Are Islamic Jihadists Fascist?

Ex-leftist Christopher Hitchens, now ensconced with his new buddies on the right at places like the neofascist Wall Street Journal, promotes the term "Islamofascist" to describe Taliban and Al-Qaeda types. (Ironic given his new bedfellows.) These fundamentalist fanatics are certainly violent and totalitarian in the extreme. Does that make them fascist?

Well, that depends on the definition of "fascist." People who use the term virtually never define it.

But here are what I see as some commonalities between one group of undeniable fascists, the Nazis, and the vicious, terrorist murderers of the (Sunni) Islamic persuasion:

-Hyperviolent and sadistic

-Extremely fanatical (thus uncompromising- yet we keep hearing naive talk of negotiating/compromising/listening to their grievances)

-Possessors of an anti-human ideology which they impose by extreme force

-Murderously intolerant of most other people on this planet

-Terrorists- systematically use terror not just as a weapon to seize power, but as a permanent instrument of rule, used ubiquitously to keep their oppressed subjects under their power

-Uncompromising as noted, except tactically when it suits them to gain advantage and then only temporarily. (The tactics of the Taliban in Pakistan, where they negotiated to take over the Swat valley, and then immediately grabbed more territory, are reminiscent of Hitler's prewar games over Czechoslovakia and etc.)

-Feign sham interest in "peace" & "negotiations" with adversaries, as a trick or ruse or temporary expedient to grab an advantage. Any "peace" thus gained is extremely temporary. Inevitably they must be fought by force of arms

-Despite their extreme ignorance and intolerant narrow-mindedness, possess a dangerous degree of animal cunning about power, politics, and manipulating other people

-Totally ruthless, unethical, immoral, and unburdened by conscience.

 So they certainly have things in common. But this description could apply to others. Perhaps "Islamofascist" is sloppy and lazy, an easy epithet used as a shortcut to a more accurate description. I guess it's serviceable if you need to reduce the description of these horrible creeps to only one word. (Forget 9/11- these shitheads throw acid on little girls to stop them from going to school, among other monstrous atrocities. What they do to other Muslims is far worse than what they've done to the U.S. And they've killed more Muslims in other countries than the number of Americans killed on 9/11 and in the attacks on the two U.S. embassies in Africa and on the USS Cole combined.)

Intellectual Architect of Kent State Massacre Finally Dies

Irving Kristol, one of the endless supply of rightwing ideologues who provide intellectual justifications for the current social, economic, and imperialist order in America, has finally died. Treated as a major figure, not because of his brilliant ideas, but because of his political significance as an ideological Godfather of one of the many strands of anti-human reaction in the U.S., in his case the one called "neoconservatism." (A claque of mostly Jewish reactionaries ensconced in New York City institutions, including academia, private propaganda nests, and right-wing rags which are always copiously funded by the right-wing rich.)

Days before the Kent State massacre, Kristol met with President Richard Nixon (a truly pathological creature and one of the most evil presidents in U.S. history, which is really saying something) and urged Nixon to crush the anti-war movement on the college campuses. Days later, Republican Ohio Governor Rhodes unleashed his National Guard on defenseless students, murdering four and wounding others, including one rendered paraplegic for life. This was preceded by and followed by a reign of repression directed against the students, turning the campus into a police state. Students wandering into town were subjected to baseless, summary arrest, and assault by local louts.

Of course, the establishment rag The New York Times rolled out a huge obit, fawning over The Great Man. As usual when they fete reactionaries, they do not quote his actual "ideas," which are shockingly stupid and vicious, as always with reactionaries, no matter the verbal finery they're dressed up in to appear "intellectual."

Kristol was an enemy of humanity in everything he wrote and did.