I've always felt that it was inaccurate and pointless to refer to any American outside the neo-Nazi fringes as "fascist" -- but Christopher Hitchens, in his new Slate column, is making me think I may have been overly fastidious.
In the column Hitchens defends the use of the term "Islamofascist," making it clear that he thinks it's OK to call a non-fascist group "fascist" if its ideology is only only more or less like fascism. Close apparently counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and the enjoyably contemptuous use of the term "fascist."
And, well, Hitchens persuades me that some pockets of America -- particularly the bloc of Americans who over the years have fought the Civil War, anti-evolution battles, the battle to retain Jim Crow, and, more recently, the religious and anti-liberal culture wars -- are kinda-sorta fascist, and therefore close enough to deserve the label.
Here's Hitchens, referring to real fascists and "Islamofascists":
The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. ("Death to the intellect! Long live death!" as Gen. Francisco Franco's sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.)
Well, the Americans I'm talking about don't have a cult of murderous violence, but many of them do obsess over that damn Civil War. And many of them aren't very fond of the life of the mind. So we're close.
Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories.
Bingo.
Both are obsessed with real and imagined "humiliations" and thirsty for revenge.
Bingo again.
Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia).
There's less of that than you'd think among the Americans I'm thinking of, but it's there in some pockets.
Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book.
Ayup and ayup.
Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression -- especially to the repression of any sexual "deviance" -- and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.
Well, only a few Americans want to stone gays or adulterers to death. We have no burqas. We don't destroy museums or burn more than the occasional book. But there's antsiness (and often much more than that) about all of these matters here in America, so it's a difference of degree.
Fascism (and Nazism) also attempted to counterfeit the then-success of the socialist movement by issuing pseudo-socialist and populist appeals....
Yup.
There isn't a perfect congruence. Historically, fascism laid great emphasis on glorifying the nation-state and the corporate structure. There isn't much of a corporate structure in the Muslim world, where the conditions often approximate more nearly to feudalism than capitalism, but Bin Laden's own business conglomerate is, among other things, a rogue multinational corporation with some links to finance-capital....
And here's where Hitchens says close is good enough if you're going to say "fascist." He's pointing to an area where Islamic extremists aren't particularly fascist at all -- but it's OK because, he says, bin Laden is sort of like a top-tier CEO. Your thoughts, Dick Cheney?
Look, folks, I'm being facetious. I don't believe in calling the jihadists "fascists" and I don't believe in calling the Bushies or American right-wingers "fascists." I object for the same reason I object to the use of the word "evil" -- both "evil" and "fascist" are words deployed by rabble-rousers to turn off reason in your brain and make you crave pleasing fantasies of vengeance. And, as D. Sidhe notes in the comments to my post on the word "evil," the use of that term helps us persuade ourselves that whatever we do is acceptable:
"Evil" also becomes a way to differentiate--and ultimately excuse--the things our nation is doing (torture, rape of prisoners, indefinite detention without due process, bombing civilians, stealing the wealth of a nation while depriving it of even basics like clean water and power)from the things that Saddam or bin Laden or Ahmadinejad have done.
They're evil, that's why they do these things. We're just doing what we have to do to stay safe, so we're not evil, even when the cited actions are quite similar. That's why they deserve to be annihilated for their cruelty, and we deserve to be praised for our courage.
Ticking off rationalizations for the use of these words is not good enough. These words are aimed straight at the emotions.
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