“The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”~ Francisco Goya
These pertinent words from the Spanish Romantic artist Goya bear reflecting upon because it succinctly distils the mentality of free democratic societies today. “Reason” has indeed been a sleep, slumped heavily upon the table of western civilization and out of this sleep a nightmare has arisen into the consciousness of an alarmed world. The “monster” I am describing is the phenomenon of Fascism, that visceral word that invokes memories of horror from our European history.
An old Leftie slogan “Fascism Means War” used to resonate deep within the moral makeup of the Left. It is a poignant phrase because it can be read at least two ways. Firstly, it accurately describes the nature of Fascist movements to bring bloodshed and destruction wherever their tendrils of influence take root within any given society. Secondly, it acts as a rallying call to oppose Fascism both ideologically and militarily. The leading Left intelligentsia of the 1930’s knew this all too well, with figures such as George Orwell and W. H. Auden going to fight the Fascist backed Franco regime in ‘The Spanish Civil War’. This is not to say there were not significant differences between intellectuals such as Auden and Orwell, but one idea bound them together “Fascism Means War”.
Fast forward in time, the jackboot marching Fascist regimes of Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini have been defeated, discredited, and banished to the dustbin of history. Germany, Italy, and Spain are now functioning and stable democracies, but this is not to say that Fascism is defeated in Europe. To the contrary, ideas of the extreme totalitarian Far-Right are alive and spreading not only in the heart of Europe but across the Middle-East and North Africa. It is what the late Christopher Hitchens described most accurately as “Fascism with an Islamic face” or what is commonly referred to as Islamism.
The attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in recent days has shocked the world and for good reason. The targeted murder of the staff of Charlie Hebdo for the “crime” of caricaturing the supposed prophet of Islam Muhammad, has attacked something deep and valuable that is at the core of our identities as citizens of free, open, and democratic societies. To put this into context, people were murdered for drawing mere lines on a page that represent symbols! Historians can now add to the long list of Islamist crimes, waged on citizens of Western and non-Western countries alike, those brave cartoonists working for Charlie Hebdo. For merely daring to voice an opinion that is contrary to a particular hard-line politicized version of Sunni Islam Stéphane Charbonnier Jean Cabut, Philippe Honoré, Bernard Verlhac, Georges Wolinski, Elsa Cayat, and Bernard Maris were killed. Slaughtered for espousing the ideals of liberty and free expression in a country that is proudly built upon the values and ideas emanating from Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire.
However, there is a huge trap that our politicians, the mainstream media, and the wider public in general are falling into. This is the refusal to speak with honesty and clarity so as to truly define the enemy that is accosting our world civilization. Politicians such as David Cameron and Francois Hollande speak empty platitudes that these attacks of terror carried out in the name of Islam have in fact “nothing do with the Muslim religion” or that the leader of the free world, Barack Obama, unbelievably declaring in a speech at the UN that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam”. I will tackle these statements in three ways so as to elucidate issues that arise from such flagrant obfuscation. Firstly, I understand the realpolitik of such words. The leaders of democracies in the west continually attempt to say this has “nothing” to do with “religion” and are mere acts of the mentally ill, so as not to give succour to bigotry. It is the attempt to snuff out the mental oxygen that gives rise to the notions of collective punishment and the much feared “backlash” towards our fellow Muslim citizens. Moreover, it is an endeavour to strip the terrorists of the label of authenticity and therefore not truly Muslim, an aberration. But this is a fantasy and a dangerous one at that.
