftily, Heidegger’s Seinsvergessenheit) that simply aren’t issues within Islam. So why should the absence of state divinization in “Islamofascism” be surprising.
I hope it’s obvious that I wouldn’t push the Jihadi-fascist analogy too far — it clearly has some quite fundamental problems. But I don’t think comparison stupid or worthless either. If bin Laden’s ideology has a recognizable Western political flavor — it IS fascism.