Christopher Hitchens certainly does:
Does Bin Ladenism or Salafism or whatever we agree to call it have anything in common with fascism?
I think yes. The most obvious points of comparison would be these: 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.
1 comment:
Islam cannot be correctly understood through the prism of Western ideologies.
Islam does not have a central authority (outside the Koran and the hadiths); central authority is central to fascism. Fascism also includes corporationism, but Islam does not. Furthermore, Moslems were anti-Semites 1300 years before Mussolini's fascism became anti-Semitic when he allied with Hitler.
Much more--and better--analysis at View From the Right.
Post a Comment