The hard and honest truth is that these terrorist attacks perpetrated by Islamists, a movement of the totalitarian extreme Far-Right, have everything to do with religion, a politicised interpretation of religion, but nevertheless still religion. It was not for nothing, that the people after carrying out a massacre of cartoonists were heard on the streets shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is Great) and claiming they have avenged the reputation of the alleged “Prophet Muhammad”. This is not the language of secularism, to the contrary, it is explicitly the language of religious wide-eyed fanaticism. Furthermore, this is not to say that over a billion Muslims all think alike and share in the same interpretation of religious texts as the brother’s Saïd Kouachi and Chérif Kouachi and their ideological bedfellows. However, that does not absolve the fact that their reading of Islam and its fusion of totalitarian eliminationism is not pulled out of thin air, it is a worryingly credible interpretation of the faith. To not correctly define, understand, and take stock of the motives of an enemy is a path that will always lead to disaster. It is the equivalent of blindfolding a boxer in a vain attempt to land a blow on an opponent by wildly flailing into the dark and constantly being surprised when the boxer gets outmanoeuvred and left sprawling unconscious on the canvas on the end of a right-hook, then getting up and repeating the same failed process. To correctly define is to understand which will be the tools in which we dismantle this hate filled ideology.
Finally, to continually deflect responsibility away from hard-line literalist religious belief is to sell a lie to the public, which in itself can lead to violence. If the mainstream media and our elected representatives do not take the centre ground with an objective reflection of reality and the motivations behind specific acts of violence, it will cede the middle ground to unsavoury elements within our societies. My fear is that we will have Fascists fight Islamist Fascists in a state of perpetual war in which the decent sentiments of liberalism and equality are stamped to death in the ensuing carnage. It is what W. B. Yeats refers to in his poem The Second Coming, when he writes:
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
The “centre” must hold and the space must be filled with a coalition of liberal minded people, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, who honestly assess the facts about the dangers of the times we live in and gather round in solidarity against movements and ideologies of the totalitarian Far-Right.
One way how not to deal with instances of Islamist murder and hostage taking are to make mealy mouthed words criticising cartoonists as agitating to get themselves murdered and therefore baring partial responsibility for their untimely demise. This only being further compounded by certain voices of the Left charging Charlie Hebdo with the labels of racism and xenophobia. The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists are journalists of a type, using satire to make political commentary of our European political milieu. To attribute the cartoonists with an inclination towards racism is to de-factor imply that they had what was coming to them. I would also contend that the speakers making such arguments on the Left are remarkably incurious concerning the French culture of satire and therefore incapable of seeing nuance and the uses of the comedic device of the double entendre. Charlie Hebdo are not a racist magazine, in point of fact they are a Left-Wing satirically polemic magazine that is strongly anti-racist, the scourge of the extreme Right and its anti-immigrant policies, and an equal opportunity offender of all religions. As an example of their anti-racism look at some of the cartoons depicting the Far-Right leader of Front National Marine Le Pen. The use of such language to libel the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo as being racist is applied so as to bring together in the readers mind these two binary world views and make them almost indistinguishable from one and other, so as to collapse the distinction between victim and victimizer. The free expression of ideas whether this is in the medium of art, literature, satire or political debate that a secular society affords the individual is not the same as group rights, the insistence of blasphemy, restrictions on freedom of conscience, anti-Semitism and murder in the name of religion. It is a category error to fail to distinguish between the two world views.
In recent days there has been a scramble in the media to construct a narrative as to why the brothers Saïd Kouachi and Chérif Kouachi would commit acts of terrorism against the French republic. Myriam Francois-Cerrah and identity politicians of her ilk have been busy making excuses where none have been asked by the killers themselves. Blaming the attacks not on the express reasons given by cold blooded murder of cartoonists, but on socio-economic issues and feeling of “alienation” by asserting grievances into their mouths, as Myriam Francois-Cerrah remarks:
“From the ban on headscarves in schools to face veils in public spaces, alongside countless controversies over everything from prayer rooms to halal food, the cycle of media ire directed at Muslims has become near-incessant. This has not gone unnoticed by extremists, who have used these issues in their output to proclaim France as a land of inequity where Muslims can never truly be at home.”
Continually people such as Myriam Francois-Cerrah and the Jew hating Ashgar Bukhari attempt to throw a cloud of obfuscation over acts of co-ordinated murder. Myriam Francois-Cerrah blames French society for in effect creating Islamist terrorism, Ashgar Bukhari blames it all on the foreign policy and should therefore be adjudicated through the prism of the “War on Terror”. Always external reasoning and never internal. The issue that is continually dodged and purposefully avoided and is the main recruiter for groups such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS in Europe and the rest of the world is ideology and not socio-economic grievances. A bomb could go off on the streets of London tomorrow and the likes of Myriam Francois-Cerrah and Ashgar Bukhari have already written the article using the same tired clichés regarding every other act of Islamist terrorism before the bomb has even detonated. It is excuse making where no excuse was asked for.
