Calling certain militant Islamic movements neo-fascist can be just hot rhetoric, but it also can be a considered assessment. It is important to remember clerical fascism. Between WWI and WWII there were three forms of fascism:
--Italian Corporatist Fascism --German Racial Nationalist Fascism (Nazism) --Clerical Fascism.
Some useful definitions:
Robert Paxton: "A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
Ernst Nolte: 6 points--antimarxism, antiliberalism, anticonservatism, the leadership principle, a party army, the aim of totalitarianism.
Roger Griffin: "[F]ascism is best defined as a revolutionary form of nationalism, one that sets out to be a political, social and ethical revolution, welding the 'people' into a dynamic national community under new elites infused with heroic values. The core myth that inspires this project is that only a populist, trans-class movement of purifying, cathartic national rebirth (palingenesis) can stem the tide of decadence."
I have two published articles where I make the argument that certain militant Islamic movements can be called neo-fascist:
Chip Berlet. (2005). "When Alienation Turns Right: Populist Conspiracism, the Apocalyptic Style, and Neofascist Movements." In Lauren Langman & Devorah Kalekin Fishman, (eds.), Trauma, Promise, and the Millennium: The Evolution of Alienation. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
_______. (2003). "Terminology: Use with Caution." Fascism. Vol. 5, Critical Concepts in Political Science, Roger Griffin and Matthew Feldman, eds. New York, NY: Routledge.
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