One of the favored right wing rhetorical strategies, as has been well-documented at Orcinus amongst other places, is projection. Their favorite targets for this are their fellow Americans, of course—claiming that Christians are being persecuted so they can freely persecute, claiming the moral high ground while supporting leaders who starve the poor and start needless wars. But wingnuts don’t do a great job of distinguishing between their political opposition and our actual enemies, so I’ve been watching the wingnutteria cling ever-tighter to the bullshit phrase “Islamofascism” with interest. Well, this morning’s front page at Townhall made the subtext pretty damn clear in regards to how the term is standard issue projection—it only took me two seconds to do a quick fix to “correct” the front page and demonstrate what criticism the phrase “Islamofascism” is trying to deflect.
Apparently Bush has been desperately dropping the phrase, though slightly modified so he didn’t sound like the 100% wingnut he is. According to Chuck Colson at Townhall, the first people to flip out were, surprise surprise, the leadership of the nation that is most like what “Islamofascists” would look like—our allies in Saudi Arabia. Why is the House of Saud the frontrunners is the “Who’s really an Islamofascist?” sweepstakes? Fascism, contrary to the hopes and dreams of the wingnutteria, isn’t just a meaningless word you can slap on anyone you like. A quick look at the dictionary will show that it’s a rather specific term.
A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
Now I have no love for any fundamentalists of any religion and I think that all Muslims who belong to organizations that want to bomb or terrorize anyone can shove it up their asses. But as it currently stands, the loosely defined group of terrorists that we call Al Qaeda and other groups like Hezbollah or Hamas are a lot of things, but they’re simply not fascists. They’re not centralized and they don’t have the vision of a corporate-government power merger that people like Mussolini advocated. Colson claims that liberal insistence on using words for what they mean is “political correctness”, another phrase that seems to mean whatever conservatives want it to. (Rush Limbaugh is always fond of saying, “Words mean things,” which is another case of conservative projection, since it’s obvious what side of the political divide prefers to empty words of all denotative meaning so that they can project whatever meaning they want on them.)
Even Colson can’t manage to slap together a definition of “fascism” that doesn’t manage to describe the American right as accurately as it does anyone else.
As Stephen Morris of Johns Hopkins recently wrote, fascism’s goal is to “achieve national greatness� through totalitarian control of both political and social life; it seeks to create an empire; and it “aspires to re-create a mythical past.�
Granted, the mythical past that our wannabe fascists want to enforce is either the 19th century or the mythical 1950s available on Nick at Night, but Morris’ definition would make most of the Republican party de facto fascists. Now I don’t think they are. I think most of the party (if not most of the leadership anymore) respects diversity and freedom and separation of powers on one level or another. But I think it’s pretty obvious at this point that the invocation of the term “Islamofascist” is an attempt to get criticism off the Christofascists here at home.
It’s a real shame, too, because as a chauvinist for Western secularism, I think if we had any political acumen at all, we could do a bang-up job of luring people in the Middle East away from Islamic fundamentalism. We would just have to let go of our pride and our racism and learn to actually reach out and be generous to people. Yesterday on NPR and today a quick Google search confirmed my worst suspicions that we are being outstripped by fucking Hezbollah in the P.R. department—they are actually buying homes and businesses for people in Beirut who lost theirs in the recent war with Israel. I nearly banged my head against the steering wheel—we’re the ones who invented the Marshall Plan and they’re stealing our idea! The utter unwillingness of our leadership to do what it would take to acheive our supposed goals in the Middle East tells you all you need to know about the real priorities of Republicans, which is to keep the hate and anger here high and keep people voting their anger and hate at the polls.
46 Responses to “Projection?”
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I think the main reason that Rove hit upon the Islamfascist label is to obscure an uncomfortable (for the right) reality: It is religious fundamentalism that is the problem. But a big part of the Republican base considers themselves religious fumdamentalists.
For years we fought Communists who were left wing extremists. Now we are fighting religious fundamentalists, who are right wing extremists. To obscure this point is Rove’s aim. It used to be that the Democrats were closer to the enemy’s way of thinking, now it’s the Republicans. An inconvenient truth for them.
You know, there’s enough bona fide fascists in the world (like Putin and his supporters, for example), that it hardly seems like we need to peg other authoritarians with the label. There’s plenty of other reasons to not like them. But differentiating between Fascism and other forms of totalitarianism is apparently “politically correct” and therefore a bad thing in the eyes of these Conservatives.
