Politics of Rage Revisited - Fascism in the Islamic World

You want questions on how to improve relationships with the world after the end of the Bush administration. Let us presume a Democrat will prevail in 2008, this will certainly please a majority of your audience. The first question should be – How will the next President understand the temper and dynamics of the Middle East and the Islamic world?


One answer may be to update your classic essay after 9/11 “Why do they hate us?”
http://www.fareedzakaria.com/articles/newsweek/101501_why.html
At this point both left and right misunderstand what is meant by such a title, as Ron Paul so awkwardly talked about the “elephant in the room” (reasons for Islamic anti-Americanism) to a room full of elephants (the GOP debate) – i.e., it’s a shorthand to say the Arab claims and complaints due to Western imperialism, Zionism and pre-emptive attacks are an excuse for terrorism. Nothing could further from the reality of your great summary of Middle East history where you honestly note everyone’s victories and defeats, failures and accomplishments in this region but focus on Islam’s failure to create ways to reform institutions and nations.

Let me in my terms create a description of how I understand what is currently happening in the Islamic world. Many commentators have begun to note how Islam has not had the “Reformation” and “Enlightenment” that Christendom did which by the way took many hundreds of years of turmoil to create patterns and institutions of pluralism and democracy. While this is a powerful truth, so is the “Politics of rage”, your other title for your essay “Why they hate us”. The use of rage communally and nationally is not isolated, even now, only to Islam, and devastated Europe and thus the world a scant 60 years ago but is far from ending its reign of terror because it is a free-form metastasizing ideology latching on to many cultures and ways of thought to wreak poison and violence and reaction and war. This is has grown from how economics and culture have been altered by technology – and so began slowly in the 19th century, created most of the havoc of the 20th but has plenty of steam left especially in the developing world in the 21st.
In the beginning was socialism. It was hoped that redistribution and worker rule over all institutions including property and business would ameliorate the growing problems of industrialism. Wherever this idealism failed, sometimes by the success of modern Western capitalism in co-opting such efforts, or the horrid dictatorships of the proletariat – Communism, or simply the malaise where no spiritual values or ideals really exist where economics and politics were supreme, the result was nihilism. And nihilism leads of course to destructive behavior, more often than not, prompted by new creatures with powerful rhetoric, using the rage of the masses for their own purposes – it’s the same story really from the streets of the failing Weimar Republic, to Mao’s Red Guard, to Khomeini’s Revolution.
But what follows is critical – amorphous rage does not stay unpurposeful, fomenting endless chaos – it forms into what we understand as fascism. Fascism is called right wing – and deservedly so for several reasons but ultimately misleading. It is right wing because it uses jingoistic rhetoric (nationalistic or in the Middle East, sometimes at least deceptively Pan-Arabic) and religious fervor to rally. It is right wing because with socialism discredited and classical liberalism devalued, debased, deformed, the spectrum shifts to the right. But ultimately, men are using this nationalism and religion to gain or hold power and consolidate it by expanding the state and merging religious and other cultural institutions with it. We saw that with Nazis, subverting the churches of Germany, co-opting them in a national patriotic church and oppressing those who protested. Most historians do not see Nazism to have been representing any legitimate form of Christendom when it exalted pagan values, but it still used a call for the return of the Holy Roman Empire in a 1000 year Reich (Millennialism as political ideology). Further, fascism uses militarism in fascinating, seemingly contradictory ways – to increase the power of the state internally and of course to project and threaten abroad, but also taps the energy and radicalism of youth (an eternal “revolution”) to threaten and devalue any countervailing institutions in society – a very effective way to minimize any potential enemies not only political but simply cultural.

What does this mean for the world? There is the impact of communist states and post communist states morphing into fascism. Some of these regimes are almost farcical and appear to be harmless anachronisms if not for the way people suffer under them. China is destined for great power and so its “capital” driven economic expansion is what we see and we underplay the most “quiet” fascist government ever. There is no anti-Western rage of times past and we hope that prosperity and global access will subvert the contradictions of a business-oriented classless society led by a totalitarian party apparatus.

But there is no such quiet, no such productive alternatives to nihilist and /or fundamentalist rage in the Middle East and wherever radical Islamist thought can gain a foothold in Muslim populations. That is the nature of what has come to be called Islamo-fascism and we can thank a old-time leftist journalist Oriana Fallaci for popularizing the term in the interval where the West apologized for talking about a “crusade” against jihads and euphemizing a strategy against a war on terror, when terror is a tactic, not an ideology, certainly not a nation or power under itself. So if we question using the term “Islamic fascism”, we could change it to Iranian fascism, or Al Qaeda fundamentalist-inspired fascism, but we need to call it what it is.


But politicians and all Americans should know how Islam differs from its twisted image of Islamic fundamentalism, though as you said in your essay the practice and institutions of Islam like Christendom have been contradictory over history. Islam is an egalitarian philosophy but created sprawling empires, that were often echoes of past glories recreated for Islam (e.g. the North African and Central Asian caliphates were like the Pharoah and Nebuchadnezzar of old, and the most elaborate and corrupt empire, the Ottoman, had taken possession of the Christian regime whose name defines convoluted politics, the Byzantine.). Islam was created as a protest movement against tribalism, slavery and treatment of women as chattel. Yet singularly has failed to stamp out these oppressions, often spreading it instead of controlling it because of inconsistent theology due to vague traditions of hadith, with little spirit of reformation for clerics to represent the umma to meet the needs of changing society but plenty use of sunna in facile interpretation to justify sultanates and slavery.

But like many in the West, many worked through the ages, in empires and in village to improve culture and society, the lot of their fellow Muslim. And being Muslim is an important thing, a duty to God and to your fellow man, and a belief that God will judge the unjust, even those who claim they are acting in the lights of religious belief. In this, Muslims, both devout and secular, are not much different from Christians, both pious and nominal, in cherishing eternal values and justice.

But what has fascist ideology as practiced within the Islamic world wrought, even in the past 30 years?

Nationalistic and Pan Islamic regimes have been seen as emperors with no clothes, and yet try to maintain control over fundamentalism – yet these are still the Weimar Republics of the Middle East, weak, sometimes unstable or alternatively rigid and unchanging, some subject to ethnic tensions that could escalate centrifugally. Iran is was the new face of Islamic revolution. Saddam’s Iraq was ever the old way of neo-Stalinist application of socialism with a Muslim face. We see the old versus the new (socialist versus the Islamofascist) in the generational wave of discord within the Palestinian movement. We see it in Kaddafi stepping away from his old ways because he was the mentor of the Red terrorists from PLO to Baader Meinhof to IRA but never a Wahhabist Islamic radicals.

Mahmoud Ahmadenijad is taking the Islamic revolution to a new fascist level, seemingly wanting to take pages from Hitler’s playbook in most frightening ways. Denying the Holocaust, while seeking a new destruction of Israel quite explicitly, and seeking to usher in a millenial reign, a Holy Empire (starring the 12th imam as well as Jesus) is only one avenue. He clearly wants to antagonize and shock while simultaneously weakening worldwide resolve to protest. The Easter “gift” of British sailors “catch and release” is illuminating. I wonder if Germany did something similar in the 1930s. Most of the recent Western “spies” are those working for liberal causes (Wilson Institute, Soros Open Society) for peace and reconciliation. Did Hitler play this same game with academics from the West, maybe Mussolini did?