Bush, “fascist” and the other F word
The term “Islamic fascist” has risen to the front of President Bush’s neural queue, it seems. He used it on Monday in reference to Hezbollah, and then Thursday he again applied it to the British plane-bombing ring.
It’s a big, heavy word, freighted with history that seems weirdly inapplicable in these cases. Fascism was all about fusing the power of the state and party with modern mythology cobbled together from odd remnants dug up from the bottom of the nationalist dustbin (Mussolini tried to drag in the grandeur of Rome, and Hitler loved his Valkyries), and it tended to be in conflict with organized religion, whose hold over the popular imagination it sought to supplant. As such, fascism seems a strange label to apply to the enemies we face today, in their statelessness and devotional fervor.
Yes, they share some of the traits we associate with fascism — a yearning for a lost era of glory, an indifference to civilian carnage (a trait that, alas, they hold no monopoly over). But why reach for this ill-fitting word when another “F word” lies so readily at hand and fits the bill so much more snugly?
Is there some reason that President Bush might not want to refer to the enemy as “fundamentalist”?
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August 11th, 2006 at 11:59 pm
It may be a Bushism - ‘Islamofascist’ has previously been used to refer to the Ba’ath party in Iraq and Syria, where your analogy hold up better; Hizb’allah as yet thankfully don’t have control of Lebanon, though the crisis they have precipitated may help them achieve that.
The term ‘Islamist’, for those who make a revolutionary ideology loosely based around Islam may be the one that fits better - what do you think?
August 12th, 2006 at 7:50 am
Indeed, “Islamist” makes more sense, and it has a specific meaning drawn from the whole notion of restoring the caliphate and the tradition of Sayyid Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood. Unfortunately, the term is so close phonetically and in spelling to “Islamic” that it is unlikely to achieve any valuable separation from that more general term in the public mind or the president’s. It appears to carry its own controversies as well (though what, in this realm, wouldn’t, I suppose).
I also think that “fanatic” (which clearly applies in all these cases) and “fascist” are so close that it may just be Bush’s mind sliding thoughtlessly from the former to the latter. Or quite deliberately. One of the abiding mysteries of the Bush presidency is, how much of his apparent incompetence and disconnectedness is genuine and how much is calculated for political advantage? I don’t think we’ll ever know the truth on that.
August 12th, 2006 at 6:19 pm
[...] Bush, “fascist” and the other F word [...]
August 15th, 2006 at 5:34 am
“Fascism” simply does not apply here: there was a fundamental (yes, deliberate word choice there!) element to the German and Italian (and the now-rampant American) strains of fascism that you didn’t mention and that is the merging of the corporate with the political.
When we see Islamic politicians openly incorporating Islamic corporation policies into political policy, then we can call it “Islamic fascism.” Until then, it just remains the word the Shrubya can’t get up the guts to say: “Fundamentalism.”
Religious fundamentalism is dangerous enough; when combined with political activism, things start getting nasty. When those two combine with Big Bidness, we’re heading into disaster territory.
August 16th, 2006 at 3:18 am
[...] Scott Rosenberg: “Is there some reason that President Bush might not want to refer to the enemy as ‘fundamentalist’?”. [...]
October 14th, 2006 at 5:26 pm
just another lie that the bush admin. tries to feed us
October 14th, 2006 at 5:32 pm
?