Stateless Fascists

by digby

I find it fascinating that the administration has taken on the shibboleth of the nuttiest far right wingnuts and is calling Islamic radicals, fascists. Clearly, they are just throwing it around as some sort of boogeyman word because Islamic extremists are like fascists only to the extent that they are dangerous creeps. But then you could say that about a lot of people, couldn’t you?

They are all blathering stuff like this to explain it:

Charles Black, a longtime GOP consultant with close ties to both the first Bush administration and the current White House, said branding Islamic extremists as fascists is apt.

“It helps dramatize what we’re up against. They are not just some ragtag terrorists. They are people with a plan to take over the world and eliminate everybody except them,” Black said.

Run for your lives!!!

I know I don’t have to spell out all he ways in which Islamic radicalism is unlike fascism. But it is worth taking a look at the writings of the guy who pretty much invented fascism, good old Benito Mussolini. He wrote a little treatise back in 1932 that spelled it all out. It’s true that fascism considered itself an enemy of democracy (and Marxism) and it fetishized war and violence. And yes, one of its primary tenets was imperialism.

We can argue about whether any or all of those components are part of the “Islamo-fascist ideology,” but for the sake of argument, let’s agree that on some level they are. But there are a few defining characteristic of fascism — as defined by the man who made fascism a household name — that surely make Islamic radicalism something else entirely.

For instance:

…The Fascist accepts life and loves it, knowing nothing of and despising suicide: he rather conceives of life as duty and struggle and conquest, but above all for others — those who are at hand and those who are far distant, contemporaries, and those who will come after…

[…]

The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State. The conception of the Liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results: on the other hand, the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality — thus it may be called the “ethic” State…….The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone….

Those two things, it seems to me, make any comparison between fascism and a loose confederation (if that) of suicidal religious fanatics spread all over the world, ridiculous. They might just as well have appropriated the phrase Mongol Hordes for all the sense it made. (Actually, Osama bin Laden has made that comparison — with the US.) Not that it will stop the wingnuts from pimping it like it’s the latest teen-age fad — making sense has never been a hallmark of these people.

The funny thing is that if you look at Mussolini’s definition it does fit some modern western political factions much better than Islamic radicalism. I leave it to you to figure out who they might be.

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