> One should not put forth the distinction between Islamic
> fundamentalism and Islam, a la Bush and Blair, who never forget to
> praise Islam as a great religion of love and tolerance that has
> nothing to do with disgusting terrorist acts. Instead, one should
> gather the courage to recognize the obvious fact that there is a deep
> strain of violence and intolerance in Islam-that, to put it bluntly,
> something in Islam resists the liberal-capitalist world order. By
> transposing this tension into the core of Islam, one can conceive such
> resistance as an opportunity: It need not necessarily lead to
> "Islamo-Fascism," but rather could be articulated into a Socialist
> project. The traditional European Fascism was a misdirected act of
> resistance against the deadlocks of capitalist modernization. What was
> wrong with Fascism was NOT (as liberals keep telling us) its dream of
> a people's community that overcomes capitalist competition through a
> spirit of collective discipline and sacrifice, but how these motives
> were deformed by a specific political twist. Fascism, in a way, took
> the best and turned it into the worst.
The idea of "love" that defines "socialism" is "mutual recognition." The psychotic psychopathology associated with a largely unmastered "deep strain of violence and intolerance" is incapable of "love" in this sense. The extreme degree of psychopathology involved also makes such a capacity very difficult to develop. There isn't, therefore, an "inner truth and greatness" in National Socialism that "could be articulated into a Socialist project."
Ted