Thursday, September 21, 2006
Martin Kramer does so, tracing some of the intellectual pedigree of the comparison, he quotes Manfred Halpin, for instance:
In a separate piece, Kramer takes on friend Juan Cole: Cole, fascism, and mind quality control
The full Cole quote provides but one more example:
The lazy conflation of Muslim fundamentalist movements with fascism cannot account for their increasing willingness to participate in elections and serve in parliamentary government. Hizbullah, for example, ran in the 2005 elections and had 12 members elected to parliament. Altogether, the Shiite parties of Hizbullah and Amal, who have a parliamentary alliance, have 29 members in the Lebanese parliament of 128 seats. Hizbullah and Amal both joined the national unity government, receiving cabinet posts. This is not the behavior of a fascist movement tout court.
Tout court? How about applying this to a certain Israeli party that has participated in elections, served in parliamentary government, joined parliamentary alliances and national unity governments, and received cabinet posts? A party that has even surrendered power to its opponents in free elections? This can't be the behavior of a fascist movement, right?...
I think you can see where this is going...
To hold out Hizballah's participation in Parliamentary forms as an example of their non-Fascism is silly. Of course, Hizballah participates in elections, they'll use whatever means that are at their disposal to seek power, as Fascists do. If they were truly democratic, they'd put down their weapons, stop threatening war with their neighbor and stop intimidating those Lebanese that disagree with them.
I do agree Islamo-fascism is a more apt analogy than Islamo-bolshevism, even though some greater applicability would seem to pertain to the latter comparison (e.g. universalism, appeal to a profoundly imagined utopian future, ideological investments in past Western transgressions). Still, Kramer is most pointedly suggesting a sui generis assessment needs to be made and am rather more in agreement with that assessment. Salafism, jihadism, Islamism, etc. would seem to be the best labels as they would still admit of fascist or bolshevik subtexts while strongly indicating the need for more specific assessments as well.
Presumably "historian" Cole is aware that Herr Hitler himself came to power as the result of an election. By Cole's logic, I guess he wasn't a fascist, either.
Kurt:
You might be assuming more about Juan Cole's knowledge than any reasonable person might otherwise be led to believe.
In An Argument Only Hanson Could Love Daniel Larison comments on why the fascist analogy is itself overblown. Excerpt:
"Back to basics. Jihadi basics: jihadis (a.k.a., Islamists) are Islamic reactionaries; they are a product of modernity but are anti-modern; they do want to bring back the Caliphate, which makes them as un-fascist as Novalis was for romanticising the medieval papacy. Fascist basics: fascists are not reactionary in any meaningful sense, since they are above all an ideology dedicated to modernisation, the new, the future, the creation of the “New Order†and the new man; they are modernisers and are not anti-modern; they are a mass movement with no attachments or sympathies with the ancien regime or its partisans; they are not the heirs of Counter-Revolutionary rightist politics, but a mass revolutionary nationalist movement, none of which has anything to do with being “reactionary†in any sense beyond the purely pejorative ..."
I don't entirely agree with him, but Larison is far closer to the truth of this than Hanson. We choose the fascist analogy largely for the visceral, pejorative, demonizing quality it bears, then reason backwards to justify our pejorative label. That's understandable as it has broad appeal, e.g. inclusive of "progressives" and others who would decidedly dismiss the bolshevik analogy, but it's applicability is limited nonetheless.