Also, from the Townhall article
While I won’t deny that there were plenty of anti-semitic Liberals in the 30s, suggesting that Hitler’s ideas were influenced by them, rather than Bismarkian totalitarianism, is ridiculous.
Amanda is in the Howse and Rocking Hard tooday!
I’m unsure what the overlap is between a theocracy and a fascist state; I suspect that it’s some theocracies are fascist states and vice versa. I think the WSJ article on the relatively useless term traces its origin to a Communist writer describing the Iranian Revolution in 1978, since it was obviously theocratic with the central figure being the Ayatollah.
However, I’m willing to dispense with all of the historical precedents and agree that the cult of authority and being-kept-safe-at-all-costsism espoused by so-called conservatives has led them into the fascist camp.
Spain under Franco was both theocratic and Fascist, and Chile likewise, from what I’ve read. You get a ChurchState synthesis - Mussolini was big on Restoring Christendom, too - but, invariably, the modern forms have the State ascendant and the Church as handmaiden. Thus military chaplains blessing the dumping of prisoners from helicopters and murdering dictators being hailed as champions of faith and order. And liberation theologians and liberal clergy being silenced, sometimes permanently.
I’ll second the projection argument. It is supported by BushCo’s behavior in other areas to date.
I’d also like to bring up Lawrence Britt’s 14 Characteristics of Fascism, which can be found narrated by radio host Mike Malloy at Eric Blumrich’s excellant site:
http://www.ericblumrich.com/14.html (home to the ever popular Idiot Son of an A**hole).
While it can be argued that the US may not yet be a full-fleged fascist state, what can’t be argued is that it’s not for lack of trying on the part of the right wing conservatives currently in charge.
Now I don’t think they are
I do. At least by Colson’s definition. De facto if not Ex dolo.
The utter unwillingness of our leadership to do what it would take to acheive our supposed goals in the Middle East tells you all you need to know about the real priorities of Republicans,
They have not yet figured out how to get away with getting Bechtel and KBR to profit from “reconstructing” Lebanon while doing Sod Fucking All, just like they did in Iraq. Why *should* they lift a finger? Don’t worry, once they figure out how to do just as good a job as they did in Iraq, they’ll be all over it like a house on fire. And leave it looking like one, just like we did in Iraq, too.
Meanwhile, the hapless “Cedar Revolution” purple fingertip govt of Lebanon does nothing either (because they were nearly broke to begin with after being invaded and occupied for almost twenty years plus a civil war, and then we had our satraps blow the hell out of them) and hasn’t shown up yet, while Hezbollah doesn’t just buy houses for people, they send in teams of engineers with bulldozers and slide rules to clean up the bombing sites and rebuild while they put the DPs into temporary houseing that is better than what we have done for the survivors of Katrina. This is called “filling a power vacuum” and it is how real revolutionary movements become national governments, as well as how the existing national governments lose the Mandate of Heaven, even if not entirely due to their own malfeasance.
–Notice, btw, the most interesting thing of all this chaos, perhaps: despite US hubris and assumption, France wants *nothing the fuck to do* with reconquering their old colonial territory even when offered the opportunity to do so on a platter. Blair may have dreams of Raj Revisted, but for all their faults, Paris doesn’t want to go down *that* road again.
I was thinking that the recent “islamofacist” craze was also an attempt to market the conservative effort to conflate Iraq, Afghanistan and the “war on terror” into World War III, which has also been popular in recent weeks.
Having done my dissertation on Peron, I became sensitized to the overuse of the word “fascist.” But the increasingly bizarre behavior of the Republican leadership does lend itself to these kinds of comparisons. What’s missing of course is an outright extermination of democratic practices - we are still having reasonably meaningful elections. And they have a long way to go to get their civic religion to a place “classic” fascists would recognize. Promise Keepers meeting may remind us of Nuremburg rallies, but they still don’t play a role that important in our politics. The impulses that drive them are much the same as those of fascists, but they haven’t gotten there yet – emphasis on “yet.â€?
A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
This definition misses the role of what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex in what we normally think of as fascist states. As Greg Palast snarked, if Hitler was actually brought to trial, his defense would have been “I was just following orders — from Volkswagon”. And here again, we see projection on the right.
That being said, I don’t think the Islamo-fascism label is that far off of what OBL and his ilk want to establish: a kind of post-industrial Caliphate that no doubt would resemble a fascist state, except on a grander scale.
