I have written before about European fascism in its modern form; reviewing one of the very fine investigative documentaries on German television (here and here, but they are sadly in German w/o subtitles), and I found myself thinking about how similar they were to the stuff we’ve caught on camera in certain Mosques (here and here, in English this time). There is an unnerving way in which the Islamic far right and the modern European far right are practically identical in their modus operandi and in terms of their endgame.
First of all, of course, there’s this:
They have large scale, extremely violent mobs who indicate that crossing them might have consequences:
And paramilitary organisations:
- They’re not doing the wave
But in addition to this, they also have nice – or at least, less unpleasant – faces to put on the movement:
…who can be found to be not so nice after all:
The point of the front men is to provide a way of solubilising the poison, of allowing it to pass undetected into the body politic. Roger Griffin, perhaps the greatest living expert on fascism and especially its modern form, has described changes wrought as follows:
Ethnocratic liberals have genetically modified the radical right so that it thrives in the very soil which once would have been poisonous to it.
That’s admirably exact; through using the language of multiculturalism, identity-politics, group rights, anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Zionism (complete with noisy defence of the Palestinians), anti-globalisation, anti-capitalism and so forth, both the neo-fascists and the Islamic supremacists blunt any front attack (Aslan in particular has managed to push this so far as to defend Hezbollah). Neo-fascists speak of defending the working class, Islamic supremacists speak of defending immigrants. And so forth.
Another point is the psychology: both the neo-fascists and the Islamic supremacists believe the modern liberal worlds is corrupt and irredeemably so. Both say that for the true warrior-priest (both Islamic votaries and the neo0fascists of the Nouvelle Droite use this image explicitly, the latter taking their inspiration from Julius Evola) the correct attitude is to hold oneself aloof and outside the system until the day can come to cast it down.
When you understand this, you see the problem with asinine emphasis on ‘terrorism’. The violent portion of both movements is just a small part of the far larger, and far more dangerous cultural movement. Neo-Nazi terrorists like Blood & Honour, Combat 18 or Brevik, or the Islamic terrorists of Al Qaeda, HAMAS or Hezbollah are just the sharp end. The real danger lies with their supporters.
