Reply #43: First, define 'fascism'. [View All]

[Igel]

Some define it in strictly economic terms. Then all of
Hitler's racism and anti-Semitism, militarism, death-cult, etc., etc. are suddenly irrelevant. Not important at all to having Germany be fascist.

Then again, the progressive in '89 who called me a 'fascist' because he assumed that I was in a church that was anti-abortion and anti a few other liberties was also wrong. Because I wasn't corporatist.

Here are a few snippets from Wiki for 'fascism' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism). Good as any other source.

---------
...Former Columbia University Professor Robert O. Paxton has written that:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
----------

Note that extreme takfiri groups that seek to establish a caliphate focus on community decline, humiliation, and their victim-hood; the "ummah" must unit (tawhid is not just an attribute of Allah). They are not "nationalist" in the sense of ethnic natio, they are nationalist in the sense that the ummah--the Muslim nation--must be victorious. In this, they echo the Ottoman's view that your tribal affiliation is in many ways less important than your "confession", i.e., your religion. Violence is certainly redemptive for those folk, and they seek to both purity the ummah and expand its reach. But let's not assume that there's any similarity between any group dubbed "Islamic" and Paxton's definition.

--------
Stanley Payne's Fascism: Comparison and Definition (1980) uses a lengthy itemized list of characteristics to identify fascism, including the creation of an authoritarian state; a regulated, state-integrated economic sector; fascist symbolism; anti-liberalism; anti-communism; anti-conservatism.<14> He argues that common aim of all fascist movements was elimination of the autonomy or, in same cases, the existence of large-scale capitalism.
--------
Authoritarian state, check. But the economic model under Islam is a bit different; apart from disposing of usury and enforcing zakat, as well as making sure that all businesses are properly religious, they don't care. The symbolism has to be shifted--I doubt if swastikas are necessarily the rage, although nationalism (as tweaked above) is. Certainly anti-liberal, anti-communist. "Anti-conservatism" needs further explication for me to understand it; most Fascist parties were both modernising and conservative, just in their own ways and for their own ends (as well most Communist parties). Odd that autonomy or existence of large-scale capitalism could be included by *anyone* if corporatism is the most important feature; I suspect I'm missing either dueling definitions or something in Payne's definition.

--------------
Semiotician Umberto Eco attempts to identify the characteristics of proto-fascism as the cult of tradition, rejection of modernism, cult of action for action's sake, life is lived for struggle, fear of difference, rejection of disagreement, contempt for the weak, cult of masculinity and machismo, qualitative populism, appeal to a frustrated majority, obsession with a plot, illicitly wealthy enemies, education to become a hero, and speaking Newspeak, in his popular essay Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt.
------------
Tradition, check. Rejection of modernism, check (but cf. Payne). Action for action's sake, check. Life is lived for struggle, double check. Etc., check. I've apparently overlooked the urgency of corporatism, but note that I find little about the extremist forms of Islam that believe in jihad and takfir and Eco's definitions. Perhaps he's been coopted by the neocons.

-------
Fascism in Italy arose in the 1920s as a mixture of syndicalist notions with an anti-materialist theory of the state; the latter had already been linked to an extreme nationalism. Fascists accused parliamentary democracy of producing division and decline, and wished to renew the nation from decadence. They viewed the state as an organic entity in a positive light rather than as an institution designed to protect individual rights, or as one that should be held in check. Fascism universally dismissed the Marxist concept of "class struggle", replacing it instead with the concept of "class collaboration". Fascists embraced nationalism and mysticism, advancing ideals of strength and power as means of legitimacy. These ideas are in direct opposition to the liberal ideals of humanism and rationalism characteristic of the Age of Enlightenment.

Fascism is also typified by totalitarian attempts to impose state control over all aspects of life: political, social, cultural, and economic, by way of a strong, single-party government for enacting laws and a strong, sometimes brutal militia or police force for enforcing them.<19> Fascism exalts the nation, state, or group of people as superior to the individuals composing it. Fascism uses explicit populist rhetoric; calls for a heroic mass effort to restore past greatness; and demands loyalty to a single leader, leading to a cult of personality and unquestioned obedience to orders (Führerprinzip). Fascism is also considered to be a form of collectivism
---------
The Wiki sort-of-summary/consensus description, that. Now, one problem is that the 'state' is not just an important construct in Islamism, nor is the ethnos or class. Instead, we have the ummah, and the need for the ummah to unite in order to serve Allah. But in most essential features, these are analogous constructs: Just as we can define fascism so narrowly that only Mussolini's state apparatus meets the test, or so narrowly that Franco wasn't fascist, so we can construct a definition to make sure "we" are right and the freepers are wrong; all the better if it restricts the word to precisely those things *we* think are all important (corporations). I don't see a point in haranguing over words and making pointless appeals to authority just because some people believe that all Islam is the same and we must protect the word's hymen from being violated and breeched--whether the definition of the word is UBL's or ayeshahaqqiqa's, the head guy at al-Azhar's or Taariq Ramadan's (or his pa's).