FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Fascism & Islam

Rant Number 434 30 March 2011

‘Fascinating Fascism’. The title of an essay about Nazi art by Jewish radical critic Susan Sontag. Fascinating phrase, too. Because ‘fascinate’ comes from Latin ‘fascinum’, a spell. It seems that fascism, despite its expiration 65 years ago, continues to cast an enduring post-mortem spell.

Baleful fascination, to be sure. For twilight scribe Chris Hitchens the jihadists, militant fighters for Islam, are Islamofascists. ‘Fascists’, Henry-Bernard Levy, someone the French call ‘a philosopher’, has called Hamas in Gaza. Mr David Horowitz in the US proclaimed an Islamofascism Awareness Week. And a London top cop the other day has even called an anarchist cell (jihadists, what!?!) in London ‘black-shirted fascists’. Sigh...clearly a fun game many can play.

Fascism comes from fasces, a bundle of rods with an axe-blade, an ancient Roman symbol of authority. Mussolini adopted the emblem for his revolutionary movement after WW1. (Note: the Duce had hijacked the term from the Sicilian fasci, a left-wing, insurrectional agrarian group.) Here are four historical marks of Italian fascism: a) the cult of the leader, the Duce; b) fanatic nationalism, the exaltation of the Italian people; c) anti-communism; d) militarism and warmongering – Italy invaded Albania, Ethiopia and Greece.

Fascism spread through Europe quickly – with modifications. Hitler’s National-Socialism parroted Mussolini with theFuhrerprinzip – the doctrine of absolute obedience to the leader. Anti-Semitism was a novel, rueful German addition. Mussolini only bought that pretty late, after falling under the man with the moustache’s spell. Ill-starred idea, eh?

Caudillo Francisco Franco gleefully copied the leader cult but, wisely, steered clear of Jew-baiting, invaded no foreign country, gradually neutered Spain’s fascist party, la Falange, and prepared the way for Spain’s modernization. As for Romania’s romantic Corneliu Codreanu, Belgium’s cherubic Leon Degrelle, Croatia’s grim Poglavnik Ante Pavelic and France’s ex-Marxist Jacques Doriot – they were minor nationalist and anti-Bolshevik leaders, Germany’s allies, who vanished into the fascistGotterdammerung at the end of WWII.

Prolegomena over. To Islam. Do Islamists engage in leader-worship? Leaders they have – everybody does - but do they exalt them above the masses and the laws of Islam? Bin Laden himself would be aghast at the thought. The Caliph is the Prophet’s religious representative. He leads the Umma but he must do that in accordance with Sharia’, the holy law of Islam.Sharia’ says nothing about absolute obedience to any man, Prophet excepted. Quite the reverse. If the Caliph or the Sultan are found infringing Sharia’, they can be deposed.

Qaddafi’s rule might resemble a fascist dictator’s cult. Brother Leader. Green Book. One party, prisons, all that. Islamist, however, Qaddafi ain’t. He ferociously repressed al-Qaeda. In the current civil war, a few Islamists are fighting him. Could it be that Islamists are actually opposing fascism? Huh!

Nationalism. Islam, like Christianity, recoils from nationalism. Even Arab nationalism. The jihadists who fought in Afghanistan & Iraq did so in the name of the worldwide Umma, not for any nation or race. If anything, Islamists are out-and-out universalists, wanting to convert the whole world to the religion of the Crescent. Of course, principles are one thing, reality another. Ottoman rule in Egypt and North Africa kept Turks aloof from fellow Muslim natives. In Saudi and the Gulf some Arab racism against immigrants exists but that is flawed human nature, not Islam.

Anti-communism. Islamists are anti OK. Who’d object? Not the Yanks, who funded, armed and egged on the mujahidin in Afghanistan. Anyway, communism today, like the British Empire, belongs to the graveyard so...let’s move on.

War. Jihad. Some call it the fifth pillar of Islam. An Islamist can do jihad non-violently, with the pen, the tongue, money, prayer and so on. But Bin Laden’s jihad means armed struggle. The sacred texts of Islam make that obligatory at times, sure. Christians themselves have enjoyed crusading. However, the last ten years have seen Western democracies invade two Muslim countries. So-called humanitarian wars are now the norm, just look at Libya. Bombing in the name of democracy. Democrats swear their motives are angelically pure but...who is invading whom?

Anti-Semitism. Hitchens, Levy & Co. squawk much about that. Given Zionist nationalism and the land-grubbing policies of the State of Israel one can perhaps understand, if not excuse, a whiff of that amongst the bearded brigade. Article 22 of Hamas charter scores an own goal with its bizarre charges of Jewish plots, though I agree, pace Hitchens, that Freemasons are a dodgy lot. But when Levy calls Hamas fascist because they lob a few rudimentary missiles into Israel, this ‘philosopher’ is grotesque. Who is encircling and blockading over a million people in Gaza? Whose land is Hamas defending? Whose air raids and incursions are regularly carrying out into Gaza, killing civilians galore?

Hamas’ methods are ruthless in quelling internal dissent but the anti-fascist partisans presumably Hitch & Levy revere were also pretty brutal in extirpating enemies & rivals in their midst. The cause of liberation demanded it. The crimes of Tito’s lot in Yugoslavia would merit exposing. Hamas does no worse.

I discover online Hitchens justifies his use of ‘Islamofascism’. The ‘exclusive power of a great book’ is one charge. Problem is, that book is the Qur’an. Followed by over a billion Muslims, not just Islamists. As to fascism, Mein Kampf like the Qur’an? Hitch can’t be serious. Mussolini himself never produced a master book of fascism – a former primary school teacher, theDuce knew his limitations, intellectually at least.

‘Hostile to modernity’, the fading scribe holds. Does it mean in art? Yet Dr Goebbels regarded expressionist avant-garde as German art and anyone who has seen Firenze’ railways station, built under fascism, will not doubt that the regime could cope with modernism. Or in technology? Germany’s scientists got close to creating the atom bomb. Is that proof of archaism? Islamists are pretty deft at using cyberwarfare and all the rest. But, yes, there is in both fascism and Islamism a radical negation of certain aspects of modernity, a negation the priest shares. All old hat, anyway. Because modernity is kaput. Post-modernity rules OK.

Unlike communism, which collapsed in ignominious self-disintegration, fascism was so alive and kicking that it had to be slain by democratic crusaders in apocalyptic conflict. Islamism is unlike both, whatever its spell over the clouded minds of our Islamophobes.

Will Islamism die the death or will it overcome? Discuss.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli