SPEAKING
FREELY 'Islamo-fascism' is Islamo-bull
... By Ismael Hossein-zadeh
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US President George
W Bush and the neo-conservative handlers of his
administration have added a new bogeyman to their
long and evolving list of enemies: "Islamic
fascism", also called
"Islamo-fascism".
This wanton flinging of the word "fascism"
in reference to radical
movements and leaders of the
Muslim world, however, is not only inaccurate and
oxymoronic, but it is, indeed, also ironic. Of
course, it is also offensive and inflammatory and,
therefore, detrimental to international
understanding and stability.
Fascism is a
specific category or concept of statecraft that is
based on specific social and historical
developments or phenomena. It cannot be conjured
up by magic or portrayed by capricious
definitions. It arises under conditions of an
advanced industrialized economy, that is, under
particular historical circumstances.
It is
a product of big business that is brought about by
market or profitability imperatives. It is, in a
sense, an "emergency" instrument (a metaphorical
firefighter, if your will) in the arsenal of
powerful economic interests that is employed
during a crisis or in critical times to remove or
extinguish "obstacles" to the unhindered
operations of big business.
When
profitability expectations of giant corporations
are threatened or not met under ordinary economic
conditions, powerful corporate interests resort to
extraordinary measures to meet those expectations.
To this end, they mobilize state power to remove
what they perceive as threats to unrestricted
business operations. Therefore, as the 1928
Encyclopedia Italiana puts it, "Fascism
should more appropriately be called 'corporatism'
because it is a merger of state and corporate
power."
While some researchers have
attributed this classic definition of fascism to
the Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile, [1]
others believe it came directly from the horse's
mouth, Benito Mussolini, the prototypical fascist.
[2]
Where big money plays a crucial role
in the election of politicians and government
functionaries, state power is almost always a
proxy for corporate power or big business. Under
"normal" or "healthy" economic circumstances,
however, that agency role of the state is often
subtle and submerged, as under such circumstances
business and government leaders can afford to rely
on the "invisible hand" of the market mechanism to
perform its putative magic work.
But as
soon as an expanding economic cycle turns to a
declining one, and the declining cycle becomes
dangerously persistent or chronic, business and
government leaders dispel all pretensions of
deferring business or economic affairs to the
"invisible hand" of the market mechanism and rush
to the rescue of the market system with all kinds
of "extra-economic" or policy schemes of
"restructuring" and crisis-management.
Such interventionist policies on behalf of
corporate interests in pursuit of higher profits
would include, for example, business-friendly
changes in labor, environmental, taxation, and
antitrust laws. They would also include changes in
rules governing international trade and investment
through multilateral institutions such as the
International Monetary Fund and the World Trade
Organization in favor of powerful transnational
corporations.
While these corporate
welfare schemes are characterized by such
apparently benign labels as restructuring,
downsizing, streamlining or
supply-side/neo-liberal economics, they are, in
fact, legal, political, institutional and, at
times, military instruments of class struggle that
are employed by business and government leaders in
pursuit of profitability, often at the expense of
working people.
These neo-liberal
corporate welfare schemes contain elements or
seeds of potentially fascistic economic
strategies. The germs of potential or latent
fascism, however, can remain dormant as long as
implementation of such "restructuring" schemes do
not face serious resistance from labor, or
menacing pressure from below; that is, as long as
corporate welfare policies can be carried out by
peaceful political and/or legal means (as opposed
to police or military means).
This has
been, more or less, the case with the United
States since the early 1980s, as corporate and
government leaders have since then "peacefully"
carried out a successful supply-side or
neo-liberal economic policy that has resulted in a
drastic redistribution of national resources in
favor of the wealthy.
But when major
business interests find "normal" restructuring
policies of corporate profitability insufficient,
or when severe resistance or pressure from below
tends to make "peaceful" imposition of such
policies difficult or impossible, corporate and
government leaders would not hesitate to employ
police and military force (ie, emergency or
fascistic measures) to carry out the "necessary
reforms" in pursuit of corporate prosperity.