The idea that Islamist terrorism is the aching cry of the oppressed against an imperialist west is a failure to understand the intellectual make-up of the Islamist ideology that underpins these instances of mass slaughter. To the contrary the totalitarian ideology of Islamism is not born out of the “War on Terror”, it has deep ideological roots going back to the 1920’s with the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood by Hassan al-Banna and perhaps even as far back as the Eighteenth century with the emergence of Wahhabism by the religious firebrand Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahab. Saïd Kouachi and Chérif Kouachi were connected to and supposedly funded by Al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsular residing in Yemen, a group who until he was killed in a Drone strike, was affiliated with the Islamist ideologue and Al-Qaeda recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki. Al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsular an affiliate group to the central organisation of Al-Qaeda which is itself the birth child of the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Qaeda having splintered in recent years with the ongoing civil war in Syria, from the chaos of the conflict, has emerged the figure of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as the leader of ISIS on to the world stage. ISIS’s own intellectual lineage tracks back to the appalling head hacker of Al-Qaeda in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The Kouachi brothers were linked to both extremist Islamist organisations Al-Qaeda and ISIS, organisations that share the same ideological totalitarian worldview.
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Benito Mussolini coined the term totalitario translated into English as “totalitarian” and it is succinctly defined as: “All within the state, none outside the state, none against the state”. A system of thought that demands the complete negation of individuality and any semblance of pluralism in belief or thought. It is the attempt to impose a monoculture, where the state implements a complete and total erasure of the individual to being reduced to nothing more than property, a mere serf to the will of a supreme leader. Moreover, a totalitarian state is innately imperialistic. The “none against the state” does not only apply to its own citizenry, but also implies military action against the ‘Other’. You are either with the state or an enemy of the state.
Islamism is an ideology that fits neatly beneath the banner of totalitarianism and is the idea of megalomania played out on the international stage of world politics. This carnival of wanton bloodshed and violence is being carried out with the sole mission to resurrect the Islamic Caliphate, a Muslim imperialist empire that has ambitions to eventually raise the black flag of Islamic Jihad across the entire world. An Islamist utopia where a particular brand of Sunni fanatical Sharia is to reign supreme upon the earth with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (as Osama Bin Laden before him) their political and spiritual leader. The figure of the Caliph in Islamic history borders upon the mythological in the minds of many Muslims because it harkens back to the glories of the Islamic “Golden Age”. An era when the Islamic empire was ruled by the wise, were leading innovators in the scientific and philosophical arena’s, and above all, bowed before no one. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s attempted cult of personality is indicative of a totalitarian thinking displayed by his Fascist predecessors in playing upon the slanted mythology of the past so as to inhabit the present with legitimacy.
