September 30, 2006
Islamic Fascism Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:15 PM EST An interesting burst of historical argument surfaced earlier this month. In August the President made his first reference to “Islamic fascism.” In September a Democrat in the Senate called on the President to stop using the phrase “Islamic fascists,” calling the locution “a label that doesn't make any sense,” and soon a reporter at a White House briefing read a dictionary definition of fascism, claiming that this definition did not fit the current facts. This hostility to the phrase “Islamic fascism” is suddenly fairly common, and is often exhibited, with great confidence, by people who do not know anything much about fascism, classical or otherwise. But hostility to the phrase is not restricted to the ignorant—far from it. In late August Robert Paxton, an extremely celebrated historian of Vichy France, also my splendid teacher at Columbia, who taught a brilliant course on fascism, gave an interview on NPR. He questioned the value of applying the term fascist to most states in the Middle East, or to Islamist terrorists. He made a similar argument in his 2005 book, The Anatomy of Fascism. Robert Paxton’s argument against “Islamic Fascism” includes, among others, the following elements: Fascists adored states; Islamist terrorists tend to deprecate states. Fascists are extreme nationalists; Islamists are generally opposed to nationalism. Fascists were generally hostile to religion; Islamists are anything but. And, perhaps most powerfully, European fascists took power in formerly democratic regimes; most Middle Eastern states have never had democratic governments. The essence of fascism is arguably that it is a response to the capture of a democratic regime by the left, or to the paralysis of a democratic regime. I have been thinking about this, and while there is much to be said against the use of “Islamic fascism,” there is also something to be said for that usage. For one thing, extreme Islamists, while hostile to current states, are often seeking to construct a superstate, one including all Muslims. They seem in this sense comparable to fascists in, say, 1930s Austria, who deprecated the existence of the Austrian state and sought to dissolve it and merge it into a Germanic superstate. Must fascists be hostile to religion? The authoritarian antiliberal Austrians who held power between 1934 and 1938, who opposed assimilation into Germany, and who had a strong Catholic political identity, are known to posterity as “clerical fascists”—perhaps a misnomer, but not an oxymoron. Franco’s self-understanding included a strong Catholic political identity and was widely understood, perhaps misunderstood, but not, I think, madly so, as having significant links to classical fascism. What about the replacement of the nation by the community of religious believers? I am not sure that the distinction between nation and a community of religious belief is at all times absolute. There have been many periods where shared religious belief did (and does) duty as the equivalent of national identity, or where religious identity has overlapped national identity—Protestantism in England, Catholicism in Ireland or Poland or Croatia, Orthodox Christianity in Russia, Serbia, or Greece. The assertion that Middle Eastern regimes cannot be fascist because they have not displaced democratic orders should weigh the fact that some Middle Eastern regimes—the former Ba’ath regime in Iraq and the surviving Ba’ath regime in Syria—were/are based on theories developed by ideologues who were very visibly affected by, and imitative of, European fascism. And what about other attributes of classical European fascism? Classical European fascism was militarist and bellicist—it liked armies, and it worshipped war. The language of many Islamists passionately expresses the same tastes. Classical fascism was a response to a perceived although often receding threat from the secular left—and this is true, to some degree, of some Islamist movements and regimes (at certain moments, the Communist party in both Iran and Iraq). Classical fascism detested secular modernity, and it detested liberalism, it detested feminism, it detested parliamentary rule and democracy, it detested feminism, etc. Many Islamists share these loathings. Classical European fascism celebrated violence and charismatic leadership, and many Islamists do the same. On balance, I can see the case for, and the case against, sharply distinguishing violent, antirationalist, bellicist, misogynist, and authoritarian Islamists from fascists. I do not think the case for making the distinction a very sharp one is so strong that anyone pointing to affinities, rather than differences, is necessarily an idiot. Then again, Robert Paxton is an extremely capable historian, so it is worth wondering why he is now making this case. For one thing, fascists are dangerous when they capture states; Islamists are very dangerous even when—perhaps especially when—they do not control states, and Paxton suspects that the analogy of fascism with Islamism predisposes Americans to go after states, which may not be the most important target. This is very much worth thinking about, and the war in Iraq may have in significant part sprung from such a mistake. The American armed forces are very good at smashing states, and people possessing hammers have a notorious tendency to mistake many things for nails. Also Paxton knows that fascism is a ubiquitous term of generally unthinking abuse, and he is inclined to be fastidious about avoiding this tendency. This is surely commendable. Still, I am struck that other people who allege that they are too fastidious to use the word fascist about Islamists are oddly free with it when describing the American government, the Israeli government, etc. I am very far from being an admirer of President Bush, but I rather doubt that the application of the term to a Ba’athist regime is more outrageous than its application to the current inhabitant of the White House.
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