The term Islamofascist is inane (even by wing-nut standards)

[troublemaker]

To me Islamofascism is currently the most irritating nut-right buzzword.

I've been thinking about why this term irritates me so much. It has a 'big lie' quality to it; for right-wing cranks it's exhilarating to call our enemies fascists because a) they enjoy lying, and b) it implies that right-wing cranks are not themselves fascist sympathizers. (Nice try, but no sale!) It also has the forced quality of a linguistic loyalty oath, like when Klansmen on TV go out of their way to call black people "nigger" even in contexts where they'd more normally say black or colored. It's a word of gratuitous difference or defiance, implying that the reader is soft on terrorism if he uses a less aggressive term. Worst of all, it's intellectual sabotage, a term designed to be flung into the cogs of reason. It embodies every vice of advertising and propaganda.

Everybody calls everything they don't like "fascist." So much so that both Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden are referred to as fascists. What's up with that? It seems simple racism on its face; aside from being Arabs the two men have very little in common. Both are monomaniacal murderers, but that describes half the notable leaders of history. Nobody ever calls Ramses II a fascist.

I'll assume the term Islamofascist is intended to connect certain Islamic people to Hitler--not much domestic propaganda value in associating them with Franco--so I'll use Nazism and fascism interchangeably here. The Third Reich was national suicide cult laden with quasi-religious symbolism and self-defined in terms of its enemies; primarily Jews and Bolsheviks. The religious death-cult part sounds a lot like Osama Bin Laden except he doesn't have a state, a dispositive discrepancy in my eyes.

If one plays the footnote game with sufficient skill it would be easy to write a book "proving" Bin Laden is a fascist, a communist or a Wendell Wilkie Republican. After a while the exercise will resemble those lists of eerie similarities between Lincoln and JFK. Like Hitler, Bin Laden made his reputation fighting communists and hating Jews. Like Hirohito he directed suicide pilots into American assets. Like Lincoln he's tall, skinny and mentally ill. Like Elizabeth Taylor he gets married a lot.

Whatever the heck Bin Laden's essence is, it's not likely to be merely a pastiche of 1919-1945 European politics. Islamic culture is certainly rich enough to spawn distinctively Islamic pathologies. We all, of necessity, use similes when pressed to define something alien. Hitler's pathology does provide instructive parallels to any pro-violence, pro-death movement but that doesn't justify the sloppiness of calling every sociopath a fascist.

Terrorist Jihadism does have an obvious western analog, not in fascism but in anarchism. The anarchists invented terrorism as we understand it, turning technology against the technological world. Since they seemed to have no moral sense and seemed to live only for destruction they were sometimes called "nihilists," still a useful term for someone like Osama bin Laden.

The first anarchists were at least as dramatic and successful as al Qeada. They were feared by all monied interests and in their heyday (1881-1901) anarchists managed to assassinate the leader of almost every western nation, including Czar Alexander II of Russia, French President Carnot, Humbert I, the King of Italy and American President William McKinley. ( for a real simple overview: www.crimelibrary.com/terrorists_spies/assassins/mckinley/2.html) The fictional bomb-maker in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent even invented the modern suicide bomber's explosives rig; he went through life with explosives strapped to his torso beneath his bulky overcoat and a detonator button at his waist.

But calling someone an Islamo-anarchist has no propaganda punch, so here we are.

A caution: The above link leads to a Court TV essay on anarchism and the McKinley assassination. It's pretty good, but at one point says, "In Chicago in 1886, during the Haymarket Square Riot, a demonstrator tossed a bomb into the crowd and killed seven police officers." The reality was more like an ambiguous variant of the Amritsar Massacre. 176 police officers were sent to the Haymarket to break up the roughly 200 person remnants of an "eight-hour day" labor rally. An explosive device was thrown at a policeman, killing him. The police responded by opening fire on the crowd so wildly that they ended up shooting dead six of their own and four bystanders. Between the police and the crowd about 100 were wounded. The police claimed they were fired on from the crowd, but it was never proven that anyone in the crowd was even armed. The fact that six dead police were riddled with police-issue bullets caused some to question the overall clarity of the police's perceptions of the event. I am generally sympathetic to police over-reactions because we cannot put ourselves in their shoes, but this went way beyond understandable error. In the aftermath eight anarchist leaders were sentenced to death despite none of them being connected in any way to the bomb. Some weren't even there. Some were sentenced to death for writing pamphlets that may have somehow inspired the Haymarket riot; the only American death sentences for publishing I know of. Of the eight men, four were hanged by the State, one took the civic initiative to hang himself in prison, and the other three were eventually released when everyone calmed down.

[radiclib]

1. You're too thoughtful, troublemaker

And wingnut terminology and thought don't mix.

