On "Islamo-fascism"

Oversimplification is easy. More to the point, it is simple; in fact, it is over simple. As such, it is comfortable, welcoming, reinforcing, reassuring, redemptive, and much more. The problem is that oversimplification is not in our nation’s interest. This ought to be reason enough to reject the artificially monochromatic paradigm that our president is parroting as the latest justification for the war in Iraq.

Is the United States at war? The United States is most certainly not at war, as war would have been defined by any previous generation of Americans. The idea of a war against an ideology, rather than a nation, is unprecedented for the republic, despite what the Bush administration may incessantly claim.

The president repeatedly cites Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union as examples of previously vanquished threats that were fundamentally similar to the current threat from “Islamo-fascism”.

Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were similar in their chauvinistic racism, jingoistic nationalism, and aggressive imperialism, but, fortunately for the United States, both of the threatening ideologies were analogous to a specific nation-state that could be targeted, assaulted, and eventually forced into unconditional surrender. No longer global military powers, Germany and Japan are now among the handful of the world’s wealthiest nations. And let us not forget that this economic ascendance has been aided immeasurably by the occasionally onerous protection of the American military for the past six decades.

The Soviet Union did not share the racism of the swastika or the rising sun, but it shared their contempt for individual human life and their expansionist tendencies. Since the USSR had a deterrent in the form of a nuclear arsenal from 1950 onwards, they were defeated through decades of covert and proxy wars, propaganda, diplomacy, and economic warfare, rather than a few years of total war. And we should give thanks daily that the leadership of the Soviet Union had the historically unparalleled wisdom to allow their empire to dissolve peacefully. Still, one thing holds between Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union. There was always a rational political entity that could be deterred in the face of an obvious imbalance of military power.

The current, stateless, threat is impervious to such deterrence. Therefore, it is fundamentally different from the threats that we have previously faced. Our enemies are certainly captured by the prefix “Islamo”, but what of fascism?

Fascism has no universally recognized definition; like communism, it is an ideology that has been routinely hijacked by messianic murderers that co-opt it as a label in a misbegotten attempt at self-bestowed political legitimacy. Fascism’s first progenitor, Benito Mussolini, stated that, “fascism is better called corporatism”. All definitions of fascism find room for nationalism, capitalism, and militarism.

We are at war with people who wish to resurrect a long-dead Islamic caliphate. This idea, by definition, rejects the western ideology of nationalism, which serves as the most load-bearing beam in the insidious architecture of fascism. Not only do our enemies not stress nationalism, they cite it as a western plot to weaken Muslims. To our enemies, the borders between Iraq and Kuwait, Syria and Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, Israel and anyone, are western inventions that serve no other purpose than to act as western colonialism’s time-rusted compass. Our enemies seek to erase scores of national boundaries in the interest of creating a single political entity, which would be “political” in an almost imperceptible sense.

There is an enemy. We are at war. But this is not 1941, and it is not 1962. The president does no justice to the need for an informed citizenry by continually parroting these tired and misleading reference points for our current foreign entanglements. We are not children, Mr. President. We all saw 9/11; we live here, too. We understand that what happened that day portended something new, something brand new, something that called for a fundamental reordering and restructuring of our outlook on the world. We knew something had changed. We only wish that you had understood that as well as we did. And if I’m wrong, if you really do get it, stop insulting our intelligence by telling us that we are fighting monsters that we all know to be dead.