George Orwell in his essay, Prevention of Literature, remarks that a “Totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy”. Thus, the Islamist worldview as professed by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, Abu Ala Maududi and Osama Bin Laden is inherently totalitarian repackaged into the robes of theocratic-fascism. Islamists divide the world into a war between the ‘Believers’ of their own fanatical interpretation of Sunni Islam and the ‘Kuffar’ a derogatory word for all those who are not seen as Muslim or the correct type of Muslim. The hard-line Islamist worldview of Dar al-Islam (the house of Islam) and Dar al-Harb (The House of War) is a language of naked militarism. Furthermore, the Islamist vision of a Caliphate neatly fits within a totalitarian worldview that intends to monitor and regulate every single action and thought of a person’s life from economics, dietary laws, sexuality, taxes, prayer, and foreign policy. Furthermore, it is egregiously emphasised for the worst with a violent imposition of a dogmatic reading of the Hadith, Quran, and the commentaries, which seeks to nullify freedom of conscience and therefore any dissenting opinion. Baghdadi sets out his ideology for all to see in his recent sermon (call to war) in Mosul, July 4th 2014:
“Allah commanded us to fight His enemies and to wage Jihad for His sake, in order to achieve this purpose and to establish His religion. Allah said: “Fighting is ordained for you, although it is hateful to you.” Allah also said: “Fight them until there is no more strife, and religion is for Allah alone…”
“Oh people, the religion of Allah will not be established, and the purpose for which Allah creates us will not be achieved, unless the law of Allah is instated and observed, and unless the Islamic punishments are implemented. This can be accomplished only through power and might. This is the foundation of Islam: A book of guidance and a sword that defends it…”
“If you want what Allah has promised, wage Jihad for His sake, incite the believers, and persevere through these hardships. If only you knew what reward, honour, elevation, and glory there is in Jihad – in this world and in the Hereafter – none of you would be remiss in setting out to wage Jihad…”
Fascism with an “Islamic face”, indeed. If one were to crystalize and distil Baghdadi’s sermon of warfare into a few key points, it would be:
- Wage violent Jihad across the world to establish the religion of Islam.
- Enforce the Sharia (the law of Islam) and hudud (Islamic Punishments) upon the entire world.
- The establishment of a Caliphate as being a religious duty and all those who do not strive for these end are therefore (by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s definition) “sinners”. The use of the word “sinners” is tantamount to a death sentence in this context.
- The defining of what it means to be a Muslim.
- Waging war against all those who are considered “Other” or “polytheists”. This includes, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Shia Muslims and all other variations of the Islamic faith, and by extension all other minority faiths. So that one exclusive intolerant interpretation of Islam will reign supreme and triumphant across the world.
Al-Qaeda and ISIS as theocratic fascist para-military organisations were not born out of the cries of the oppressed, to the contrary, they are imperialists in a state of religious exaltation. The leaders of ISIS have chillingly declared that they “have no borders, only new frontiers”, a blood curdling statement if there ever was one. This is not the language of the beleaguered or disposed but of militaristic chest pounding, wide-eyed fanaticism, whilst all the time being shielded beneath the black flag of Islamic Jihad, the “black shirt” of our own ideologically fraught modern era.
Umberto Eco’s essay Ur-Fascism or Eternal Fascism illuminates fourteen defining features of Fascism. However, “these features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it”. Using Eco’s essay as a template, I will therefore examine how Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the Islamist ideology conform to at least five points from the fourteen features of “Ur-Fascism”.
- “Cult of Tradition”
The concept of tradition, by itself is not an egregious thing. Tradition can be used to explain a shared common narrative of nation, culture, or even ethnicity. Thus, tradition can be symbolised as the glue that sticks together often disparate communities and makes the ‘Other’ knowable within a shared common heritage. The “Cult of Tradition” only becomes a serious issue when ideals become sacrosanct and placed upon a lofty pedestal impervious and unyielding to criticism. Moreover, when tradition becomes an ossified edifice it spurns any notion of innovation or progress in the moral sphere and can become a tyranny all of its own. The debate between ‘Tradition versus Progress’ has long historical roots, probably most famously elucidated by two prestigious men of letters Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, regarding the French Revolution. Burke, a British constitutional traditionalist (the father of modern day Conservatism, certainly not a Fascist), believed in the transcendent order of institutions like the church, monarchy, and the state, and looked upon the French Revolution with aghast at the tearing up of the traditional institutions of French society. Thomas Paine adversely attacked Edmund Burke’s traditionalism in the ‘Rights of Man’ and forthrightly declares:
“Every age and generation must be free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow…Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated. When man ceases to be, his power and his wants cease with him; and having no longer any authority in directing who shall be its governors, or how its government shall be organized, or how administered.” ~ Thomas Paine
W. H. Auden in his memorial poem In Memory of W.B. Yeats remarks “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living”. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s interpretation of the “words” of “dead” men, are indeed, “modified in the guts” of his fanatical group. The attempted resurrection of the Islamic Caliphate is indicative of the “Cult of Tradition” that is often displayed by Fascist movements. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi therefore asserts himself as a continuation of a tradition that tracks back to the Prophet Muhammad, thus availing himself with political and religious legitimacy. This dangerous obsession with tradition promoted by ISIS draws upon Islamic history of conquests through campaigns of prolonged warfare as a justification for their actions in the Middle-East today. As evidenced in Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s speech in Mosul “Fighting is ordained for you, although it is hateful to you”. This rallying call to war in the proceeding sentence is cynically given justification and religious legitimacy with the invocation of God to “Fight them until there is no more strife, and religion is for Allah alone”. The continual need to be seen as the occupiers of Islamic tradition is a status symbol that is consequently used to aid recruitment. ISIS market themselves as being the sole representative of Muslims worldwide and it is therefore seen as incumbent for Muslims to join their organisation as a religious duty to God.
The traditions of Islam and Islamic history are utilised to give a veneer of respectability to the utopian visions of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The lesson of history reminds us that all visions of utopia leads to a state of dystopia. The human spirit is brutalized beyond recognition because the institutionalizing of violence changes a society from a system of law and order to anarchy. Thus, what emerges is a kind of bastardised version of Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” writ large, in which the strong men of Fascist movements, use violence for their utopian political goals and assert their dominance over an occupied populace. Furthermore, ISIS with their particular fusion of the glories of the Islamic imperial past reincarnated into the modern day and their particular brand of hard-line religious literalism are aiming to a forge a new state that can accurately described as Fascist.
2. “Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism…The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
Jeffery Herf an eminent historian of Fascism and Nazi propaganda describes this political phenomenon as “Reactionary Modernism”. Herf remarks:
“Before and after the Nazi seizure of power, an important current within conservative and subsequently Nazi ideology was a reconciliation between the antimodernist, romantic, and irrationalist ideas present in German nationalism and the most obvious manifestation of means—ends rationality, that is, modern technology.” ~Jeffrey Herf, “Reactionary Modernism”
To distil the idea of “Reactionary Modernism” into a sentence it would be a zeal for modern technology, especially the machines of war, whilst rejecting the values of the Enlightenment that are to be found in institutions of a liberal democratic society. It is a false idea to couple together advancement in the technological sphere and universal secular liberal values. One does not beget the other as night follows the day and often the advancement in technology has no bearing on morality whatsoever. The use of technology and the machines of war are a utility in which Fascist goals can be met. As evidence, Adolf Hitler’s National Socialists used the development in wireless transmissions in the form of the Radio, to propagate their propaganda across the Middle-East and North-Africa. Whilst on the German homeland books were burnt, democracy destroyed, and a campaign of unrelenting anti-Semitism based upon irrational, non-scientific, racial myths of Aryan superiority was campaigned against “International Jewry”. The Nazi regime of Hitler was not the product of the Enlightenment concept of reason run amok, it was adversely predicated upon an irrationalism that despised the hard fought for gains of the Enlightenment.
Similarly, Al-Qaeda and ISIS make use of modern technology so as to make dawah (invitation to Islam) and use modern social media to propagate their propaganda to Muslims across the world. This use of modern technology is cynically employed to strike fear into their political and religious enemies and to aid recruitment to sympathisers of their ideology. As evidenced with the uploading of video footage to the internet containing the ritualized murder of American and British hostages James Foley, Steven Sotloff, David Haines, and Alan Henning. A purposeful act of theatrics played out to dramatic effect. Social media is the postmodern theatrical stage of our time, in which the innocent are savagely butchered in an act of dramatic tragedy in front of a camera lens to the aghast of the viewing audience. Indeed, the use of social media is co-opted and wielded as a utility, a weapon of war on the treacherous battlefield of ideas, in which Islamist groups face off against Muslim and non-Muslim alike so as to win recruits to their ranks.