And where do they get the idea that liberal intellectuals influenced HItler? Was Bismark even that big of an influence on Hitler? Interestingly, The Rhetoric of Reaction notes that conservative intellectuals such as Pareto actually seemed to have influenced Lenin.
And regarding Qutb: I remember reading an article about him (I think it was him) in the NYT Magazine. What struck me was how similar his “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” rhetoric sounded to apologists from throughout the “Judeo-Christian-Islamic” tradition … viz:
Qutb: Judaism is too bound by laws and tradition, Christianity goes too far the other way, Islam is just right
Jewish Apologist: Islam is too bound by laws and tradition, Christianity goes too far the other way, Judaism is just right.
Catholic Apologist: Islam and Judaism are too bound by laws and tradition, Protestantism goes too far the other way, Catholicism is just right.
Protestant Fundie Apologist: Islam, Judaism and Catholicism are too bound by laws and tradition, liberal Protestantism goes too far the other way, Fundie Protestantism is just right.
Etc.
As I commented somewhere else, I am beginning to wonder if the Right does not really hate Communism. The Right is envious of communist totalitarianism, that by all rights and God’s blessing should be theirs.
I am beginning to wonder if the Right does not really hate Communism. - j swift
The dominant intellectual strain of the American right is still neo-conservativism: a philosophy that in its most extreme forms was dominated by (not so) ex-communists.
So yeah — you aren’t the only one wondering that.
The truth will out: in his press conference today, Bush admitted, literally, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
“A reporter yelled out, “What did Iraq have to do with the 9-11 attack?” and Bush yelled, “Nothing!’”
I don’t have the tech ability — but somebody who does: please, please record that exchange and set it loose on YouTube.
good godde on earth.
don’t read the comments after colson’s article unless you have a really, really strong stomach. partial quote:
believe it or not, it gets worse.
Whenever I see “Islamofascism”, I’m reminded of this Simpsons episode where Rainier Wolfcastle is battling the CommieNazis. That’s really all ‘Fascism’, ‘Communists’, and ‘Nazi’ means to them, just synonyms for ‘Bad Guy’. All you have to do is label some group with some combination of those and you get your desired emotional reaction of “Bad, must kill!”. I don’t think it really goes any deeper than that.
[…] Amanda M. spells it out. […]
Let’s not forget though that there are Islamic fascists just as there are Christian fascists. Perhaps the term Islamic Dominionists is not as loaded a term. Dominionists are the name Christian Fascists have given themselves.
The utter unwillingness of our leadership to do what it would take to acheive our supposed goals in the Middle East tells you all you need to know about the real priorities of Republicans, which is to keep the hate and anger here high and keep people voting their anger and hate at the polls.
Don’t forget fear, in the form of terrists lurking around every corner waiting to drop cyanide tablets in your Coca-Cola or bomb your plane with Vaseline.
“The truth will out: in his press conference today, Bush admitted, literally, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
“A reporter yelled out, “What did Iraq have to do with the 9-11 attack?� and Bush yelled, “Nothing!’�
Wow I missed that I could only watch a bit before my stomach cold allow no more. What I saw was just a ass kissing session broadcast on all the networks for no apparent reason. Could not F**king believe the softball Katrina question for instance and of course Bush was asked about democrats emboldening Al Queda, the umpteenth time that concept has been uttered by the so-called liberal media. The whole damn thing looked like a republican rally.
Anyway about Amanda’s rockin post, it blows my mind that the so called political opposition is still failing to turn the lameass war on terra as justification for anything argument on its head and provide a healthy and logical alternative to this nonsense. These guys aren’t that good, Amanda just shot the whole argument to hell in a few paragraphs. Why can’t the dems do the same?
Mussolini was actually quite anti-religious earlier in life, so there’s a lot to suggest that his alliance with the church was strategic rather than ideological. Propably for both. The Italian Futurists who helped put Mussolini in power were extremely anti-clerical, also.
I tend to think of theocracy and Fascism as being to distinct, though similar forms of totalitarianism. The positive thing about theocrats is that there are least holes in their discourse that reason can poke through. ie. Most Protestant christians believe in the priesthood of all believers, which is an intensely anti-authoritarian idea. Fascists, on the other hand, have complete faith in a (usually secular, though not neccesarily atheist) strongman who has some sort of inherent right to control people. Fascism doesn’t require the same kind of Cognitive Dissonance as most types of theocracy, just hate and contempt for humanity. As a result, it’s very difficult to reason with a convinced Fascist - violence is the only language they speak.
