I guess I'm not against it, but it seems to me that using the term is more likely to contribute to what he rightly calls the repeated recycling of the theme, in a way that avoids real analysis of what the Taliban régime and the broader Islamic fundamentalist phenomenon actually are. Even if we try to avoid it, using the term "fascism" tends to focus us on the social and mass psychological features of European populations a few generations back. Isn't it better to define some of the things we would need to know in order to arrive at an analysis of these contemporary issues in a way analogous to the way we and people like us have analyzed fascism over the years?
This looks like a probable good start --
> I suggest a key concept in the transition from
> precapitalist to capitalist societies and from them to socialism is that of
> bourgeois democratic rights. People are not being wholly unscientific in
> looking at regimes that drastically restrict these, as fascist.
>
But then we must ask what has stood in the way of developing bourgeois democratic rights. What social and social psychological experiences are absent in some of the Islamic world that lead to this failure? It failed too, in Europe, up to a dangerous point. People like Horkheimer and Adorno shed some light on why this happened, in terms of family structure and personal development. How much can we transfer their analysis to Afghanistan? Probably not too much, at least directly, and the effort to transfer the analysis, rather than to begin with an analysis from the ground up, is almost certain to lead us astray.
I personally feel quite ignorant of much that I would need to know in order to arrive at a sounder understanding. For example, what are the ranges of family structures, related to gender and class developments, the changes in all of these things, the degree to which there has been transition from pre-modern to modern cultural patterns, the way in which Islam itself has participated in these developments.
Before we start comparing populations in the developing world to European ones, we need to be clearer on all this.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema