Volksturm from the (Middle) East
I'm back. BTW, I just noticed, in the comments to an earlier post, a few weeks ago, that a certain reader of this blog was angry with me for not returning his email. I think that that reader must have sent that email to my old work email. I'll try to get in touch today.
But turning to matters of interest to more than one person.
A while back, I posted on the Administration's misuse of the term "fascism" in its war rhetoric. And TMcD disagreed, in comments. He thinks that "fascism" is a close-enough fit, and that we need a catch-all term for right-wing movements, anyway. I've been meaning to revisit this issue for a while, and this may be my big chance.
One thing about fascism, and Nazism, as well, is that both "doctrines," if they can be called that, posit the supremacy of the State versus every other institution in society. That is actually what makes them "totalitarian," a term Mussolini actually used to describe his version of fascism. Now, in practice, this was impossible to achieve, especially with respect to the Church--and here, I mean the Catholic Church, especially in Italy. Given deep historical roots, the Church had a relative degree of autonomy that is odds with the "all under the State" idea of totalitarianism. This was even true, to some extent, in Germany.
But with Islamic extremists, the idea that the State should be the supreme power is blasphemy, I think. My understanding of Islamist thought is that there is no conceptual distinction between the State and the Mosque. This is especially the case in Islamic fundamentalism as practiced in Iran. But we shouldn't leap to the conclusion that this means that these thinkers/regimes are positing fascism/Nazism. Because, in our Western terms, these thinkers/regimes are clearly positing the supremacy of the Mosque over the State, if anything.
This is to say, I think, that fascism is a thoroughly modern movement because it posits the secular State as primary, even if it rejects materialism (Mussolini) and emphasizes spiritual, or at least irrational, aspects of human experience. But the versions of Islamic fundamentalism at issue today are throughly pre-modern and theocratic. That seems like a big enough difference to require the use of a different term.
BTW, I've used the term Islamic fundamentalism twice in this post. And I think that it's a great term, if kind of "1979." Politically, there may be reasons that the administration avoids employing "fundamentalism" with negative connotations, but this term is much, much better than "Islamofascism," or "Islamic fascism."
posted by Number Three @ 6:47 AM
2 Comments:
I've got a full response coming later in a new post (maybe tomorrow), but I'll make a couple of points in preview.
First, not all mid-20th C. fascists were "secular." Remember than Franco's phalangists were trying to revive a primordial Catholic Church in Spain.
Second, we need to be clearer about terms like "totalitarian" in relation to fascism. Although Mussolini embraced the former term, there's some question as to whether his regime actually qualified, for exactly the reasons you cite above. Same for Franco. But there's no doubt they were both "fascists." Meanwhile, Stalin was a totalitarian but not a fascist. There's obviosuly overlap, but the two terms each have overspill.
Third, it's not clear that what distinguishes either the fascist or the totalitarian is devotion to "the state" per se. Although Mussolini makes this central, Hitler does not. For him "race" is everything and it supercedes the state. I'll have more to say on this later.
Responses:
I don't think that when Bush etc. use the term "fascism," they're talking about Franco. Franco was a fascist, in name, I guess, but he was really an old-fashioned right-wing authoritarian, allied with the Church. Most theoretical discussions of fascism focus on Italy and Germany, not Franco's Spain.
Totalitarianism was central to fascist thought, if not practice. The fact that there were Communist totalitarians doesn't undermine that. But totalitarianism it seems to me is a big part of the Islamofascist rhetoric.
Even if one wants to argue that Nazism is all about "race," as opposed to the State, that race is embodied in the Nation-State, governed by the Fuhrer principle. So not so different. Plus, extra bonus--RACE, like the STATE, is a modern concept. So even if Nazism is different in this regard, it posits another modern concept in place of the fascist ideal. Very, very different from pre-modern bodies of belief.
It seems to me that the burden on the Islamic fascism side of the debate is to establish that Islamism is itself a modern, rather than a pre-modern, movement. That doesn't get it all the way home, but it would move the ball a little closer, to mix metaphors.
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