The unbridgeable fault line between Islamism and secular universal values embodied in the Enlightenment is clear to see. Islamists believe that the state should be governed through revelation and a fundamentalist reading of scripture. Whereas, the modern state, as inspired by the Enlightenment and the language of modern day Human-Rights, believe that the state should implement law through the use of reason. Thus, the fracture between laws based upon revelation that are divinely ordained and the laws grounded in the Enlightenment conception of reason, where humankind are the authors of their own laws of government, is a fault line that inspires antipathy and hatred towards universal secular liberal values. Moreover, Islamists subsequently ape their fascistic predecessors ideology in their full frontal attack on democracy, freedom of speech and conscience, Human-Rights, Individual rights, secularism, LGBT rights, and the rights of women to equality. ISIS and their Islamist brethren conception of a state is therefore a state rooted upon a bloody ground of nihilism that can only lead to irrationalism, because by definition the divine can not be scientifically verified as objective fact. Divinely inspired revelatory law, is a belief that is grounded in faith rather than scientific reasoning and therefore irrational, consequently a state based upon the dictates of a politicised version of Islam will be a state of barbarism where the individual is abolished and collectivised into a bloc called the Ummah.
3. “Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism…The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.”
4. “No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.”
Umberto Eco in these two points highlights and underlines to the reader a feature of Fascism that is pivotal to the intellectual makeup of its character. This being the lack of pluralism in belief, opinion, and thought. Pluralism collapses in to praise of the singular leader, the one book, one political-religious party, and the one God. It is the attempt to impose a hegemony of opinion upon the populace and destroy freedom of conscience.
ISIS and other Islamist groups conform to these two points with shocking regularity. The “cult of action for action’s sake” is displayed in their continual need to wage Jihad for Jihad’s sake, this creates a culture of both masculine machismo and a stunted intellectual outlook. Furthermore, the intellectual or liberal is despised as a demonic figure trying to lead the true Muslim awry on the true path to paradise. The fundamentalist consequently tries to occupy the space of authenticity and parade themselves as the “true” voice of the traditions of Islam. Thus, liberal Imam’s and Muslims who interpret their faith non-violently and peacefully are described as takfir (heretics), innovators, inauthentic, and therefore moving away from the traditions prescribed to them by ISIS as a variation of Sunni fanaticism.
Disagreement within this narrow political worldview is tantamount to “treason”. The murderous persecution of Christians, Jews, homosexuals, the Kurdish people, Shia Muslims, and peoples holding minority faiths positions such as the Ahmadiyya and the Yazidis is implemented to impose the singular and strangle diversity. Disagreement is thought of as dangerous because disagreement implies dissent and therefore plurality, which is the enemy of the totalitarian mind-set. Opinion in a totalitarian state is consequently viewed as something that is given to the individual from on high, rather than coming from the individual themselves formed by their own lived experience. The outright hostility towards pluralism remains an anchoring force within Islamist ideology, not only against an enemy ‘Other’, but all the people who happen to fall under their umbrella of rule or shared religious belief system. Thus, we see the curtailing of freedom of conscience and speech and replaced with a murderous dogmatism concerning the killing of apostates and liberal minded Muslims who interpret their faith in a non-violent manner are persecuted and murdered. The Islamist ideologues in ISIS and their fellow travellers, like the Nazi regime of Hitler and the Communist regime of Stalin, attempt to “purge” (euphemism for murder) the ills from their society. What this means in actuality is the murder and elimination of all forces that oppose their ideology and thus cementing the autocrats position of sole-power. Moreover, the crushing of dissent again appeals to the “Cult of Tradition” outlined by Umberto Eco, with Islamism attempting to return Muslims back to the “true” path of Islam as envisioned by the Prophet Muhammad in its purest form and not changed and degraded by western capitalism, decadence, materialism, secularism and imperialism. A perfect example of this mentality in history is Stalin’s “purge” of dissent within the Soviet Union as exemplified with the Moscow “Show Trials” and the need to return to the “true” message of the “glorious” ‘Russian Revolution’ of 1917.
