[lbo-talk] fascism

[www.leninology. blogspot.com]

Tahir Wood wrote:
> The comparisons that have been made here between religious> fundamentalism and fascism are interesting; they seem to revolve partly> around the meaning of the word 'fascism'.
The comparison is facile, partly because the terms are inadequate.  Political Islam, for instance, can take leftist and reactionary forms.  Hasan Hannafi, and Egyptian Islamist, interprets Islam as supporting democracy through the shura, supports womens' rights and pluralism etc.  The MEK used to interpret Islam as providing the basis for revolutionary socialism (before they became Ba'athists and then neocons).  
> My own working definition of fascism has always been that it is> ultra-nationalism. It posits a common identity, usually linked to> ethnicity, but always linked to territory. Identity and territory are> the two main mechanisms that people use to create the Other. And fascism> is always deeply concerned with identifying and defining the Other.
This is certainly a gesture common to all fascist movements, but in and of itself it isn't adequate.  I would suggest, (as would Robert Paxton, Ian Kershaw, Leon Trotsky etc) that fascism is first and foremost a movement, and that there is little to no coherence in the ideologies expressed and experienced by its agents (if there is such a thing as a coherent fascist ideology, it is probably to be inferred from the actions of fascists in power).  It is a movement borne out of the social distress and dislocation created by capitalism, which particularly affects the unemployed and petit-bourgeois elements whose class position encourages them to think in individualistic rather than collectivist terms.  Sorry if this is obvious, but in light of the above, it bears drawing out: most nationalist movements of the Third World (which would include Political Islam, even if the imagined community in this case is the Umma) would not in that analysis be fascist: they are anti-imperialist rather than 'anticapitalist'; their nationalism is not dominative; they have often been far more democratic than any fascist movement; they do not usually involve doctrines of a polygenic hierarchy of race - actually, they are often humanistic and universalist (this is true of Hezbollah, for instance); even where they have been militarist, they have not necessarily been expansionist.  Etc.
> I do not think that western christian fundamentalists are always> fascists or even like fascists. Many are merely conservative, which is> different, maybe due to a western commitment to democracy, and nazi> types are generally indifferent to Christianity, if not hostile to it.> They usually prefer paganism, like Nietsche in fact.
Quite - but give Nietzsche a break: he's had to put up with decades of association with those mystical quacks, when the truth is that he would have laughed his head off at the preposterous poseurs of the Third Reich, and he would also have resiled from the inherent populism of the movement.
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