Francis Fukuyama and Islamo-Fascism

Before Horowitz was Fukuyama 

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

From Talk of the Nation, Monday , January 13, 2003:

Is the rise of radical Islam a dangerous return to the past ... or a sign of democratic change in the Middle East?

Writer and thinker Francis Fukuyama joins host Neal Conan to talk about his theory of "Creative Destruction."

Guest:
Francis Fukuyama
Professor of International Political Economy,

Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Washington, D.C. 

 NPR hit a new low with the Talk of the Nation Francis Fukuyama segment entitled NPR : Francis Fukuyama on 'Creative Destruction'.  A more sophisticated interviewer might have focused on the story behind the
appearance in a journal like Commentary of an article like Fukuyama's "Can Anything Good Come from Radical Islam?"+

Commentary has long been a vehicle for extreme right-wing Zionist and racist points of view.(*) Suddenly, just in time for the War on Terrorism to become an American-lead Israel-supported crusade against Islam, Fukuyama discovers that the Egyptian Islamism of Hassan al-Banna and Sayd Qutb has similarities with Fascism and Communism. The claim is a clear attempt at demonization by association, a favorite technique of Zionist hasbarah (propaganda).

 

Because Egyptian Islamism has since the 1920s been at the forefront of anti-Zionism, finding the smoking gun of the link between political Islam, Fascism and Communism has long been a favorite pastime of Zionist ideologists.

Finding such a connection has a very specific political purpose.  While the USA has no genuine common interests with Zionism or with the State of Israel, the Zionist lobby counts on a reflexive reaction among Americans that Fascism, Communism and related ideological movements are irredeemable evils that must be fought to an unconditional surrender.

The Talk of the Nation interview indicates that Fukuyama has no clue what Fascism is.  Fascism is at the core a nationalist revision of Marxist socialism on which a superstructure of extremist organic nationalism, anti-bourgeois collectivism and state corporatism is constructed. Some forms of Fascism invoke racist and primordialist ideas.  In France and Spain, Fascism was extremely antidemocratic while Eastern European versions of Fascism preferred the veneer of formal democracy over a basically undemocratic state organization.

During the interview both Neil Conan and Francis Fukuyama confused Fascism and German Nazism.  They are distinct but related ideological phenomena.  Only a very few French fascists like Brasillach came close to a German Nazi point of view.  Despite the official name of the Nazi party, nationalist revision of Marxist socialism does not play a role in Nazi ideology as developed by Hitler.  German Nazism combines ethnic fundamentalism, extremist organic nationalism, anti-bourgeois collectivism, primordialism, social Darwinism and biological determinism.  

 

German Nazis were generally less antidemocratic or undemocratic than Fascists and had something of a fondness for plebiscites.  From the German Nazi standpoint voting was not necessarily bad as long as voters belonged to the correct racial stock (an opinion that they share with Zionists and modern French neo-Fascists, who have developed a xenophobic anti-Arab revision of Fascism).

Fascism and German Nazism have a major ideological conflict because generally reconciling any form of socialism and social Darwinism is difficult. The Borokhovian variant of Labor Zionism, which is a subspecies of Fascism, achieved a true synthesis of Fascism and social Darwinism by applying social Darwinism only to the conflict among nations and not to the struggle among individuals within society.  The reconciliation between Fascism and Social Darwinism is particularly clear in the writings of Arlosoroff, who was one of the main Labor Zionist ideological theorists and who was strongly influenced by Borokhov even though he did not agree with him on all particulars.(**)

Can we trace the influence of Fascist ideology in political Islamism as easily as we can identify it in Labor Zionism?(***)

 

Is there anything in the writings of Hassan al-Banna or Sayd Qutb that looks remotely lie the key Fascist ideas that are found in the works of Deat, Drieu de la Rochelle, Mussolini, de Man, Barres, Sorel, Valois or Brasillach?  

 

Is there even evidence in the writings of Hassan al-Banna or Sayd Qutb of any but the most cursory familiarity with the basic Fascist ideas?  

 

Nothing that Fukuyama has written or said indicates that he could answer the questions.  The Talk of the Nation interview suggests that he has either not read or has not comprehended any of the primary literature of Fascism or of Islamism.