[skooooo]

2. The Wahabis are fascists...

...in my opinion. But you can't apply the term to Islam in general.

[denverbill]

26. The Islamists are extreme, right-wing theocrats.

Frankly, there is very little difference between them and extreme right-wing Republicans.

Extreme right-wing Republicans want to invade the entire middle east, kill all of their leaders, and force them to convert to Christianity. That's almost identical to what the extreme right-wing Islamists want, in reverse. The only difference is that we are armed with the most sophisicated weapons and virtually unlimited funding, while they have crude bombs and box cutters.

[Nlighten1]

3. Along with...

Idiotarian

[troublemaker]

4. Is that their term for libertarians? Never heard that one.

[Nlighten1]

19. No this is what they call liberals.

Ever heard of the "Anti-Idiotarian Rotweiller"?

[stavka]

5. Very good Post.....

I've forwarded it on to many friends.

9/10

I salute!

[rumguy]

6. You're right, but hey

we use the term a lot too...

It'd probably be best if everyone put down the fasicst label for awhile, it is seriously getting overused.

[Forkboy]

7. Go down to I/P and tell this to the DUer who always uses it

He wont be hard to find.

[troublemaker]

8. PART II (for those who want more)

The Bin Laden as Hitler thing is flawed but interesting. The Saddam Hussein as Hitler thing is demented. But dementia can be a virtue in the propaganda racket. Just this afternoon I heard a reference (on FOX news, of course) to "Saddam Hussein's fascist regime."
There's an irony here. Saddam Hussein is practically the poster-boy for post-war Arab Stalinism (it's one of those Bill Pullman-Jeff Daniels resemblances that nobody could miss) and Stalin is the bete noir of modern conservatives, yet conservatives today make a point of calling Saddam a fascist.

Leftists were Stalin apologists for years and even everyday folks viewed Uncle Joe and Hitler very differently because we were allied with Russia in WW II and we knew that Russia paid almost the entire human cost of the allied effort in Europe, but by 1960 it became clear that useful moral schemes aren't subtle enough to distinguish two monsters like Hitler and Stalin. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s conservatives mounted a campaign to get academics and opinion-makers to put Stalin and Hitler on the same level. The conservatives had a point, too. Their boy Hitler had been demonized while the left's boy Stalin was considered merely flawed. The conservative view prevailed and nobody today nobody wants to argue the relative superiority of either man except Marxists and Jews, for different reasons. (As with all pendulum swings, they can go too far. Hitler actually was a somewhat more malevolent figure than Stalin, but it's not a distinction worth drawing.)

Yet when confronted with a guy who practically has "Stalin II" tattooed on his forehead conservatives say he's a fascist. I suspect there are three reasons for this, 1) "fascist" still carries more emotional weight as propaganda, 2) fighting "fascism" makes the war on Iraq sound like WW II (conservatives always strive to re-live history in the form of parody), and, 3) conservatives get great emotional satisfaction from taunting the left, in this case turning the left's traditional abhorrence of fascism back against them.

Is "Islamofascist" meant to curry Republican favor with Jewish Democrats? Maybe so. Hitler is properly considered the definitive Jew-hater and painting all enemies of Israel as Nazis has emotional weight. But even if we accept the creepy premise that hating Jews is somehow worse than hating anyone else, Stalin remains a very bad guy. If we learned tomorrow that Stalin (a confirmed anti-Semite) killed more Jews than Hitler it wouldn't be so shocking.

Whatever connections early Baathists had to Nazis (and there are some connections), whatever fondness for Hitler Saddam Hussein ever evinced, the fact remains that Saddam's rise to power, retention of power and governing style--the Saddam gestalt--mark him as Stalin Jr.. Doesn't this sound like Stalin?

"Every day the...country woke up with his name on its lips... That name was conferred, as the highest of honors, on factories,...farms, streets and towns. During the...wars, soldiers went to their death intoning his name. Even in the camps, his portrait looked down on...people who, corralled behind barbed wire at his behest, turned rivers back in their course...and perished in the hundreds of thousands. Statues of this man in granite and bronze towered over the...country."

Our chosen symbol of victory in Iraq was a limp homage to Khrushchev's statue toppling de-Stalinization of Russia. For all of Hitler's faults he was a shade less egotistical than Stalin, Mao, Saddam, Kin Jung Il and the rest of the club. At least we didn't have to ride around Germany pulling down monumental statues of him in every town.

(The passage quoted above sounds like Stalin for a good reason; it's the opening paragraph of Edvard Radzinsky's engaging recent Stalin bio. Where's the fun in life if one can't play sophomoric pranks on the reader?)

[flewellyn]

9. I don't think it's so bad a term, itself.

I mean, there ARE elements of fundamentalist Islam that are rather fascistic.

