Bush and the `Islamofascists' Perspectives | The Statesman | September 12, 2006
http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=4&theme=&usrsess=1&id=129436 Ever since World War II, the West has seen in all those hostile to its policies a re-incarnation of Hitler. Victory in a virtuous and just war has been replayed time and again; often to lend legitimacy to far more equivocal campaigns than the fight against Nazism. This means that the most heterogeneous collection of people have been lumped together to create a sense of menace: our values in peril, the threat of world dominance, the hydra-head of tyranny and the dictators we do not appease (as opposed to those we welcome with open arms). It has become a mantra against hate-figures of all kinds who have threatened Western interests, usually economic ones. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Saddam Hussein are only the most recent inheritors, via a long line of bogeymen, some distinctly more loathsome than others, including Mossadegh, Nasser, Gaddafi, Milosevic, Ceaucescu, Noriega, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, Khomeini, Daniel Ortega, Hugo Chavez and even Salvator Allende. The label of Fascist or Nazi has been the epithet of choice, often prefatory to some act of violence, or the toppling of some regime unfavourable to the West. One advantage of the multi-purpose demon of Hitler is that it leads to ideological confusion, since it has been applied to leaders from the extreme Left to the far Right; from military dictators to democratically elected Socialists. Mr Bush and the USA's neo-Conservatives have resurrected the spectre of Fascists in the war on terror. Is this because terror is too abstract a concept to urge a proper degree of popular hysteria? It is necessary to rummage in the depleted rag-bag of memory to wave some familiar hate-brand (a kind of malign version of salesmanship) that will rouse a people living in a perpetual present, torpid with affluence and numbed by violence as entertainment, into a proper indignation against those who would attack "our way of life". George Bush, on the eve of the fifth anniversary of 11 September, quoted from the published works, mainly letters and videos, of Osama bin Laden to an audience of the Military Officers' Association of America. He likened these to Lenin's What is To Be Done? and Hitler's Mein Kampf. "Bin Laden and his terrorist allies made their intentions clear as Lenin and Hitler before them," warned the President. Whether efforts to assimilate Islamists to Fascists or to Communists will strike the necessary chord of terror in the minds of Americans is questionable; not least because a disturbing number of the elements of fascism are evident in the present regime of the USA. To invoke the spectre of fascism is, in this connection, a form of projection ~ a process familiar to psychologists dealing with individuals, but no less relevant in countries confronting implacable foes. Among these features are a militant nationalism, the elevation and worship of the military, the presence of an external enemy on which "eternal war" must be waged, viewing dissent as treason, a nexus of big government and big business, an erosion of civil liberties, undermining of democracy (by wealth, fraud or media dominance), xenophobia and scapegoating of organised labour. The obvious error in any attempt to assimilate the Islamists to Fascism or Communism is that both of the latter were materialist ideologies, although both mutated into a semi-mystical belief; Nazism, on the one hand, into a transcendent nationalism, with its mystique of collective bonding in the pursuit of the supremacy of the race, and, on the other, into an irrational belief that "History" was on the side of Socialism, faith in the establishment of heaven on earth following the "inevitable" dictatorship of the proletariat. The tireless attempts by the West to extirpate these malignant secular faiths, despite the victory over Nazism and the defeat of Communism, have not been entirely successful. Fascist or neo-Fascist dictatorships formed some of the West's strongest allies in the struggle against the Red Menace; few will forget the tenderness of Western leaders towards Suharto, Marcos, Pinochet, Mobutu or even Idi Amin, as well as the military rulers of Central and South America and South Asia. The faith of Islamists is of a different order from the allegiance demanded of their votaries by secular beliefs, despite the convergence of certain practices between the two. It is a paradox that the West could not rid the world swiftly enough of rival secular ideologies: this is because these were a threat to their own hegemony in the arena of secularism. It is clear that the "pluralism" advocated by the West allows of only one form of secular ideology, namely that version embodied in its own system. More than this: the use of other-worldly ideologies to vanquish secular beliefs was the preferred means of engineering the fall of Communism. Afghanistan has a vibrant significance. It is no secret that the USA assisted the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, but the strongest weapon in their armoury was not furnished by the mighty arms production system of the USA, but the use of religion as politics, an explosive mingling of ideas on earthly governance with those sanctified by revealed religion, an inextricable tangle of this world with the next. Did they know what they were doing at the time? Could they not have foreseen the combustible consequences of their actions; or were they so blinded by hatred of Communism that its destruction had to take precedence over everything else? It is an irony that Mr Bush still includes Mr Castro (and more recently Mr Chavez) in his list of regimes to be toppled, for Communism (by contrast with the faith of the re-establishment of the Caliphate, the introduction of sharia law, the rule of clerics over the everyday affairs of business, commerce, social intercourse, sexual relations and every other aspect of human life), now seems a relatively mild alternative, one with which "peaceful co-existence" was from time to time regarded as a thinkable possibility. By a strange interplay of ideologies ~ which prove to have a life of their own, not amenable to control by any known power ~ it seems that Mr Bush and the rulers of America have learned a great deal from the would-be theocratic dominators of the world; since it is their version of truth and freedom which must prevail, not only in their own heartlands, but across the globe. The folly of this delusion ought to be self-evident in the shallow and ritualistic enactment of "democracy" in countries like Iraq or Afghanistan. It is as though the process of "voting" ~ albeit for warlords, drug- dealers, arms merchants, tribal patriarchs ~ itself constitutes democracy; when the superficial electoralism of the West is called into question by waning popular participation, and the alienation of increasing numbers of people there. In the USA, it seems, any ordinary millionaire can now become President, and huge sums of money are required for the electoral process to tale place at all. Is that democracy? With the faltering of the ideals proclaimed by the West in its domestic arrangements, how much more grotesque it is to point to the supervised and coerced "choices" abroad as the triumph of democracy, which has led neither to security nor to peace, and which has been unable to answer even the most basic needs of its enfranchised people in Afghanistan and Iraq. The avowed intention of the USA is the establishment of its own system worldwide. This is also the language of dominance, and it echoes the delusional intentions of bin Laden. If Mr Bush recognises Islamofascism when he sees it, this is perhaps because he wishes to cast out its mirror-image, which lurks within his own version of truth and freedom which he wishes upon the whole world. (The author lives in Britain. He has written plays for the stage, TV and radio, made TV documentaries, published more than 30 books and contributed to leading journals around the world. email:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) -- This is ZESTGlobal. Post articles on international affairs to [email protected] If you got this mail as a forward, subscribe to ZESTGlobal by sending a blank mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR, if you have a Yahoo! ID, by visiting http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/join/ Yahoo! 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