Christofascism (Crypto-fascism?)…
The Liberal Avenger
Amanda M. spells it out.
She brings up an excellent point along the way. Hezbollah is paying $12k in cash to every family whose home was destroyed by Israel and they are apparently buying businesses and buildings outright to give…
Bravo! Well said; well played.
And as for the neonuttery’s contention that insisting on accurate definitions amounts to “political Correctness”, well, that’s just another manifestation of the right-wing’s essential anti-intellectualism, the obverse of the coin of ignorance with which they pay all political and social debts.
For years we fought Communists who were left wing extremists.
Well, actually, we fought right-wing totalitarian regimes that labeled themselves “communist,” “democratic,” and “republic” with equal accuracy. Authoritarian police states that keep a military boot on the necks of their populace are not particularly left-wing.
Mussolini was actually quite anti-religious earlier in life, so there’s a lot to suggest that his alliance with the church was strategic rather than ideological.
Do you think that Hitler was actually a devoutly religious man who nevertheless coopted God and Country in a way that magically made his political party the apex of the church hierarchy? Or was he perhaps strategically using religion as a tool to inflame and control the masses? E.g., Hate the gays, hate those who worship differently, hate those who are of a different race, attack all nations that might one day threaten you, and defer to your anointed commander-in-chief, all as God intended. How convenient for Mr. Hitler that he was raised in a religion with those tenets.
And I strongly suspect that many members of the Republican Party and leaders of the Religious Right are also using religion purely as a tool to gain more and more temporal power, with no other underlying ideology. Certainly that describes Mr. Bush’s “religious” beliefs.
labyrus - “Mussolini was actually quite anti-religious earlier in life, so there’s a lot to suggest that his alliance with the church was strategic rather than ideological. Propably for both. The Italian Futurists who helped put Mussolini in power were extremely anti-clerical, also.”
The Nazis successfully combined a weird sort of neo-paganism with Christianity as an integral part of their appeal to the masses. It is not clear if any of them really believed what they were saying, but it was politically very useful.
In much the same way, the Right here has used religious arguments frequently to advance their agenda. Even the NeoCons use a lot of religious language to describe what they want to achieve.
If anyone outside of Bush truly believes the religious crap, it’s not clear. I suspect very strongly that they are only using religion for its political value, and no more than handful of deluded people (in the Administration) actually take any of it seriously…
Of course, the “Base� eats it up, just like they did in Germany/Italy/Spain, etc.
Most Protestant christians believe in the priesthood of all believers, which is an intensely anti-authoritarian idea.
This was certainly a longstanding foundation of Southern Baptist belief, as was separation of church and state (No, really!). The problem is that groups such as the Southern Baptists have thrown such cornerstone beliefs over the side, given a chance to crush the heathen filth and rule the nation/world. Indeed, Dominionist D. James Kennedy’s good buddy, Al Mohler, is now in charge of the preeminent Southern Baptist seminary in Louisville, KY, and has enacted a purge of those who espouse the priesthood of all believers; instead, Mohler is pushing a hierarchical system of revealed wisdom from church leaders such as himself. All this is in service of a Dominionist worldview, where a totalitarian theocracy is the goal. They’re eager to have ranks of militaristic young men wearing “Gott Mit Uns” belt buckles reclaiming America for Christ. And around we go again.
As I commented somewhere else, I am beginning to wonder if the Right does not really hate Communism. The Right is envious of communist totalitarianism, that by all rights and God’s blessing should be theirs.
I see it a bit differently. The modern conservative movement seems to have developed as a way to fight Communism. Partly, of course, the people funding it wanted to protect their wealth, but they had moral and patriotic reasons as well. This explains why “Christian” leaders changed their sermons to help them. Conservatives honestly thought (though falsely, for the most part) that Communists controlled the media and so forth, so to fight this threat they set out to create a mirror image of the Communist Party as they saw it. (I don’t know if they convinced the media to stop focusing on objective truth, I think that happened independently and they jumped on it.) This reversed-Communism has outlived any usefulness it might once have had. But I don’t know if the people who designed the system could change how it works, at this point.
I came across an article by Umberto Eco written in 1995 describing his version of 14 aspects of what he calls Eternal Fascism. The whole article is behind a pay wall (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=1856), but the website The Modern World excerpts the 14 points:
http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html
I thought #12 was Eternal Pandagonian:
12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons — doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.
