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You Must Be A Fascist To Object To Using A Word Like Fascist

The word “fascism” means an extreme totalitarian system that suppresses human rights and democratic freedoms. ~Janet Daley, The Daily Telegraph Ms. Daley’s definition is wonderful for being tremendously broad and unhelpful.  Oh, it suppresses human rights and democratic freedoms, does it?  Well, the same general description might be applied to communism, autocracy and theocracy.  Some might even note […]

The word “fascism” means an extreme totalitarian system that suppresses human rights and democratic freedoms. ~Janet Daley, The Daily Telegraph

Ms. Daley’s definition is wonderful for being tremendously broad and unhelpful.  Oh, it suppresses human rights and democratic freedoms, does it?  Well, the same general description might be applied to communism, autocracy and theocracy.  Some might even note that the phrase “democratic freedoms” could very easily be a contradiction in terms–democracies can and do suppress freedoms.  Does this make them fascist?  Given the terminological stupidity of our age, I wouldn’t be surprised if we could find some way to align Dororth Day’s pacifism with fascism.  Goodness knows Ms. Day hindered our right to go to war to “protect” “human rights”! 

In fact, calling Islamic fundamentalists Islamic theocrats, while somewhat redundant in one sense, would make a great deal more sense than calling them Islamic fascists.  Fascism has a specific, historical meaning that tends to be confined to secular regimes and political movements between 1919 and 1945.  All self-avowed or so-called “neo-fascist” groups in Europe today look to this period for their inspiration.  The “al Qaeda types,” to use another terribly precise phrase of the Vice President’s invention, do not sit around thinking on the good old days under Mussolini.  To be very precise, fascism does not really refer to anything other than the political philosophy of Mussolini and the Italian state between 1922 and 1943.  In Italy itself, the rule of fascism was so relatively benign in terms of “suppressing human rights and democratic freedoms” that referring to Islamic fanatics as fascists is an insult to the fascists.  We see here the use of fascism not as a real descriptive term, but a demon-term embodying everything that is the opposite of the equally vacuous god-term democracy. 

Even calling Nazism fascist is something of a blurring of boundaries between things that are not really the same.  Fascism, in the sense of Italian fascism, was a mildly annoying form of authoritarianism compared to the insanity of Nazism, and Fascist warmongering was equalled only by the inefficacy of Italian arms in the field.  But at the very least Nazism and fascism possess significant similarities as post-war, secular revolutionary modernising political programs that reject international socialism, international capitalism and parliamentary government and which tend to prefer corporatist, state capitalist and syndicalist theories.  Can you imagine how stupid you would sound calling someone an Islamic syndicalist?  To those who know what the term means, Islamic fascist or Islamofascist sounds equally stupid

Islam (or if we must use the circumlocution, Islamic fundamentalism) and fascism do not possess these similarities.  Islamic fundamentalists are no more fascists than they are communists.  If they fall under some grand general definition of “totalitarian” (another word people don’t understand properly), as post-WWII anticommunists argued for in showing the similarities between fascism and communism, that is one thing, but to call them Islamic fascists would be like calling someone a commie fascist or a Nazi commie.  Nazism and communism may have many things in common to the point where you can oppose both as an antitotalitarian, but you cannot refer to them interchangeably anymore than you can refer to liberalism and socialism as if they were the same things.  For the purposes of identification and conceptual understanding, you might as well start lumping together all sorts of incongruous labels when describing people.  Calling Islamic fanatics fascists obscures far more than it reveals, and fundamentally confuses our thinking about how to fight them.  It is a revival of old Marxist tropes, according to which everyone to the right of social democrats (and occasionally including some social democrats) was fascist or “objectively fascist,” and it is above all an attempt to pretend that this is some sort of disagreement about regime type and economic system that operates within the normal field of our political debates, when it is a disagreement about an all-encompassing worldview.

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