Such emergency steps would include
union-busting, strike-breaking, tax breaks for the
wealthy, cuts in social spending, severe austerity
economic measures and the like. To undermine
resistance to this belt-tightening package of
economic fascism, the corporate state will then
find it necessary to embark on the corresponding
package of political fascism: bearing down on
civil liberties and republican principles,
manipulating electoral and voting processes,
undermining constitutional and democratic values,
disregarding human rights and international
treaties, and so on.
Imposition of such
anti-democratic policies will, in turn, require
scapegoating, fearmongering, enemy-manufacturing
and, of course, war. While domestic dissent is
portrayed as treason, external non-compliance is
depicted as threat to "our national interests"
because, according to this logic, other countries
cannot remain neutral or independent: "they are
either with us or against us".
Xenophobic
or chauvinistic nationalism, superficial or
pseudo-populism, and worship of military power are
major hallmarks of fascism. Corporate state
propaganda machines would feverishly promote these
values because, among other things, such values
resonate with ordinary citizens and help mobilize
the masses behind the agenda of fascism.
Successful mobilization of the masses
behind the program of fascism is, of course, a
most ironic and perverse type of social
development: the victims (the middle,
lower-middle, poor, and working classes) are
driven to rise up in their crazed desperation to
support the victimizer, big business, through the
agency of fascism. This is, of course, pivotal to
the success of fascism.
This brief
description of the characteristics of fascism is
more than theoretical; it also reflects the actual
developments that gave birth to the rise of
fascism in Germany and Italy. Fascist dictators in
both countries, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini,
were elevated to power by major business
conglomerates.
In Germany, for example, as
anemic economic conditions of the 1920s further
deteriorated in the early 1930s, powerful business
interests put pressure on the Weimar Republic to
help them carry out a brutal economic-austerity
package: cutting wages and social spending, on the
one hand, and giving generous state subsidies and
tax breaks to big business, on the other. Although
the Weimar Republic did offer help and took some
steps in this direction, German corporate leaders
found such measures insufficient and
unsatisfactory.
Thus, as Michael Parenti
points out, "By 1930, most of the tycoons had
concluded that the Weimar Republic no longer
served their needs and was too accommodating to
the working class. They greatly increased their
subsidies to Hitler, propelling the Nazi Party on
to the national stage." Parenti further writes,
"Business tycoons supplied the Nazis with generous
funds for fleets of motorcars and loudspeakers to
saturate the cities and villages of Germany, along
with funds for Nazi Party organizations, youth
groups and paramilitary forces. In the July 1932
campaign, Hitler had sufficient funds to fly to 50
cities in the last two weeks alone." [3]
Like Adolf Hitler of Germany, Italy's
Benito Mussolini was brought to power by big
capital: "To maintain profit levels, the large
landowners and industrialists would have to slash
wages and raise prices. The state in turn would
have to provide them with massive subsidies and
tax exemptions. To finance this corporate
welfarism, the populace would have to be taxed
more heavily, and social services and welfare
expenditures would have to be drastically cut."
[4]
To undermine the workers' and
peasants' resistance to these brutal austerity
measures, the corporate state would have to
curtail civil liberties and eliminate democratic
rights that helped the masses defend their modest
living conditions.
"The solution was to
smash their unions, political organizations and
civil liberties. Industrialists and big landowners
wanted someone at the helm who could break the
power of organized workers and farm laborers and
impose a stern order on the masses. For this task
Benito Mussolini, armed with his gangs of
Blackshirts, seemed the likely candidate."
In 1922, the Federazione Industriale,
consisting of the leaders of industry, banking,
and agribusiness corporations, "met with Mussolini
to plan the 'March on Rome', contributing 20
million lire to the undertaking. With the
additional backing of Italy's top military
officers and police chiefs, the fascist
'revolution' - really a coup d'etat - took place."