The problem, I think, is that the people who use this term are the same folks who would get really really really REALLY angry if we were to use the term "Christofascist" to refer to the fascistic elements of fundamentalist Christianity. They just KNOW, after all, that we're talking about them. :-)

Hey, there's an idea! Let's start spreading the term "Christofascist" along with "Islamofascist"! We should also throw in "Judeofascist" to refer to the Likudniks, like Ariel Sharon, in Israel. Surely, there are such people around. Let's call them what they are!

[troublemaker]

10. The problem is that fascism is a *modern* political disease

Whether Baathists are fascists can be argued, but the jihadists aren't in the ballpark.

Fascism can't really arise outside the framework of a state. You need an existing modern bureaucracy--an advanced concept of civil service. The party people are crazy and cannot possibly govern, but the party attaches itself to an existing government built by more competent people; much like what we are seeing in today's America.

[flewellyn]

11. Right. Hence the "Christofascists" bit.

I say we spread that word all over the place! :-)

[Bombtrack]

12. No it isn't because fascist is an ambiguous word. What I think is more

rediculous is your statement that it is "racist". Neither the term fascist nor it's connection to Muslim terrorists have any clear or subtle racial overtones whatsoever. The fact that Wuhabbist, Khomenist, and Palestinian terrorists tend to be racist, murderous supporters of a totalitarian ideology, I'm sorry isn't to far of a stretch from how the word fascism has been applied in the past.

The only inkling or attempt at an understanding of your reasoing I have from your rant is you don't think that Islamic terrorists are as bad or evil in general as the early 20th century european fascists or whoever else you believe the term applies to.

[troublemaker]

14. Each point you see in the text is contradicted by the text

There's not a word to suggest Baathists and jihadists are any less evil than fascists unless one thinks "fascist" simply means "evil." If I wanted to say al Qeada is less evil than fascism I would say that. I have no idea which is *more* evil... call it a tie.

The issue is how the right wants to portray our enemies. Lumping Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden into one political category is ridiculous unless one is trying to draw false conclusions for political purposes.

The comment about racism was fairly straightforward and explained exactly what aspect of the comparison is racist--the idea that two men with diametrically opposed political ideas are both called fascists. It's an attempt to hang one easy label on all those Arabs who don't like us.

But if it's fun to flame imaginary passages, go for it.

[Octafish]

13. What about Pat Robertson? He's a Fundiefascist.

Just read up on those hategroups spread across our nation. Half of these nutjobs believe the Lord and Savior didn't die for the Üntermenschen.



Call me an Üntermensch, too.

[number6]

15. that and Islamist are the most ridiculous terms

I've ever heard, oh and feminazi..
demoncrat Ill-liberal etc ...

[troublemaker]

16. I find "violent Islamic fundamentalist" plenty scary enough

but the American right can hardly afford to play up the religious aspects of the problem. Glass houses and all...

[number6]

21. violent Islamic fundamentalist

that would be a more sensible term

[geek tragedy]

17. What's ridiculous about "Islamist?"

Islamism--the idea that Islam should dominate political as well as religious life--is a very real ideology.

[number6]

20. Christianist's

should dominate political as well as religious life..

Christianists..watch out for um ....boo

so what religion doesn't

[geek tragedy]

22. "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's"

In predominantly Muslim states, there is a far, far, far higher of entanglement between Islam and the state than there is in predominantly Christian states.

The US is probably the most explicitly religious of predominantly Christian states, and we debate "Under God" at the Supreme Court. Blasphemy is still illegal and punishable by death in many Islamic states, including our allies Pakistan and Saudi-occupied Arabia.

[Bridget Burke]

23. What's the source of "Islamist"?

Don't have an OED handy at the moment.

[geek tragedy]

25. Not sure where the term started

but it's not really intended to be inflammatory--certainly not like "Islamofascist."

The problem is that people lump all Islamists together, whether they be the current governing party of Turkey or the bin Laden crowd. A state governed by Islamic principles doesn't need to be a seething theocracy. But, that's the choice that the Huntington and bin Laden crowd want to force on Muslims.

[ContinentalOp]

18. Great post!

That term has always bothered me as well. I first heard it used on Dave Emory's conspiracy radio show which IMO is full of strange right leaning misinformation.

I wonder who came up with this term? A quick and admittedly unscientific search of the Usenet archives doesn't reveal any uses of the word before 2002. And then from May 2002 to the present there are over 3000 uses of the term on various Usenet posts.

Yes, using usenet to judge the origin of a term is arguably stupid but I don't have access to anything like Lexis Nexus.

[The Magistrate]

24. An Excellent Commentary, Mr. Maker

The comparison to the classic Anarchists is particularly apt; there is indeed a great overlap in method of organization and action.