| Christopher Hitchens yesterday made a heroic effort to defend the term, "Islomfascism." Of course the f-word has been bandied about lately to smear those on the left, so it's interesting to hear what Hitchens has to say on the matter:
Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. ("Death to the intellect! Long live death!" as Gen. Francisco Franco's sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined "humiliations" and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia). Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression-especially to the repression of any sexual "deviance"-and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.
Fascism (and Nazism) also attempted to counterfeit the then-success of the socialist movement by issuing pseudo-socialist and populist appeals. It has been very interesting to observe lately the way in which al-Qaida has been striving to counterfeit and recycle the propaganda of the anti-globalist and green movements.
Hitchens does admit that "Islamo-facism" is missing its nation-state, corporatism, and racial politics, but, hey! The analogy isn't perfect. |
| Of course, that's exactly what's wrong with the analogy. The term "facism" no longer has a specific meaning in society. It's "meaningless" in an Orwellian sense. It's not being used as an informing descriptor, but as a means to leverage a response. Orwell, in "Politics and the English Language":
The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.
(I've also reflected on how the word "terrorist" has likewise been made meaningless.)
The use of "Islamo-fascist" is dishonest. (As is, of course, the use of "fascism" to describe progressivism.) It's meant to exaggerate the threat of radical Islamic terror groups, to whip up fears of a Kulturfampf, to imply that the numbers of violent Islamic extremists number in the millions and not, in fact, in the thousands or even hundreds.
Why? Because without that fear, there's no impetus to stay in Iraq, to bomb Iran, to continue the neocons' penchant for using U.S. military power to achieve global hegemony. Without the fear of a global, cultural conspiracy to eradicate Western secularism, it becomes plain that conservatives who support the war are just plain, flat-out wrong. (Because, as we know, the preponderance of the evidence suggests that we should leave Iraq, and the sooner, the better.)
You can feel the hysteria in reactions against Doris Lessing's recent statements that, taken as a whole, the 9/11 terror attack was not as bad as the period when the IRA was active in Ireland and England. And, you know? She's got a point. Fewer people were killed on 9/11 than during the troubles, and the English and Irish during that time lived in real fear of their lives and violence, unlike today and in places like Montana, where the only fear of Islamic terror is imagined.
In any case, Lessing's statements are arguable. But you wouldn't know it from reading Big Lizard's Dafydd, who goes on a 1,400-word rant against "intellectuals."
I believe that people who consciously think of themselves as intellectuals -- living the life of the mind (in their own minds) -- feel pressure to stand out from the pack of lesser mortals. This leads them to say outrageous things for sake of outrage itself... as if saying the mirror-opposite of what a normal person would say betokens superiority. But it's a faux superiority and glibness that often masks thoughts no more interesting than the quotidian ruminations of the masses; their verbal ability fools nearly everyone, starting with themselves. But except in a very few cases, at core, it's charlatanism.
In short, Lessing's opinion is the result of her faulty character, not out of any particular deficiency of her argument. And that's the way with the supporters of the Iraq War and Bush's illegal anti-terror activities. It's become a moral crusade - and maybe it has to be, because there's little rational reason to support Bush and his neocon cabal. |