[5]
Although the inner connections among
economics, politics, and cultural facets of
fascism may not be as clear-cut or precise as
correlations in, for example, natural sciences,
they are nonetheless subject to specific social
and historical laws, dynamics, and developments.
In general, and in broad outlines, fascism
arises as an emergency reaction, or
crisis-management response, by big business to
threats posed to its interests, threats that
cannot be fended off by the "usual" or "normal"
maneuverings of the capitalist state. Protracted
and menacingly long economic crises tend to be
breeding grounds for the rise of fascism.
In response to such chronic recessionary
cycles, business and government leaders would,
first, try "normal" restructuring or streamlining
policies to stem further economic decline and
restore profitability. These would include
implementation of capital-friendly fiscal and
monetary policies; dilution of health, safety, and
environmental standards; weakening or undermining
business regulations and antitrust laws; and so
on.
But if the anemic economy does not
respond to such "ordinary" neo-liberal economic
measures (and social tensions continue to mount as
a result), the corporate state would then not
hesitate to resort to "extraordinary" measures of
economic restructuring. With varying degrees or
intensities, such "extraordinary" steps would
entail elements of fascistic politics and
policies.
It must be pointed out here that
the emergence of fascism from long periods of
economic and social crises is not inevitable. For
example, while the depression period of the late
1920s and early 1930s led to the rise of fascism
in Europe, it gave birth to the New Deal reforms
in the United States. It could as well have led to
the rise of socialism in either place, especially
in Europe. US president Franklin Roosevelt's
famous statement (in response to opposition by
some ruling circles to the New Deal package) that
"we need these reforms if we want to avert
revolution" succinctly captured the fluidity of
the US social developments of the time.
Historians overwhelmingly agree that a
major force behind the corporate drive to fascism
in Europe was a desire to avert socialism. The
late Rosa Luxemburg's warning on the eve of the
rise of fascism that Europe was at the crossroads
of "either socialism or barbarism" presciently
captured the volatility of the European
socioeconomic circumstances of the time.
These experiences (as well as the economic
logic and theory of social developments) indicate
that the outcome of deep socioeconomic crises is
not predetermined; it all depends on the balance
of power between the contending interests and the
outcome of class struggle.
Now, it is
obvious that, in light of the characteristics of
fascism as a specific socio-historical phenomenon,
the Bush administration's labeling of radical
Islamic movements and leaders as fascist, or
"Islamo-fascism", is sheer nonsense. It betrays
either blatant demagoguery, or shameful ignorance,
or most probably both.
For one thing, the
economic foundation of fascism, an advanced
industrialized market economy, is absent in most
areas or countries of fundamentalist Islamic
movements and/or radical Muslim leaders. For
another, militant Muslim leaders such as Mahmud
Ahmadinejad of Iran, Hassan Nasrallah of Lebanon,
Hamas leaders of Palestine, and Muslim Brotherhood
leaders of Egypt are known as people's leaders or
fighters, not agents and collaborators of big
business, as would be the case with fascist or
fascistic figures and characters. They are,
indeed, often in collision, not collusion, with
big business and corrupt establishments of their
communities or countries.
Furthermore,
most radical Muslim movements of recent years have
tended to push for more, not less, political
democracy, as this would lead to their gaining
political power and independence from foreign
powers and their (comprador) local allies. That
is, indeed, how, for example, Hamas won in the
recent Palestinian elections in the occupied
territories.
That was also how Ahmadinejad
became the president of Iran (despite the vehement
opposition by the corrupt and moneyed
establishment). Iraqi and Lebanese Shi'ite Muslims
have equally been keen on free elections. Egypt's
Muslim Brotherhood has been trying for years to
bring about free and transparent elections in that
country, only to be obstructed by the regime of
(the lifetime) President Hosni Mubarak, the
treasured ally of the United States.
