SEPTEMBER 2006
The Big Lie About 'Islamic Fascism'By Eric Margolis
08/29/06 "Lew Rockwell" -- -- The latest big lie unveiled by Washington’s neoconservatives are the poisonous terms, "Islamo-Fascists" and "Islamic Fascists." They are the new, hot buzzwords among America’s far right and Christian fundamentalists.
President George W. Bush made a point last week of using "Islamofacists" when recently speaking of Hezbullah and Hamas – both, by the way, democratically elected parties. A Canadian government minister from the Conservative Party compared Lebanon’s Hezbullah to Nazi Germany.
The term "Islamofascist" is utterly without meaning, but packed with emotional explosives. It is a propaganda creation worthy Dr. Goebbles, and the latest expression of the big lie technique being used by neocons in Washington’s propaganda war against its enemies in the Muslim World.
This ugly term was probably first coined in Israel – as was the other hugely successful propaganda term, "terrorism" – to dehumanize and demonize opponents and deny them any rational political motivation, hence removing any need to deal with their grievances and demands.
As the brilliant humanist Sir Peter Ustinov so succinctly put it, "Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich."
Both the terms "terrorism" and "fascist" have been so abused and overused that they have lost any original meaning. The best modern definition I’ve read of fascism comes in former Colombia University Professor Robert Paxton’s superb 2004 book, The Anatomy of Fascism.
Paxton defines fascism’s essence, which he aptly terms its "emotional lava" as: 1. a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond reach of traditional solutions; 2. belief one’s group is the victim, justifying any action without legal or moral limits; 3. need for authority by a natural leader above the law, relying on the superiority of his instincts; 4. right of the chosen people to dominate others without legal or moral restraint; 5. fear of foreign "contamination."
Fascism demands a succession of wars, foreign conquests, and national threats to keep the nation in a state of fear, anxiety and patriotic hypertension. Those who disagree are branded ideological traitors. All successful fascists regimes, Paxton points out, allied themselves to traditional conservative parties, and to the military-industrial complex.
Highly conservative and militaristic regimes are not necessarily fascist, says Paxton. True fascism requires relentless aggression abroad and a semi-religious adoration of the regime at home.
None of the many Muslim groups opposing US-British control of the Mideast fit Paxton’s definitive analysis. The only truly fascist group ever to emerge in the Mideast was Lebanon’s Maronite Christian Phalange Party in the 1930’s which, ironically, became an ally of Israel’s rightwing in the 1980’s.
It is grotesque watching the Bush Administration and Tony Blair maintain the ludicrous pretense they are re-fighting World War II. The only similarity between that era and today is the cultivation of fear, war fever and racist-religious hate by US neoconservatives and America’s religious far right, which is now boiling with hatred for anything Muslim.
Under the guise of fighting a "third world war" against "Islamic fascism," America’s far right is infecting its own nation with the harbingers of WWII totalitarianism.
In the western world, hatred of Muslims has become a key ideological hallmark of rightwing parties. We see this overtly in the United States, France, Italy, Holland, Denmark, Poland, and, most lately, Canada, and more subtly expressed in Britain and Belgium. The huge uproar over blatantly anti-Muslim cartoons published in Denmark laid bare the seething Islamophobia spreading through western society.
There is nothing in any part of the Muslim World that resembles the corporate fascist states of western history. In fact, clan and tribal-based traditional Islamic society, with its fragmented power structures, local loyalties, and consensus decision-making, is about as far as possible from western industrial state fascism.
The Muslim World is replete with brutal dictatorships, feudal monarchies, and corrupt military-run states, but none of these regimes, however deplorable, fits the standard definition of fascism. Most, in fact, are America’s allies.
Nor do underground Islamic militant groups ("terrorists" in western terminology). They are either focused on liberating land from foreign occupation, overthrowing "un-Islamic" regimes, driving western influence from their region, or imposing theocracy based on early Islamic democracy.
Claims by fevered neoconservatives that Muslim radicals plan to somehow impose a worldwide Islamic caliphate are lurid fantasies worthy of Dr. Fu Manchu and yet another example of the big lie technique that worked so well over Iraq.
As Prof. Andrew Bosworth notes in an incisive essay on so-called Islamic fascism, "Islamic fundamentalism is a transnational movement inherently opposed to the pseudo-nationalism necessary for fascism."
However, there are plenty of modern fascists. But to find them, you have to go to North America and Europe. These neo-fascists advocate "preemptive attacks against all potential enemies," grabbing other nation’s resources, overthrowing uncooperative governments, military dominance of the world, hatred of Semites (Muslims in this case), adherence to biblical prophecies, hatred of all who fail to agree, intensified police controls, and curtailment of "liberal" political rights.
They revel in flag-waving, patriotic melodrama, demonstrations of military power, and use the mantle of patriotism to feather the nests of the military-industrial complex, colluding legislators and lobbyists. They urge war to the death, fought, of course, by other people’s children. They have turned important sectors of the media into propaganda organs and brought the Pentagon largely under their control.
