Usage Note: Islamofascism

The Weekly Standard ran a recent piece arguing that “‘Islamic fascism’ is an accurate and important term.” It was an answer to the dust kicked up by speeches from George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld a little while ago comparing Islamic terrorism to fascism in the 1930s, with the wry implication that anyone who’s soft on terrorism—like, say, Democrats in this election year—would join Lloyd George and other Nazi appeasers as the great disastrous weaklings of history.

That’s electric rhetoric, and the Standard fulfilled its usual duty as barking ideological yard dog by backing the President up. “Like the Christian fascism of an earlier era,” argues Joseph Loconte, “the Islamic variety cannot be defeated by compromise and accommodation. It must be met, and condemned, head on.” But for all his noise about meeting things head on Laconte’s argument just skitters across the surface, because “Christian fascism” is a nonsense term invented by Laconte himself. It’s as empty as “Islamofascism.” Fascism was irreligious.

Go ahead and call violent Islamic jihadis “totalitarian,” “anti-Semitic,” or even “insane” if you want, because they are. I’ve met a few, and they’re no fun. But fascism was a specific movement in the ‘20s and ‘30s that preached a heroic brawny image of the New Man. It rejected religion and elevated the state above all things to organize and carry a new generation of hale, pure (sometimes vegetarian and nudist) Europeans into a shining modern future.

It has, in other words, almost nothing in common with any strain of Islam. The Standard points out that Nazis co-opted the church after they seized power, and of course that’s right. But it was never more than a flimsy cover. The Nazis never wanted to impose anything resembling a theocracy on the new pure race of Germans. They just realized, like most leaders, that if you want to rule, you have to pretend to pray. What violent jihadis want, cynically or not, is the rule of God on earth.

Stephen Schwartz, who coined “Islamofascism,” argues that “Islamofascism is a distortion of Islam, exactly as Italian and German fascism represented perversions of respectable patriotism in those countries.” That’s right, it is a distortion. But that doesn’t make it essentially close to fascism. The other parallels mentioned by Schwartz—paramilitarism, street fights, willingness to “break the law,” ambitions to take over the world—are characteristics of any violent political movement. They’re a reason to worry, but they don’t bring Islamists closer to fascists, and it’s either ignorant or dishonest to say they do.

It’s true that Nazis have influenced “Islamofascism.” They sowed a virulent strain of anti-Semitism in the Middle East (which Bernard Lewis has described, but even he knows fascism and anti-Semitism aren’t the same), and by example they showed Ba’athists like Saddam Hussein how to organize Arabs under a dinky, semi-secular, dictatorial nationalism—which Al Qaeda loathed.

The essence of a political creed isn’t its methods, but its excuse. Anyone can use a bomb or demonize Jews, but what dream of the future drives a person to do it? There’s always a romantic vision, and the fascist one was a pure and secular national state. The Islamist one is sharia law, which is different. So “Islamofascism” is not just misleading but intellectually dishonest, because it distracts from other movements that are busy in the world right now, other romantic visions that serve as excuses to kill.

More on those in another installment.

     posted 5 October 2006 by Michael Scott Moore

  1. Hear hear. Sloppy, imprecise use of historical/political terms shortchanges decent analysis and blunts debate.

    — Bowleserised    Oct 5, 09:33 am    #

  2. I know the French used to (and probably still do) use the term ‘intégristes’ when referring to fundamentalists/extremists. I think it’s originally a Catholic coinage, referring to an extremely conservative and traditional wing of the church. It’s a term that seems to apply to Islamists less contentiously than fascists does.

    — BiB    Oct 5, 02:14 pm    #

  3. Dead right, Mike, as usual. I have been amazed to see this half-witted, ignorant term spread like wildfire.

    — James Kennaway    Oct 11, 05:31 am    #

  4. and even more hear here:

    http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/stephen_oshea/2006/10/war_of_the_words.html

    — kean    Oct 11, 08:29 pm    #