Look, I don't spend a lot of time in the useless task of debating leninists on anything, because as I have made it clear I don't respect their positions on many things. So I can't guarantee that I will keep this thread going, but I will make one or two brief replies below. Tahir
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.
Tahir: I didn't discuss "political islam" as some kind of unitary phenomenon. There are democratic, feminist and liberation theology forms of islamic politics. If you look at my post again you will see that I wasn't discussing them.
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).
Tahir: I don't see any reason for preferring the fundamentalists to MEK. I doubt whether they are neocons, even today. I do think they are rather tacky opportunists, whereas they were perhaps something better circa 1979. They were at least better than the blithering idots of the Tudeh party who were quite prepared to suck the dicks of the clergy just as much as they were prepared to serve the stalinists. As for democracy, this is explicitly condemned by many islamist movements, and implicitly undermined by others. Take any of the definitive freedoms of democracy, freedom of speech, association, thought, whatever, they are all restricted under islamic rule.
> 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
Tahir: No its not at all obvious; it's self contradictory. "Think in individualist rather than collectivist terms", so you go and found a "movement"!! What, a movement of one? Please think things through a little, even if it goes against the grain (I'm sure it does, but make the effort at least).
, 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.
Tahir: Besides the fact that this ignores my argument (leave that aside, it's what I expect), every one of these assertions can be disproved by facts. Firstly on the anti-imperialist question; all fascist movements have their anti-imperialist moments. Take the Afrikaner nationalists of South Africa, for example. They fought two bloody wars against British imperialism without any assistance. Many fascist movements are not expansionist. How expansionist was Franco's Spain, Pinochet's Chile, or indeed apartheid South Africa? Not very. Islam however has for most of its history been expansionist and imperialist - just ask the Indians - and I see no reason why some of the modern islamic movements should not also be expansionist. So there again, not much of a point. Not "dominative"? Ask the minorities of Iran about that (including the Arabs). Ask the workers of any country in the middle east if their rulling classes are not "dominative". Ask women the same question. I haven't got time to expand on this, except to say your enthusiasm for the notion of anti-imperialism, which I would guess you have fairly recently adopted (I gave up on it and my last vestiges of leninism about 10 years ago), is leading you to distort the facts. I don't expect that to change as a result of any dialogue with me.
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