ISIS by conquering land and declaring a pseudo-state make appeals to it ideological followers of ‘outsiders’ attacking their attempt at creating a utopia on earth and thus agitate and promote difference for violent purposes. The language used by ISIS is that of the oppressed, besieged by the “crusader” western imperialists, purposefully forgetting that the main demographic taking the fight to ISIS are the Kurdish people of Iraq and Syria, the Baath Party of Bashar al-Assad (a murdering war criminal in his own right), Iran and its Shia proxy Hezbollah, and the Shia and minority Muslim and non-Muslim faiths of the region. These people can hardly be described as outsiders in their own lands or stooges of western imperialism. To the contrary, Bashar al-Assad, Iran and Hezbollah do not have a cordial relationship with the western powers and are thought of as hostile states or terrorist organisations. To invoke the history of the Crusades is to again bring the past into the present. It is the attempt to avail themselves with the lustre of history and create false narratives that are schizophrenically littered with the language of the beleaguered and oppressed, in conjunction with a curious militaristic chest thumping which is espoused through the conduit of religion. To justify this campaign of horror to themselves and to the on looking Muslim communities around the world, they construct a narrative of this conflict not as rational realists, but as irrationalist’s fighting a heroic battle against the forces of Satan that is embodied in anyone who is declared ‘Other’. When in reality the people who are signed up members of this ideology are the true imperialists with their organisation heading up a brutal campaign of blood-shed, rape, and torture. ISIS therefore portray the conflict as being an almost metaphysical conflict between Sunni and Shia, Christian versus Muslim, and ultimately East against the West. To view the world in this binary manner is to view the ‘Other’ as not being fully human and therefore worthy of destruction like livestock before the butchers knife. To be human in the mind of ISIS ideologues is to be a Sunni Muslim with a literalist reading of the Quran, the commentaries, and the Hadith allied with a psychopathic penchant for violence.
10.“Everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Falangists was Viva la Muerte (in English it should be translated as “Long Live Death!”)… the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.”
The “cult of death” that is at the root of all fascist movements is in my estimation the most troubling aspect of Fascism as a system often contradictory beliefs. True believers who are willing to kill and be killed in an act of “heroic” martyrdom, for infamy, and the eternal glories of paradise in the hereafter are literally the most dangerous people on the planet. It is a warrant for warfare and the devaluing of human life, which as we have witnessed throughout history leads to genocide, gas chambers, and countless other crimes against humanity. This is the nucleus of the Islamists ideology, the poison at the heart of the blood thirsty beast. Indeed, it is the reason that the intellectual progenitors of Islamism sort solidarity with the movements of the European extreme Right of the 1930’s. The Islamists saw the Fascist movements of Europe as a mirror in which they saw their own grisly reflection. The same anti-Semitism, the shared hatred of democracy, and an absolute and mutual love of violence. This current of thought is colloquially expressed in modern times by many Jihadists as having a greater “love of death” in comparison to the infidels “love of life”. If you look back upon the Umberto Eco quote above concerning the Falangists “Long Live Death!” in comparison to the rhetoric of the Jihadist seeking martyrdom, they are indistinguishable from one and other. The same death cult meme just adapted to fit a different culture or set of religious beliefs. Hassan al-Banna’s movement (The Muslim Brotherhood) was predicated on this very idea and therefore the moral reasoning behind striking common cause and kinship with the death cult and anti-Semitic movements of the totalitarian Far-Right of Europe, as witnessed by his adoration of Adolf Hitler. As evidence, June 11th, 1946 writing to the Arab League concerning the need to give safe haven to the unindicted Nazi war criminal and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini (whom helped to recruit Muslims to fight with the SS Handschar division in Eastern Europe). Hassan al-Banna writes:
“Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimin [the Moslem Brotherhood] and all Arabs request the Arab League on which Arab hopes are pinned, to declare that the Mufti is welcome to stay in any Arab country he may choose and that great welcome should be extended to him wherever he goes, as a sign of appreciation for his great services for the glory of Islam and the Arabs. . . . The hearts of the Arabs palpitated with joy at hearing that the Mufti has succeeded in reaching an Arab country. The news sounded like thunder to the ears of some American, British, and Jewish tyrants. The lion is at last free and he will roam the Arabian jungle to clear it of the wolves. . . . What a hero, what a miracle of a man. We wish to know what the Arab youth, Cabinet Ministers, rich men, and princes of Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Tunis, Morocco, and Tripoli are going to do to be worthy of this hero. Yes, this hero who challenged an empire and fought Zionism, with the help of Hitler and Germany. Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin Al-Husseini will continue the struggle. . . . God entrusted him with a mission and he must succeed. . . . The Lord Almighty did not preserve Amin for nothing. There must be a divine purpose behind the preservation of the life of this man, namely the defeat of Zionism. Amin! March on! God is with you! We are behind you! We are willing to sacrifice our necks for the cause. To death! Forward March.” (My emphasis added) ~ Jeffrey Herf,
“Nazi Germany’s Propaganda Aimed at Arabs and Muslims During World War II and the Holocaust: Old Themes, New Archival Findings’, Central European History, Vol. 42, No. 4 (DECEMBER 2009), pp. 709-736
It is often written by apologists of Hassan al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood that the intellectual progenitor of violence and death cultism that emerged in North Africa and the Middle-East was the Islamist ideologue Sayyid Qutb and not Hassan al-Banna. As evidenced in the above quote, it is a wilful distortion of the facts so as to redeem the Muslim Brotherhood from their bloody past. Hassan al-Banna planted the seeds of the death cult, Qutb merely watered those seeds with the blood of his fanatical followers. Qutb did not distort Hassan al-Banna’s meaning, he just took al-Banna’s words to their intellectual conclusion. This being that violence in defence of the faith is a heroic deed, in and of itself, and the material world is not proficient enough to fulfil the human condition. Therefore, the individual must pledge their lives to death so as to attain the delusional glories of paradise in the hereafter. This frame of mind is witnessed in every Islamist movement from Al-Qaeda, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood to Boko Haram, ISIS, and Jamaat-e-Islami etc. It is primarily this ideology that propagates the instances of Islamist violence in the world and only through understanding and defeating this ideology, in a war of ideas, are we going to stop these occasions of human slaughter.
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To defeat this fascist ideology that is menacing our shared world, the western intelligentsia need to find a backbone and show real solidarity with people who are on the front lines around the world fighting this out of control raging beast. We are at war with an ideology whether we like to admit it or not. Moreover, our main stream news organisations need to be held to account and publicly shamed for their cowardice in not showing the Muhammad cartoons. The idea that news organisations are not showing the “offending” images because of “editorial” reasons is a euphemistic and polite fiction. Sky News in an act of abject craven grovelling before the feet of men of violence, decided to cut from their live broadcast the activist and feminist writer Caroline Fourest for having the temerity to show cartoons on television in a free society. We have heard many hollow words from our media in the UK of “Je Suis Charlie”, when in reality they do not stand behind Charlie Hebdo they appease the men of violence so Islamist cross hairs will be aimed at people who are braver than themselves. Appeasement is the belief that by grovelling at the feet of Fascists you will be shot last, period.
Freedom to speak, think, and write is the most precious right known to humankind. It is the belief that is the bedrock of all other rights, without the capacity to freely express ones will the individual becomes as a slave to the government or the baying mob. The truth is the sword is mightier than pen, it is only when another sword that stands behind the pen is freedom conscience even possible. For too long our media has not served the best interests of the public and appeased with shocking regularity a Fascist ideology, which is the antithesis of everything that our societies are built upon. Furthermore, we need to embolden and show solidarity with the true voices of reform within the Muslim communities around the world because it is these people who are the intellectual dynamite to the close minded fascist mentality. We have to place our trust in the true reformists Muslims bravely trying to instil a culture of secularism within Islamic belief, who are the real revolutionary voices and not the fascists in black masks holding AK-47’s. It is time to wake up from our dreary slumber and let the universal light of reason blaze brightly once again and banish the totalitarian monsters back to the shadows of our consciousness, being a mere memory of a nearly forgotten nightmare. We Are All Charlie! We Are All Raif Badawi! We are the school boys and girls of Peshawar and northern Nigeria. Long live those precious ideas of the French Republic founded upon the Enlightenment philosophy of liberté, égalité, fraternité!
Flaming Quill 
Excellent post! Lots of interesting bits and pieces, particularly the use of the Umberto Eco essay.