I was frankly flabbergasted to see that someone for whom I have a good deal of respect and who I count as a friend (and of course I still do despite my frustration with them at the moment) actually made some sympathetic noises about Bush's recent rhetorical line about "Islamic Fascism." This is a person who shares my atheism and I think finds it appealing in some abstract way to think that religious fundamentalism is being connected in a very public way with totalitarian ideology. All this provokes in me an almost unbearable wearying desolation.
Look, this should go without saying, but Bush is grotesquely obviously using the term "fascism" here to create a visceral emotional connection between his catastrophic unending and unendable "global war on terror" (by means of state terror) and the apparently morally unimpeachable Second World War.
Now, fascism historically is an authoritarian formation of corporatism -- and, it should go without saying, the United States is considerably closer to that formation than are most of the regimes Bush selectively attacks in his disgusting criminal oil grab.
If you get taken in by the general frame that Bush is circulating here, it simply doesn't matter how often you go on to make your sad inevitable ritual genuflection to the effect that "now, of course I know not all Muslims are terrorists" or what have you. It should go without saying, but this is exactly as tired as the creaky clumsy inevitability with which a racist comment always follows immediately after the preamble protestation, "now, I'm not racist, but..." Bush's multiply ignorant, endlessly cynical "islamofascist" rhetoric circulates to inculcate a universalizing connection between Islam and totalitarianism (via the iconography of the bleak disastrous "glory days" of muscular Cold War conservatism) and everybody knows it by now and, hence, again, all this should really go without saying by now, too.
You know, this really should go without saying, but, once again, only a vanishingly small minority of the world's Muslims are terrorists, and the vast majority of the ones who are terrorists have been radicalized by social insecurity, hopelessness, and exploitation (usually, it should go without saying, faciliated directly by US and North Atlantic foreign and trade policy) and not at all by their Islamic faith or practice.
Now, I'm an atheist and, it should go without saying, fundamentalism (which is a sociopolitical formation rather than a metaphysical one) scares me as much as it does anybody here. As an atheist feminist faggot democrat I know quite well what my life is worth in a theocracy. But neoconservatives have been wreaking havoc on the planet throwing glib crapola around about "fascism" "the Muslim World" (there is no such monolithic thing) "the clash of Civilizations" and so on -- and the people who come to my friend's website to discuss technoscientific topics are too smart and earnest to be robotically repeating still these bloodsoaked know-nothing soundbites after so many years of stupid appalling devastation.
All this should go without saying.
This isn't a tea party conversation, people. This rhetoric is doing real material work in the world. It is pulling triggers and dropping bombs and radicalizing sprawling populations of people who have little to lose and with whom we will be sharing the world for the rest of our lives. Things can actually get much worse if intelligent people of good will get too lazy to understand what is afoot here. There is certainly important political work to do to secularize this multicultural world in which we find ourselves, to make the world safer for atheists as well as for folks who practice marginal spiritual creeds, or what have you. But it should go without saying that we have to be incredibly sensitive to the ways in which American fundamentalists (of the Christian and market varieties) eagerly appropriate anti-fundamentalist militancy in the service of their own gunslinging moralizing in the clash of contemporary fundamentalisms, killing numberless innocents in our name.
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3 comments:
Dale, I wish you had actually taken the time to refute the various points I made in my article instead of offering trite contradictions and spouting off anti-Bush remarks. I understand that the current administration has you foaming at the mouth (and I share your frustration), but my article was an effort to move the conversation outside of the neo-con perspective and offer an "outsider's" viewpoint on the political phenomenon that is theocratic Islamic fundamentalism. It's obvious that this was completely lost on you, making this post of yours very regrettable. Moreover, a discussion of American right-wing extremism was beyond the scope of my article, and consequently should not be taken as a suggestion on my part that it doesn’t exist.
I'm actually getting the impression that you didn't read the entire article, or that your brain turned off simply due to the fact that I was elaborating on an accusation made by the Bush administration. Islamic totalitarianism is not a figment. Why did you choose to ignore the fact that Salmon Rushdie and other intellectuals have made the exact same claim? Your accusation that it is "abstract" of me to tie in theocratic religious fundamentalism with totalitarian ideology is patent nonsense. How can you make such a claim? I spent the better part of 6 years studying various totalitarian phenomenons when I was at university taking history and political science; I don't make these accusations lightly nor without justification.
