****
Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer.
Ein Volk: The Believers. That Umma to which all loyalty is owed, and who are so very different from the Unbelievers, or Infidels, to whom no loyalty, or friendship, or true kindness, or unfeigned gratitude, must ever be felt or shown.
Ein Reich: The Caliphate, or if not administratively yet one Caliphate, then some approximation thereof, of Muslim states working in tandem against non-Muslims. For now, that amounts to the O.I.C. (Organization of Islamic Countries) and, still more basic, the Arab League. Within those groupings there are internal problems, but that does not hide the fact of the attempt to bring together all the Muslim-ruled lands to stand, in opposition, whenever necessary, to non-Muslims. There is no other equivalent grouping, by any Infidels anywhere (no "Organization of Christian or even Post-Christian States" or "Organization of Buddhist States" and as for "Hindu" or "Jewish states" each of those sets has a membership, cantorially speaking, of one).
Ein Fuhrer. There are rivalries for that post of would-be Fuhrer. There is the mediagenic, soft-spoken Bin Laden. There is the unmediagenic, un-soft-spoken Al-Zawahiri. There are other, little fuhrers hoping to grow bigger: Khaled Meshaal of Hamas, or even a Shia candidate or two, unlikely as it appears that the Sunnis would ever acquiesce in a Shi'a-ruled quasi-caliphate: the late Ayatollah Khomeini, or Sheikh Nasrallah of Hezbollah in Lebanon,, or Moqtada al-Sadr of the Mahdi Army in Iraq. It doesn't matter whether this or that candidate is now judged the Most Likely to Succeed as the Successor to the Successors of Muhammad, the Rightly-Guided Caliphs of the first century of Islam. What matters only is that the ideal of the united Muslims (united against Infidels), within a united Caliphate, and run by a Rightly-Guided Caliph, is present in the minds, or hopes and dreams, of hundreds of millions.
http://www.newenglishreview****
3 comments:
Here's the Permalink to Hugh's post, which includes a mysterious Dag reference to a Russo-Islamic symbol. I always figured Dag was a Colt man.
Are Islam and Naziism closely analogous? Maybe one day they will be. But the Third Reich was hardly the stable thousand year Reich promised, and arguably it could not have lasted long even if they had won the war because its desperate questing for perfection was all too worldly and unrealistically activist and bound to stir up trouble within and without Berlin. Islam has lasted 1400 years, how many of those under a Caliphate? So what do the Muslims know about despotism that Hitler did not? Was it things as simple as allowing Jews to be dhimmis rather than an object to be eradicated at all costs on the false promise that this would rid modern man of his anomie? Islam only promises virgins or raisins in paradise. In this world you can just submit, shut up, and go home, plant a few crops and beat your wife: you don't have to constantly prove your modernity is the best.
For this reason, perhaps we should fear an Islam that has managed to scrabble together a few nukes much more than our forebears feared the Nazis. Arguably the analogy to the West's favorite devil does not capture this adequately.
Many might choose Islam's promise of lazy despotism. The only problem is that an orthodox Islam will never support the kind of economy and creativity that can feed anywhere near the present population of the planet. And if one day we're all the Umma, if we stop being dhimmi slaves doing all the economic heavy lifting and just sign on to the Koran club, who gets to starve first?
I don't lump Nazis with fascism itself as the end of the discussion. Fascism is local and yet universal, particular and also general. Franco was as much a fascist as Hitler, and yet the two nations were utterly different in practice. There need not be an exact match between one fascist programme and another, only great similarites of base. Looking at our restricted definition of fascism as from the 1920s t0 1940s misses the point of Ur Fascism, the very roots of the fascism that grows here and there across time.
Regarding my comment at New English Review, I could kick myself for my fit of aphasia: "All the lawyers in my village are named Smith and Wesson."
I'll kill ten innocent by-standers for that mistake!
Fascism is local and yet universal, particular and also general.
Fascism is universal? It exists even in primitive-hunter gatherer societies where man is highly bound to ritual, but not to any big man? Big men have existed on this earth little more than 5000 years.
Totalitarianism, despotism, sado-masochism, enslavement, ritually- bound sacrality, first among equals: why not use such general terminology? why the appeal of "fascism"? Everyone is called a fascist now a days I wonder if it means anything more to the kids today than calling someone arrogant, manly, etc
Post a Comment