“A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.”
Isn’t that what the United States is right now?
With B pushing this term around he brings it back to a religious issue…..
So instead of a political and economic issue being FLAMED by religious mantra….we are back into the territory of the ‘Holy War.’
Once again we are in the middle of Islam vs Christianity and only ONE kind of CHristianity….right wing fundamentalist awaiting for the second coming kind of Christianity that Bush has milked for all it is worth…it got him in and will keep the fear frothing around the heartland.
Religious zealotry takes away peoples need to question the WHY’s of this situation.
WHY do the terrorists hate the west?
WHAT is the history of US involvement in the countries that breed terrorists?
Could the Western Nations not be the shining democractic heroes we all like to pretend we are?
Fear and misinformation……….it is what keeps the US economy humming.
Excellent post and actually went the whole way through the thread which is just as good*.
To thank Amanda for recalling ‘projection’ in this political sense.
Psychiatrically, I think they told us it was a process whereby we —
“attribute to OTHER that which we detect, however ‘murmured’, or fear in SELF”
The fear word is important because it reflects personal insecurity or what some currently would call ’self-loathing’. So really a protective mechanism.
Also great referral to the Sara Robinson essay…I’m waiting for the 4th installment so I can read en bloc. Guideline for discourse with my Red-State type neighbors up here in Montana outback — who are generally good people.
[*I apologize for that….it’s self-congratulatory (’cause I’m here). Oh well.]
[The various modes of worship] seem to the people equally true, to the philosopher equally false and to the magistrate equally useful. - Edward Gibbon.
This still holds true for the philosopher and magistrate. The religions of the Book fucked it all to hell for the people though.
There is a recognised form of governance that melds fascism and theocracy; Falangism. Unfortunately for our little semantic powow here Falangism also, traditionally, is anti-capatalist which isn’t what these a-holes we’ve got right now are all about. Well, they are anti-capitalist but in the direction of Mercantilism not, like the Falange, Syndicalism.
Pablo: I think the term “Islamist” is pretty much the muslim version of Christian Dominionism, that is to say a political belief system of fundamentalist Islam that believes that the guidelines in the Koran should be basis for government.
I will agree with Dr. T and, really, David Neiwert. While the rhetoric on the right in America is definately trending towards Fascism, violent eliminationism of domestic political opposition and the elimination of the democratic structures in the US isn’t there yet. The remaining walls preventing the final decent into outright dictatorship an government sanctioned eliminationism are looking mighty thin these days, but recent events like the ruling against Bush’s lawbreaking suveillance program and Lamont’s victory against Lieberman keep me somewhat optomistic that the existing democratic structures can still prevent full-blown fascism from metastasizing.
Right now though, I really do think America could go either way.
mds: Thanks for clarifying things vis-a-vis communism. Some of that “left-wing extremism” we supposedly fought might well have kept the Taliban out of power in Aghanistan if the United States had done what it counsels others to do and minded its own business.
Amanda: Point taken. Have you a suggestion as to a good, succint label for Jihad, Inc’s ideology? I’m all ears. In fact, a good term for Abrahamic dominionism would probably be in order.
So let me get this straight. Muslims HATE and KILL, and because we are better than Muslims, we too need to HATE and KILL. Our HATE and KILLING is fine because we are real people, unlike Muslims, who are just fake people. Their fakeness, consequently, is what makes their HATE and their KILLING so much worse than ours, because if they were real people, you see, they would only HATE and KILL other fake people (who probably have brown skin too).
Gosh, it’s all so simple! Why didn’t any of you explain it like this to me before?
It’s not just the right-wing and other assorted GOP crazies using the “islamofascist” term. It’s routinely hurled around the liberal blogosphere as well. Just saunter over to Daily Kos for a few examples…
Doesn’t projection usually imply subconscious behavior? Not sure. But the latest xtian play at martyrdom seems much more conscious and propagandist. This christian self-proclaimed victimization is a concerted attempt at the re-education of large groups in this country to believe that a bland form of civic, non-sectarian Christianity was understood by our founders to be the moral basis of our rights, and the guiding philosophy of our social compact. That this is blatantly untrue is irrelevant to them. They need to get the next several generations of Americans to believe this in order to withstand judicial challenges to their legislative activism.
They’re creating their own reality, just like Rove said.