Dale, are you aware that people are being summarily executed in Iran for the most petty of offences (a 16yr old girl was executed recently because she was raped), or that the Iranian government is training (or is that brainwashing) children to be suicide shock troops and human shields? Ahmadinejad has people throwing themselves off cliffs to show their devotion (if you feel you need citations for these claims, please ask). And you're telling me my rationalization that this is blatant totalitarianism is somehow abstract? How *dare* you minimize these horrors at the opportunity to take a piss on the Bush administration.
The fascistic theocratic *totalitarian* Iranian regime is pure evil regardless of who their opposition is.
(btw, your characterization of fascism as an authoritarian outgrowth of right-wing corporatism is largely inaccurate. Many business owners under both the German and Italian fascists resented the sweeping socialization and domination of the ruling parties. All state activities had to be under the guidance of the ruling ideology, which greatly constrained the free market and led to an artificial command economy much like the Soviet Union)
The only thing more trite than my accusations against Bush are the crimes of his that occasion my criticisms. And you need to think twice before you ascribe wild emotionalism to my claims just because I disagree with you on matters of emphasis on such questions. Glass houses and all that (see subsequent discussion of your unfortunate "how dare you" moment for more).
You say: "I'm actually getting the impression that you didn't read the entire article[.]" No such luck, I read it all and disagree with you is all. "[O]r that your brain turned off simply due to the fact that I was elaborating on an accusation made by the Bush administration." This is veering close to a fairly typical ad hominem I am used to hearing from people whose politics are not yours, but I don't take it personally. Even friends get snappy when they passionately disagree from time to time.
You say: "Islamic totalitarianism is not a figment. Why did you choose to ignore the fact that Salmon Rushdie and other intellectuals have made the exact same claim?" This simply wasn't the focus of my comments, and I don't think it matters much in light of the point I was making instead. I think these arguments have a very specific kind of impact in the context of the so-called American "global war on terror" (by means of state terror) and I am calling attention to my worries on this score.
You say: "Your accusation that it is 'abstract' of me to tie in theocratic religious fundamentalism with totalitarian ideology is patent nonsense." To have just this discussion at just this time in just this way in a post that literally begins with a quote from George W. Bush on "Islamic fascism" is quite simply to be a dupe facilitating war crimes taking place in our names right here, right now in my view. I do consider the discussion of Islamic Fascism by North Atlantic citizens in wartime to be "abstract" and perniciously depoliticized compared to the bloody material reality on the ground facilitated by precisely such rhetorical moves. I don't think we deserve the luxury of pretending in making arguments like these that we don't know who is making comparable arguments with what consequences in times like these. I don't know of a way to sugar coat that assessment in a way that might protect me from charges that I am foaming at the mouth, but there it is. Clearly, you disagree. I think you are terribly wrongheaded to think that way. I guess we'll have to leave it at that.
You ask: "How can you make such a claim?" By putting one word after another until I reach the end of the sentence is how.
You write: "Dale, are you aware that people are being summarily executed in Iran for the most petty of offences (a 16yr old girl was executed recently because she was raped), or that the Iranian government is training (or is that brainwashing) children to be suicide shock troops and human shields? Ahmadinejad has people throwing themselves off cliffs to show their devotion (if you feel you need citations for these claims, please ask). And you're telling me my rationalization that this is blatant totalitarianism is somehow abstract? How *dare* you minimize these horrors at the opportunity to take a piss on the Bush administration."
Nothing I have said minimizes the horrors you speak of, and I suspect you will eventually be ashamed of yourself for suggesting otherwise. I don't need to jump on the neoconservative "Islamofascist" rhetorical bandwagon to be aware of the workings and effects of ongoing radicalization in the Middle East and elsewhere (facilitated among other things by precisely such glib overgeneralizations about Islam on the part of a cynical neoconservative corporate-military machine).
Would you want me to pull the awful analogous move of saying "George, are you aware that Iraqi civilians, including children, are being raped and killed in the name of a global war on terror peddled with a rhetoric that conjoins Christian evangelism with anti-Nazi war movie nostalgia and a Cold War mindset, some of which is inseparable from the claims you are making about Islamic fascism in this historical moment?" Do you want me to pretend to think you condone such things even when I know full well that you don't? That's just plain icky.
Obviously (I would hope, apparently inaccurately) it is precisly because I know that you don't support such atrocities that I expect you would give a grateful hearing to the suggestion from someone you like and respect that the rhetoric you are employing perhaps too innocently may in fact facilitate outcomes I feel sure you would not desire any more than I would.
And the reported "resentment" of some Italian businessmen notwithstanding, my characterization of fascism as a form of corporatism remains perfectly accurate.
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