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There is a striking parallel between the Fascists of Europe and the Islamo-fascists of today

B20689 / Thu, 28 Dec 2006 06:23:09 / "War on Terror"

There is a striking parallel between the Fascists of the 30s and early 40s and the Islamo-fascists of today. Of course Nazism was a first world phenomena based in an industrialized country, while Islamo-fascism is a third world phenomena.

Islamo-fascism uses an old religion, Islam, while Naziism made up a new one for itself, however, the similarities are striking and so may also be the historical pattern by which they both rose and fell, or in the case of the Islamo-fascist movement, will fall.

We all have seen those pictures and films of Hitler, with that stoic stare, all serious, with the fingers of his left hand in his belt, giving a Nazi salute. How scary that image must have seemed to his future victims at the time. To many at the time, he was invincible. Or at least to many Americans, who felt safer on this side of the Atlantic, if he was not completely invincible, there certainly was lots of horror to be had between then and when the Nazis would be finally beaten.

In the 30s, the US was isolationist, still getting over the hangover of WWI. Unlike in Britain and France, most Americans saw the First Great War as a great collective mistake on all sides, a failure of civilization itself, and many Americans sympathized with the plight of Germany, who many Americans felt may have been treated unfairly by the allies in 1919.

So in this backdrop rose the image of Hitler. Calls to rally behind the European democracies in the 30s, were often blunted by idealists in the US who blamed German behaviour under the Nazis, on Germany’s victimization by the Allies after WWI. And German victimization was sold as the biggest excuse to stay out of Europe’s future conflicts.

In the end it took Pearl Harbor and than a declaration of War from Germany’s evil dictator himself to drag the US into the next war. Of course today we all know the rest of the sad story. Europe was left in ruins, millions of civilians were murdered by both the Germans and the Japanese. Both empires collapsed and then after the collapses of 1945 not a remnant of either empire survived the conflict. They were, so to speak, annihilated.

Yet today, the Islamo-fascists are touted as the next great challenge to Democracy. They attack Arabia’s move to Democracy, the same way the Nazis and the militarists in Japan attacked Germany and Japan’s steps to Democracy. These fascists all use nationalistic victimization to appeal to the emerging ethnic instincts of their masses. They all blamed local Democratic movements for siding with their respective countrys’ enemies, they all struggled to keep out international ideals and universal standards of human dignity. They each tried to redefine right and wrong in local Nationalist terms and called anyone who referred to universal standards as foreign sympathizers. To the Nazis it was the Communists or the Democratic Socialists or the Jews who were the enemy. They were all foreign agents of people seeking to destroy Germany.

And in all the cases above, the fascist use another propaganda tool. They try and convince those friends of Democracy and enemies of fascism overseas, that the conflict is too hard and too expensive to win, obviously trying to dissuade people from interfering in the fascist’s own attempts to dominate their countries.

The story of the Islamo-Fascists of Arabia is not yet fully written. Like fascism in the early and mid 30s, it is fresh, and it is having a tremendous influence on the nationalist instincts of people who feel humiliated. Like a cat, it hisses in an attempt to dissuade its enemies from interfering, occasionally given the West a taste of what conflict against them might feel like. But like Nazism which bit off more then it could chew, the fall of the Islamo-Fascists will also be swift, and when it does fall, people in the West will be rushing to take credit.

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