Douglas-> Al-Jazeera usually just uses the the term ‘islamicists’ or ‘radical islamicists’ to refer to any Islamic Militants, although I imagine the same objections would be raised if the West adopted such terms. I’ve also seen “Political Islam” used. This is still perhaps too broad. Someone could be a fairly reactionary Islamicist who believed in a strict application of Sharia, merging the chuch and state and all that without being Jihad oriented in the same way Bin Laden is, and without attaching any legitimacy to political terror.
As for Abrahamic Dominionism, the most sensible word is “Zionist”, although Zionists have tried to redefine the word to frame the debate differently. Although that’s vague, again, since Secular Zionism is different. Both are built on the premise of some sort of right to other people’s resources.
Personally, I tend to think the whole “Facism” discussion doesn’t really touch on what the worst-case scenario for the US (and by extension the world) is. The new “Pax Americana”, if Bush and co. continue to get there way, isn’t going to look quite the same as any other kind of imperialism has in the past, because the world is a very different place than it was 70 years ago. The social control the religious right wants to implement is limited to the US alone, but the Foreign Policy goals of the right basically spell out an economic and military Hegemony (not a social one). The corporatism is pretty similar to traditional fascism, but the Companies involved aren’t rooted in the US, they’re multinationals who are just as happy to sell to China.
Put differently, what I’m saying is that today’s rabid American Nationalism is, I think, unique in many ways, and needs it’s own terms. “Neo-Conservatism” is propably one of the better labels we have, although pop-culture uses of the word tend to obscure its meaning.
The utter unwillingness of our leadership to do what it would take to acheive our supposed goals in the Middle East tells you all you need to know about the real priorities of Republicans, which is to keep the hate and anger here high and keep people voting their anger and hate at the polls.
This is so. in credibly. true. When this most recent conflict started, and SYRIA was calling on the U.S. to help enforce peace… part of me was stunned. SYRIA wants us to help? Holy shit. This is kind of a big deal. And perhaps it was a political ploy — maybe they asked for the simple reason that they knew the Bush administration would sit back and watch with its thumb up its ass. Arab nations are asking the U.S. to intervene for peace and we sit and stare while people die… incredible. Wingnuts keep criticizing democrats for their “cut and run” strategy, saying that we NEED to be involved in this region, that we can’t revert to “isolationist” policies. It’s such a load of shit — as far as I know, no Dem has ever advocated withdrawing to our own soil and sticking our fingers in our ears. It’s because Dem’s seem not to support the “let’s go kill them all if they won’t accept our form of government and lifestyle” thing that most decent people (I hope on both sides of the aisle) have a problem with.
What is scary to me is that there are apparently people in this country who can’t see that. It’s so BLATANTLY obvious that the only involvement the Bush administration is willing to have in the Middle East involves first-strike assimilation policies, but alas… fear is such a great weapon of governance, isn’t it?
The social control the religious right wants to implement is limited to the US alone, but the Foreign Policy goals of the right basically spell out an economic and military Hegemony (not a social one).
That would certainly be true initially, labyrus. However, we can look clear back to Constantine’s extremely convenient religious conversion to see how using religion as a tool of statecraft in an empire breeds universal conversion at swordpoint. The Religious Right are still viewed as useful idiots by many at the top of the modern Republican Party, but that’s by no means static, especially if domestic goals are achieved. You know how there was all the hullabaloo about Israel attacking Lebanon being a precursor to the Rapture? Hardcore Rushdoony Dominionists don’t believe in a conventional Rapture; they believe that Christ will only return when Dominionists have conquered the world in the name of the Lord. That’s bound to have a few effects on foreign policy in a nation that combines neoconservatism with The Handmaid’s Tale.
Sometimes I think there’s an enormous “NOT” logical operator buzzing around Republicans’ heads. Reconstruction in the Middle East? Clearly, we have to do the exact opposite of what’s appropriate.
And all this projection of “fascism” really does a handy job of expending the force of the word. I mean, with the media as it is, why investigate nascent fascism over here when we’re told it already exists over there? Apparently, it’s the kind of thing that only comes in single servings these days. And you’d have to be some sort of paranoid liberal to argue otherwise! Yeesh.