Radical movements and individuals of the
Muslim world may be called fundamentalist,
populist, nationalist, or terrorist; but they
cannot be called fascist. As Marc Ash recently put
it, "Blowing up an airliner full of passengers is
barbaric and completely unacceptable, regardless
of the objectives of those involved, but it really
doesn't fit the definition of fascism."
(Even if we assume, for a moment, that
such wild acts of desperation can be called
fascism, still they cannot be called Islamic
fascism; just as the rise of fascism in Europe was
not, and could not, be called Christian fascism.)
Fascism "is not an isolated act of madness, it is
a coordinated act of the state. All the while
private corporations profit wildly." [6]
But while radical groupings and
individuals of the Muslim world (or anywhere else
in the world, for that matter) cannot be called
fascist, the neo-conservative/corporate-run Bush
administration does bear some major (though
low-level) hallmarks of fascism. These include a
tendency to curtail civil liberties and retreat
from democratic principles, a penchant to view the
peoples and nations of the world as "allies" and
"enemies", a preference to boost the power and
fortunes of big business at the expense of the
needy and working classes, a desire to manufacture
enemies and to invent scapegoats to justify wars
of aggression, and so on.
This is not to
say that President Bush or the neo-conservative
handlers of his administration can be called
full-blown or mature fascists; but that their
ranks, their circles of power, and their
politico-philosophical agenda are infested with
insidious germs of fascism that, if not contained,
can develop to full-fledged fascism.
While
it is important to identify and to warn about the
signs of latent or embryonic fascism in and around
the Bush administration, it is also necessary to
point to the emergence or proliferation of a
number of hopeful signs and forces that are
evolving to counter the fascistic tendencies of
neo-conservatism. What are those counteracting
forces?
One such sign of optimism is the
fact that as the neo-conservative agenda of the
Bush administration is increasingly exposed as
fraudulent, public support for that agenda is
dwindling among the American people. As noted,
agitation and mobilization of the masses around
the flag and on the ground of pseudo-nationalism
by means of disinformation and deceit are a major
secret of the success of fascism.
Rising
uneasiness of the American people with the
neo-conservative-Bush agenda of war and militarism
is a hopeful sign that further implementation of
that ominous agenda might not be as easy in the
future as it has been in the past six years.
Another reason for optimism is that even
the US military is gradually questioning the
jingoistic plans of the neo-conservative civilian
leadership. Tensions between the professional
military experts and civilian leadership, many of
whom never wore the uniform, festering ever since
the invasion of Iraq, have now been heightened
over a potential military strike against Iran.
While civilian militarists, headed by Vice
President Richard Cheney and Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, are said to have drawn plans to
bomb Iran, many senior commanders are openly
questioning their wisdom. [7]
Third, and
perhaps most important, serious tensions and
disagreements are developing within the ruling
elite over aggressive unilateral policies of the
neo-conservative Bush administration. Cross-party
opposition within the ruling factions to the
neo-conservatives' agenda, latent ever since they
took over US foreign policy, has recently become
quite intense. The so-called realists and/or
multilateralists are increasingly expressing
dismay at how the neo-conservative policies of the
administration are undermining not only worldwide
US credibility but also its geopolitical and
economic interests.
A major part of the
disagreements within the ruling circles is because
their economic interests are impacted differently
by the foreign policies of the Bush
administration. While major beneficiaries of
military capital, that is, armaments industries
and related businesses that benefit from war and
militarism, support the administration's policies
of unilateral wars of aggression, non-military, or
civilian, transnational capitalists do not favor
such policies as they tend to cost them foreign
markets and investment opportunities.
The
powerful interests that are vested in the
military-capital or war industries include not
only the giant Pentagon contractors such as
Boeing, Northrop Grumman, or Raytheon, but also a
whole host of smaller war-related businesses that
have recently spun around the Pentagon and the
Homeland Security apparatus to cash in on the
Pentagon's escalating budget.
