a column!

In recent weeks, trying to explain the American position on the conflict in Lebanon or to identify the enemy within the mess, President Bush has adopted with ever more enthusiasm the phrase "Islamo-fascism," long popular with neo-conservative intellectuals. It's hard to express how misleading it is.
   And it is intentionally misleading, an attempt to fix public opinion concerning an extraordinarily complex world around a simplistic - or perhaps actually idiotic - dichotomy.
    To see that, begin by asking this: who are the Islamo-fascists that we're supposedly fighting in Iraq, the "front line on the war on terror"? The "insurgency" of al Qaeda, or of Saddam loyalists? Iranian-connected Shia militias? The armed forces of Iraq and connected death squads? To try to toss Chechen nationalists, Afghan warlords, the Taliban, Hezbollah, and (what the hell) North Korea into the mix, while excluding Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or the government of Lebanon can be expected to yield an entirely incoherent world, and it is at least yielding bad policy.
    We might begin by asking what the term 'fascism' means. It's one of the most elusive terms in political philosophy. Certainly, it implies a totalitarian government. But we might ask ourselves, for example, what people meant when they called Mussolini or Hitler or Franco a fascist.
     First of all, the phrase implies an enthusiasm for interconnected industrialization and militarism. It is distinguished from its perennial enemy communism by leaving capital in private hands and encouraging its rapid expansion. Indeed the dominant corporations of fascist nations have traditionally prospered. Fascism is characterized by a basically secular hyper-nationalism, a la the Ba'ath party.
     At the very heart of fascism, however, was what we might term its aesthetic: its symbol systems and visual languages. Under the aegis of the master designers Joseph Goebbels, Albert Speer, and Leni Riefenstahl, fascism developed an aesthetic of neo-classical gigantism: of perfect bodies and intimidating marble edifices, of tens of thousands of people marching and singing in unison. The fascist aesthetic was beautiful (at its best), arid, and designed to intimidate.
     At any rate, trying to understand the Islamic world by throwing around "fascism" is worse than useless. Indeed, the economy of the United States - to say nothing of our nationalism and militarism - are more like Nazi Germany than is that of any Islamic country. And of course, even as we condemn our enemies as fascists we are resorting to secret prisons and a vast secret police surveillance operation. Of the aesthetic developed by Karl Rove and of the architecture of Washington, DC, I remain silent.
    Whatever led to the emergence of fascism in early twentieth-century Europe, it is assuredly not much like what has led to the emergence of radical Islam or of terrorism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first. For this, you are obviously much better off looking at the history of Islam itself and at the effect of Western capitalism on the third world than at the disaffection and decadence of Europe in the twenties and thirties.
    Fascism has nothing to do with Islam's history of heresy and fundamentalism, poetry and philosophy, conquest and defeat, violence and transcendence, incorporation and exclusion, life and its annihilation.
     One might just dismiss the phrase "Islamo-fascism," then. as an infelicity or slip of the mind. But it is deeply offensive, first of all, because it is an indication of how stupid the people who run the country think the people they run (us) are. They think we can handle exactly one opposition, exactly two forces: yes and no, good and evil, capitalism and communism, freedom and fascism. Another way the administration tries to achieve this end is by continuously tossing out the phrase "the enemy." If you think you have a good handle on who they mean, I suggest you keep on pondering.

     And second, it is a symptom of the mere dualism of the administration's policies: support Israel and condemn Hezbollah, for instance, incessantly, repeatedly, no matter what happens ever. Insist the democracy is succeeding in Iraq and refuse to make the actual compromises required for peace.
    Paradoxically, this may help manufacture the bipolar world that it fantasizes: we will manage to alienate so much of the world so severely that we succeed in splitting it in two: with us and against us.
    We'd be better off with a larger, truer, and less manipulative set of concepts.