And perhaps it was a political ploy…
That’s what probably scares me the most right now about the Bush administration and leaves me very pessimistic about the next 2 years: Bush’s lack of political acumen. At least with Bush Sr. in power, it felt like the U.S. at least had an equal seat at the table in foreign policy. Now it feels like we’re getting rolled left and right. We refuse to engage politically with any of our enemies, we ignore the Palestinian/Israel situation and we divert our military into a colonial nation-building disaster in Iraq. The Bush administration either will not or (worse) cannot engage in any meaningful sense with other governments and that leaves us profoundly isolated and vulnerable.
And these were supposed to be the “adults”…
[…] As usual, nicely put by Amanda at Pandagon. […]
Well, if you read Richard Clarke’s “Against All Enemies”, you’ll see that his estimate of the threat is that ObL does, in fact, have a dream of creating grand Muslim caliphate, and mostly recites the entire “they hate us for our freedom” stuff.
While I believe that ObL might well dream of a Muslim theocracy ruled with an iron fist, I’m not convinced that “fascist” is the right term. “Delusional (but no less dangerous) maniac” seems more appropriate.
I’ve been saying this for years. The only way to dismantle groups like Hezbollah is to usurp their power, to outperform them in the services that they provide their people. But because American politics is nothing more than unadulterated jingoistic prick-waving, actually helping real people live their lives is completely out of the question, especially since they don’t have the “right” color skin or the “right” religion or the “right” language.
It’s almost as if we’re actively cribbing from late 19th century Austro-German history, except this time, we’re the rabid national exceptionalists.
mds:
And is America a democracy?
Of course you are right, and I certainly didn’t mean to mischaracterize these ideologies. I was dealing in the language of political discourse in America. We are talking politics, not ideology. Rove, not Wolfowitz.
Communist USSR was a vicious parody of socialism as bin Laden is a vicious parody of Pat Robertson. The point is, in the popular mind, if the popular mind would think for a moment, bin Laden is conservative. Very conservative. Communists are on the liberal side of the divide. Nominally.
It is a PR nightmare for the Republicans that the Democrats have been unable to grasp, that religious fundamentalism is the problem. The problem is believing more in your god than in our common humanity. To illustrate, let me quote from the good book:
Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God says. “Out on Highway 61″.
If god commanded you to kill your child, would you? No? Welcome to agnosticism.
Yes? You are a fellow traveler with bin Laden.
Used to be the fellow travelers of our avowed enemies were on the left wing. Not all the racist hatred spewed by a thousand Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells can obscure their ideological similarities to bin Laden.
Among all the other good points here, the term “Islamofascisim” has a few other benefits:
It has associations with WWII, which was not only one of our greatest military victories, but was waged against enemies who were unquestionably monstrous (Well, this is completely without nuance, but that’s the dominant WWII narrative).
It serves to make our enemies into the other: If we called them “Islamic Fundamentalists” then we’d think, “Hey, we have religious fundamentalists here, too.” If we call them “Islamic Terrorists” then we think, “Hey, we have terrorists here, too.”.
But nearly nobody in America considers themselves to be outright fascists; Even proto-fascists like the current administration have to say everything in the language of Democracy; Bush doesn’t say, “Democrats are bent on destroying the nation!” he says, “Democrats don’t mean to destroy the nation, it’s just something they do accidentaly”.
Which is kind of the same, but is stated as though the speaker has some strong belief in pluralism.
Thirdly, and I just now thought of this, “fascism” is a term that necessarily implies a top-down and highly organised power structure; the term thus allows us to consolidate our enemies into one monolithic force, something the Bushites certainly enjoyed doing in the leadup to Iraq.
Besides giving them an excuse for whatever Middle Eastern adventures they want to engage in, this also allows people to focus on military solutions at the expense of other types of solutions. After all, Fascist organisations are not particularly fluid; people imagine them as, well, the Nazis; a well-oiled military under the thumb of a cruel dictator. Take out Hitler and the top generals, and the whole edifice will fall.
Meanwhile, if we think of our enemies as a loose confederation of people, with fluid membership and a loose power structure then military action seems less useful, AND the rhetoric of the “War on Terror” becomes much more unpalatable; rather then having a clear goal (Killing a small group of influential men) you have a vague one (Killing all terrorists everywhere) that is in all likelyhood never going to be accomplished.
Christopher…
Insightful last thoughts. Here’s two in reponse.
Command (’top down’) economy and command power structures are both imposition of
‘will’ on a system. That imposition has an effect but it usually amounts only to a
nudge and is temporary.
That ‘loose confederation of people, with fluid membership and a loose power structure’ ARE a system….and so, likely? to prevail.
Wondering….