Comments

1. Dave

   Tuesday 23 October 2007 at 8:21

   Hitchens makes some good points, of course, and for the purposes of popular journalistic discourse, both Islamism and Baathism can certainly be said to share a number of features—and sources of inspiration—with European fascism (not necessarily all of the same ones, though).

   Also, it is at least as valid as the term “Islamophobia”—originally useful for describing a specific form of cultural racism, but now hideously deformed by the right-wing left so as merge Muslims with their would-be oppressors, the Islamists, to make use of ordinary Muslims as the Islamists’ “human shield”.

   (I think this is the point that Hitchens fails to stress enough: that the Islamists are essentially too weak to threaten the West in any fundamental way—certainly militarily—and that they are mainly a threat to Muslims worldwide.)

   However, that said, for Marxists, there can be no substitute for locating each kind of social or political movement, as well as each manifestation of that movement, in a specific time and place, as part of a specific process of development, each with its own inner logic. This is one of the things that give Marxism its explanatory power—at least, when it is properly applied, which is difficult.

2. anon

   Tuesday 23 October 2007 at 12:26

   [deleted non-comment — anon spamming crap]

3. unaha-closp

   Tuesday 23 October 2007 at 22:05

   Hitchens in naming Al Qaeda as the Islamofacists is refining the point too far. It is like trying to make out the Schutzstaffel were the only facists in Germany. The Scot writer Malise Ruthven got it in the 90s, Islamofacism is the practice of “god given” tyranny by oil rich Islamic regimes.

   This provides a much greater match for the facist practices. The oil revenue provides a mechanism of socialist-type wealth redistribution directly equivalent to the popular redistribution favoured by Fascism (and Nazism). These tyrannies lay great “emphasis on glorifying the nation-state and the corporate structure” (of the beneficial national corporate oil companies). The oil producers are the corporatist elite of the Middle Eastern Muslim world, fufilling a directly equivalent role to the industrialists of intra-war Europe. The nationalist racial superiority aspect of the islamofacist Arab and Persian states is witnessed in their wholesale oppression of ethnic minorities (Berber, Kurd, Fur, Indonesian maids in Saudi).

   Where Hitchens gets it wrong is - “Muslim world, where the conditions often approximate more nearly to feudalism than capitalism”. It does not much resemble feudalism. The people are not exploited by their superiors in a tax farming manner, the opposite occurs - the state provides for the people through the success of the corporate elite. Capitalism is practiced after a fashion where the nation states ideology and power is validated by its corporate success - facist capitalism.

   Al Qaeda is merely an internationalist off shoot of islamofacism. If we manage to defeat Al Qaeda it will be replaced by the next off shoot and the next and the next.

4. Bill

   Wednesday 24 October 2007 at 17:30

   I can simplify the argument. You gotta identify them as *something*. We say “Christian Right” and similar monkiers with little self criticism to refer to conservatives who tie into Christian theology to “lean” on everyone else. We even sometimes get uppidty and call’em or anyone else who disagrees with progressive themes, as “fascists.” Same should goes for the radical islamicists, right?

   If we for some reason cannot do the same for the gander as with the goose when they are doing it in the name of the same imaginary friend, you’d better be willing to give me a darned good answer why, ’cause ain’t nobody asking me why I’m insulting moderate Episcopalians when I say “Christian Right” or complain about Pat Robertson.