Now, the neoconservatives are busy whipping up war against Syria and Iran to keep themselves in power and maintain the political dynamics of this 21st century revival of fascism.
The real modern fascists are not in the Muslim World, but Washington. The neocons screaming fascist the loudest, are the true fascists themselves. It’s a pity that communist and leftist propaganda so debased the term "neo-fascist" that it has become almost meaningless. Because that is what we should be calling the so-called neocons, for that is what they really are.
August 29, 2006
Eric Margolis, contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada, is the author of War at the Top of the World. See his website. http://www.ericmargolis.com/
Copyright © 2006 Eric Margolis
How Carl Schmitt Spawned Fascist America
By ARTHUR VERSLUIS
At the insistence of the White House, the Pentagon publicly asserted in 2006 what has already become self-evident, that the United States would not observe the protocols of the Geneva Conventions concerning some prisoners. Coming as the announcement did on the heels of revelations about the prisons at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and various secret locations to which the CIA had prisoners flown for interrogation and torture, it would seem that American citizens had lost their capacity for outrage or even indignation. But the fact remains that the selective abrogation of the Geneva Conventions, the George W. Bush administration's attempts to assert "unitary executive" power, has an instructive precedent.
As is well known, the White House has been eager to assert what is claimed to be the power of the "unitary executive," that is, the asserted power of the executive branch to override those provisions of laws with which it does not agree. This theory of the "unitary executive" meant, in practice, that the White House attached "signing statements" to hundreds of pieces of legislation enacted by Congress. Instead of vetoing bills, the Bush Jr. administration issues these statements asserting the administration's unilateral rejection of or re-interpretation of the legislation.
This asserted "unitary executive power" is not only a rationale for "signing statements.” It underlies nearly everything that the George W. Bush administration has done. To take the most historically important example, the invasion and occupation of Iraq took place without the authorization of Congress (that is, without any official Declaration of War, and of course without the imprimatur of the United Nations). A violation of both American and international law, the invasion of Iraq was, in fact, the unilateral abrogation of law by the American executive power.
The invasion of Iraq is, of course, not the only example, just the one with the most far-reaching and visible consequences. There are others. Consider the abrogation of FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, whose purpose was to limit the abuse of federal uses of wiretaps or other forms of surveillance after the abuses of the 1960s and 1970s had been revealed. The scope of the wiretapping and other invasions of American citizens' privacy is not yet fully known, but no doubt eventually many abuses will be revealed. Only long after the election shenanigans of November, 2004, did Americans even learn that the Bush Jr. administration once again had unilaterally abrogated American law, asserting here too the "power of the unitary executive." What very few people have realized is that this notional "unitary executive" power has an instructive precedent, which is outlined in the works of the German legal theorist, Carl Schmitt. In the 1920s, Schmitt sharply criticized the parliamentary system of the Weimar Republic, in an analysis that has a striking resonance with the contemporary American Congress's morass of ineptness, paralysis, and manifest corruption. When National Socialism came to power in the 1930s, Schmitt defended the Third Reich and its right to peremptory justice by reference to the juridical example of the Inquisition.
According to Schmitt, the ultimate power of government is not to be found in legislation, but in the executive power to abrogate or suspend legislation. What matters is not the rule, but the exception, and "sovereign is he who decides the exception." Schmitt's aphorism describes how Hitler in fact took power, with the unilateral abrogation of civil liberties in Germany. Hitler imposed a "state of exception" on those whom he deemed alien to or a danger to the regime, and those in such a state of exception no longer have the rights of citizens. This state of exception, willed by the German unitary executive power, was the juridical basis for the Nazi death camps. The assertion of notional "unitary executive power" in part results from officials' prior disgust at the inherent weakness of a parliamentary system to forcefully address long-term problems facing society, like a weak fiat currency, economic crisis, or terrorism. A "unitary executive power" appeals to the "Right," to which Schmitt and purportedly the Bush Jr. administration belong, but, one has to note, it also could have appeal for the "Left." Such executive powers no doubt appeal to all who are certain of their own rectitude, certain that they are guided by destiny or by God to act, to be decisive. Thus one characteristic of fascism is said to be "decisionism." "At least we're doing something," a decisionist says - even if what "we're" doing is in fact despotic and destructive. George W. Bush is, he tells us, "the decider."
In The New Inquisitions: Heretic-hunting and the Origins of Modern Totalitarianism (Oxford UP, 2006), I detail inquisitional pathologies that have haunted the West for a very long time. These pathologies are clearly visible today - and not only in various Bush Jr. administration policies - but especially in the attempted abrogation, by executive fiat, of the Geneva Conventions. It surprises me that there is comparatively little written about such attempts, let alone about their historical precedents in National Socialism, but perhaps that is only to be expected in what a growing number of observers from across the political spectrum recognize as the proto-fascist ambience of the contemporary United States.
Arthur Versluis is author of The New Inquisitions: Heretic-hunting and the Origins of Modern Totalitarianism (Oxford UP, 2006). He is professor of American Studies at Michigan State University and can be reached at versluis@msu.edu