All these
war-based industries and related businesses have
been reaping the benefits of a wartime bonanza
thanks to drastic increases in military spending
under President Bush - officially a 45% increase
in real terms over what he inherited in 2001. Not
surprisingly, these beneficiaries of "war
dividends" are the major supporters, and often
also the architects, of the Bush administration's
foreign policy. They are the real (though often
submerged) forces behind the facade of the cabal
of neo-conservative activists, their militaristic
policies, and their demagogic rhetoric of
democracy. [8]
But while the interests
that are vested in the business of war have been
handsomely benefiting from the Bush
administration's policies of war and militarism,
thousands of non-military transnational businesses
have suffered from losses of trade and investment
opportunities in global markets as a result of
those policies. From their point of view, the
neo-conservative policies of military buildup and
unilateral wars of choice have increasingly become
economic burdens, not only because they devour a
disproportionately large share of national
resources, but also because such operations tend
to create instability in international markets and
subvert long-term global investment.
Furthermore, the resentment and hostility
that unprovoked aggressions have generated in
foreign lands have also created consumer backlash
against brands that are closely identified with
the United States: Marlboro cigarettes, America
Online (AOL), McDonald's, Coca-Cola and Pepsi,
Pizza Hut, American Airlines, ExxonMobil, and many
more. [9]
Losses of trade and investment
opportunities in foreign markets have prompted a
broad spectrum of non-military business interests
to form coalitions of trade associations that are
designed to lobby foreign-policy makers against
unilateral US military aggressions abroad. One
such anti-militarist alliance of US businesses is
USA-Engage. It is a coalition of nearly 700 small
and large businesses, agriculture groups and trade
associations working to seek alternatives to the
proliferation of unilateral US foreign-policy
actions and to promote the benefits of US
engagement abroad.
The coalition's
statement of principles points out, "American
values are best advanced by engagement of American
business and agriculture in the world, not by
ceding markets to foreign competition. Helping
train workers, building roads, telephone systems,
and power plants in poorer nations, promoting free
enterprise - these activities improve the lives of
people worldwide and support American values."
[10]
While these positive developments
(erosion of public support, hesitation of the
professional military brass, and disagreements and
tensions within the ruling elite) are hopeful
signs that the power and influence of Bush, his
administration and his neo-conservative allies are
rapidly declining, they do not mean that these
champions of unilateral wars and militarism can no
longer inflict serious damage to international
peace and stability (for example, by a reckless
bombing of Iran). One should never discount the
dangerous reactions of bullies when they find
themselves against the wall.
Notes [1] Frank J
Ranelli, "Defining fascism, then and now",
OpEdNews.com (September 13, 2006). [2] Andrew
Bosworth, "Welcome to Neo-Fascism 101",
VirtualCitizens.com (August 8, 2006). [3]
Michael Parenti, "Plutocrats Choose Autocrats",
Section 1 of Chapter 1 ("Rational Fascism") of his
book Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and
the Overthrow of Communism, 1997. See also
James Pool and Suzanne Pool, Who Financed
Hitler (New York: Dial Press, 1978). [4]
Parenti, ibid. [5] Ibid; see also Daniel
Guerin, Fascism and Big Business (New York:
Monad Press/Pathfinder Press, 1973). [6] Marc
Ash, "Fascism of all varieties", TruthOut.org
(August 11, 2006). [7] Ismael Hossein-zadeh,
"US Iran policy irks senior commanders: The
military vs militaristic civilian leadership",
Pyavand.com (August 14, 2006). [8] I have
provided a detailed discussion of these relations
in my recently published book, The Political
Economy of US Militarism (Palgrave-Macmillan
2006), Chapter 6. [9] Ibid, Chapter 8.
[10] USA
Engage.
Ismael
Hossein-zadeh is a professor of economics at
Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa. He is the
author of the newly published book, The
Political Economy of US Militarism. His webpage
is www.cbpa.drake.edu/hossein-zadeh.
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Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
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