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An Argument Only Hanson Could Love

First, the general idea of “fascism” — the creation of a centralized authoritarian state to enforce blanket obedience to a reactionary, all-encompassing ideology — fits well the aims of contemporary Islamism that openly demands implementation of sharia law and the return to a Pan-Islamic and theocratic caliphate. In addition, Islamists, as is true of all […]

First, the general idea of “fascism” — the creation of a centralized authoritarian state to enforce blanket obedience to a reactionary, all-encompassing ideology — fits well the aims of contemporary Islamism that openly demands implementation of sharia law and the return to a Pan-Islamic and theocratic caliphate.

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. ~Victor Davis Hanson, National Review

Back to basics.  Jihadi basics: jihadis (a.k.a., Islamists) are Islamic reactionaries; they are a product of modernity but are anti-modern; they do want to bring back the Caliphate, which makes them as un-fascist as Novalis was for romanticising the medieval papacy.  Fascist basics: fascists are not reactionary in any meaningful sense, since they are above all an ideology dedicated to modernisation, the new, the future, the creation of the “New Order” and the new man; they are modernisers and are not anti-modern; they are a mass movement with no attachments or sympathies with the ancien regime or its partisans; they are not the heirs of Counter-Revolutionary rightist politics, but a mass revolutionary nationalist movement, none of which has anything to do with being “reactionary” in any sense beyond the purely pejorative way in which that term is bandied about by progressives who use it as if it were an insult.  More Fascist basics: fascists did not want to recreate a pristine order taken from the past, though they did want to restore their nations to what they believed had been past glories, but instead wanted to regenerate their nations and see them born anew.  Their emphasis on newness, modernism, futurism puts them starkly at odds with any real reactionaries.  Fascism’s palingenetic urge has next to nothing to do with reviving an old order; Nazis would borrow certain symbols and ideas from the German medieval past, but they had no intention of recreating the Empire of the Hohenstaufens, much less the Holy Roman Empire, which would have offended them in its cosmopolitan and Catholic nature.  In brief, if jihadis are Islamic reactionaries, which they are, they cannot be Islamic fascists.  Pick one or the other, if you must, but for goodness’ sake stop confusing the two–as Hanson always, always does.

Then there is the canard of generic fascist anti-Semitism as proof of the connection:

Because fascism is born out of insecurity and the sense of failure, hatred for Jews is de rigueur [sic].

Of course it is important to note here that Italian Fascism initially had no anti-Semitic impulses (unlike National Socialism, it did not originate out of the charged atmosphere of the struggle between Habsburg liberalism and various nationalisms that frequently focused on Jewish support for liberalism as a way of discrediting it and simultaneously of finding a political reason to despise Jews), and in the 1920s had Jewish supporters, which makes even more sense when you understand that Fascism claimed to be–and was–a revolutionary, modernising movement of the sort to which Jewish intellectuals are frequently drawn.  Judenhass in Islam is as old as Islam itself; it needs no comparing with the obsessions of the Nazis, because it has its own sources and its own very simple, religious reasons.  The similarity here is noteworthy, but ultimately superficial, as Islam and fascism also both view traditional Christianity with contempt, though the former does so rather more than the latter.  The point is simply this: adherents of totalising worldviews naturally regard those who do not belong to their worldviews as enemies.

Then there is Hanson’s historical error:

Second, fascism thrives best in a once proud, recently humbled, but now ascendant, people.

This is misleading and simplistic.  Sociologically, fascism thrives in nations that are late-comers in modernisation (Payne refers to them as second-tier modernising nations, I believe) but which are actually potentially on the verge of becoming major powers.  Their former humiliation is irrelevant–Italy was on the winning side in WWI, for all the good it did them, as was Japan, which had only gone from victory to victory in the international arena since the Meiji Restoration.  Resentment and overconfidence alike can encourage militarism–which is actually a far better term for what Japan represented anyway. 

The jihadi impulse is far more elemental; for them, it is simply the fulfillment of religious obligation to struggle for Islam and bring the world into submission to Islam.  Rain or shine, victory or defeat, no matter what has happened in the recent or distant past, the jihadi will persist in the struggle (and, incidentally, it is because of the nature of the word jihad that Mein Kampf would be called jihadi in some parts of the world).  In fact, there is no question of any Muslim nations being in the “ascendant” where the jihadis find their most willing recruits, as there are no “ascendant” Muslim nations even remotely on par with the modernising nation-states that bred fascist movements–it is typically in the nations that have been on the receiving end of defeats for as long as anyone can remember that the jihadis do best.

So anyone who speaks about “reactionary fascism” or “religious fascism” doesn’t know what he’s talking about, since there are no such things.  You can, of course, despise all reactionaries and despise all fascists, but you must understand that they not the same and have next to nothing in common.  For my part, as a reactionary, I won’t stand for the association, since fascism represents the antithesis of everything I believe.

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