For obvious reasons an intellectual like Fukuyama, whose thought is part of the discourse bolstering hegemonic US domination and who writes for Zionist propaganda publications, would want to demonize Egyptian Islamism and probably all anti-hegemonic movements as an expression of Fascism and Communism.  Yet he will have to do better, for Syrian and Iraqi Baathism , which was genuinely and demonstrably influenced by French Fascist thought, contrasts tremendously with Egyptian Islamism, which is primarily a early non-nationalist form of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism.

Al-Banna mainly opposed British interference in Egyptian politics and Zionist colonialism in Palestine.  Egyptian Islamists intended to fight Western colonialism and imperialism primarily on the home front in Egypt.  After winning in Egypt, they expected to take the battle to Palestine to drive out the British and their Eastern European settler colonist colonial surrogates.  Taking the struggle back to the imperial motherland was a fallback position if the primary strategy failed.

Al-Banna's ideology employs Islamic language and is particularly hostile to internal collaborators, who are to be fought primarily via social and religious reform.  Egyptian Islamists undertook rebellion against the Egyptian government not from a Sorelian belief in social or national purification through violence but because all other vehicles of political influence were closed to them.  

 

While some breakaway Islamist political groups began to show nihilistic tendencies as a result of brutal suppression by the Mubarak government as may have some Algerian Islamist factions in response to the suppression of elections,

• the significance of Islamist nihilism remained small in Egypt if it ever exists,
• there never was any clear identification of the Algerian groups that committed massacres or determination of their reasons or goals, and
• Bin-Ladinism cannot be considered nihilistic on the basis of anything Bin-Ladin has written or said.

Because at least half the War against Terrorism must be fought on the ideological front in order to turn supporters away from Bin-Ladin, analyzing and understanding the ideological roots and affinities of ideologies like Islamism, Baathism, Zionism, Nazism, Fascism and Communism is a large and important part of the effort to develop a counterstrategy, but Fukuyama provides us only with trite vaguely Zionist demonism and propaganda.  If he wants to supply any sort of genuinely useful scholarship, I would suggest that he start with a serious study of the Zionist thought from the same period as the first stirrings of Egyptian Islamism.

Historiography of Pre-State Zionism argues that Zionism provides a unique window to investigate the whole constellation of late 19th century and early 20th century ideas that form the warp and woof of movements like Nazism, Fascism, Pan-Germanism, Russian pan-Slavism, Greater Serbianism and Polish nationalism. Once Fukuyama understood the political and intellectual history of this period from the perspective of Europe, he would be more prepared to address the same period of Ottoman, Arab, Turkish and Iranian political thought.

Fukuyama should reflect whether anyone inclined to Bin-Ladinism or Islamist anti-Americanism will take seriously any American criticism or condemnation of political Islam as long as the USA panders the perverted Zionist application of Jewish religious ideas, myths and scripture to advance colonialism, imperialism, ethnic cleansing, racism and invasion in the Middle East.

NOTES

 

+  Modernizing Islam, a response to Francis Fukuyama by Martin Kramer is a thoroughly Zionist response to Fukuyama. Both Fukuyama and Kramer should respond to the question whether anything good came out of radical Jewish (ethnic Ashkenazi) ethnic fundamentalism (Zionism) in order to provide a baseline to judge their views on Islamism.

(*) See Ruth Wisse, Yiddish: Past, Present and Imperfect, Commentary, November 1997.

(**) Social Darwinism is the common language that Zionists and Bush's form of Republicanism share.  One can only stand in awe at the triumph of marketing and advertising that has successfully repackaged social Darwinism as compassionate conservatism.  Bush applies social Darwinism both to the conflict among individuals within society and to the conflict between nations.  Jabotinsky took precisely the same standpoint in his development of Revisionist Zionist ideology in Russian.  Revisionist Zionism today is the basis of Likud ideology. Is it surprising that an American political leader who could call social Darwinism compassionate conservatism could also proclaim that Sharon, the leader of the Likud party, is a man of peace?

(***) Just compare the writings of the Zionist Berl Katznelson and the Belgian Fascist Henri de Man.

 

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