Cyrill Vatomsky, Where All Politics Are Global

I had some first hand experience with flying from San Jose to Los Angeles in the wake of the foiled terrorist plot to blow up airplanes announced just several days ago.

TSA agents confiscated my stick deodorant and my Gillette 4-blade razor for a flight in a 30-seat Embraer Jet. An old Russian saying covers it all, and mind you, Russians know best about this: teach a fool to pray and he will have a concussion. 7 TSA agents to search trough little bags of 7 year olds? How high on the terrorist list do you think a commuter paddle jumper would be?!

Several comments about the Saturday Special the day before and the question du jour was “what would you do with the Middle East if you were in charge?” MZ did a great job provoking stupid comments from the callers. A great illustration of why none of the callers are really in charge?

From there on, I eventually was moving towards the discussion of whether Islamo-Fascist is an appropriate term. First, Pakistan and Afghanistan are great examples of how we do not allow rulers of countries to use means that our European ancestors used to crush local warlords.

A great article in the Counterterrorism blog deals with Pakistan and proliferation of terrorism in there. It was not Pakistan that contributed to the London plot, and unfortunately too many people make the connection, as if the US has responsibility for any international criminal that just happened to be born there.

Callers: one of the collars suggested that we need to bomb Muslims because they will never be able to have democracy. I am so damn tired of this supremacist mentality among some mountain hicks in the US. As if universal suffrage is something that has always existed in the West! Our democracy is less then 100 years old and we claim Arabs can not have one.

The second hour is about fascism and its relation to Middle East. It starts with a reference to Ruth Hunter, a Santa Cruz activist, brainwashed by Castro’s goons to the point of being mentally incapacitated. Since I know how Potemkin Villages work from my personal involvement. Such gullible dimwits from the West that enjoy all the benefits of capitalist democracy, but love going to Cuba to praise its fascist leader is one of our big problems.

CAIR is very upset about the use of “Islamist Fascist” but the similarities are very real.

Of course it is CAIR and one should expect such foolishness from a group which finds it hard to condemn Islamic extremists but oh so easy to condemn anyone who might utter something, even the truth, which might slight Muslims.

Let’s make not bones about it: there is very little difference between Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s China, Fidel’s Cuba and  what is becoming now of Chavez’ Venezuela. There is little difference between all these fascistic states with Hussein’s Iraq and Khomeini’s Iran, not to mention Syria.

There is also an ideological connection between Nazi and current Muslim fascism. Let’s not forget the Grand mufti of Jerusalem al Husseini, who organized Bosnian Muslim division of Waffen SS , but then there is also a reference to Arafat.

From QandO blog:

Frankly I'm glad to see the terminology finally shift from "terrorists" to what they really are. But as far as links to fascism go, one doesn't have to look any further than WW II and Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem:

And more:

Born on Aug. 24, 1929, Mohammed Abd al-Rahman Abd al-Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini enrolled at Cairo University in 1951. He came not to study, but because the university had become the hotbed of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Free Officers, unabashed Nazi sympathizers who, under Nasser's leadership, went on to stage a successful coup the following year. The coup was still far off, and the younger al-Husseini shortened his name in order to disguise his family ties. Ever since then, the world has known the mufti's most famous disciple as Yasser Arafat

From Weekly Standard:

After Gamal Abdel Nasser became Egypt's president, for example, a number of Nazis were given prominent positions in his government. Nazi commando Otto Skorzeny trained thousands of Egyptians in guerilla and desert warfare, and even organized early Palestinian terrorist forays into Israel and the Gaza Strip in the mid-1950s. Johann von Leers, who had been a high-ranking assistant to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, produced material for Nasser attacking the United States and Israel. Von Leers even converted to Islam during this period, adopting the name Oman Amin von Leers. Corresponding with a fellow fascist, von Leers opined that "if my nation had got Islam instead of Christianity we should not have had all the traitors we had in World War II."

Enough ideological roots are on display. But what's on the surface is not enough. Let us look at what really stands behind fascism. Not the label, not “something bad” but what are the fundamental features and attributes a fascist state? And what are similarities if any and what are differences between what is accepted to be fascist states and some Islamic states: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, USSR, Iran, PLO, Syria.

• From social structure standpoint fascism and religious fanaticism are both collectivist, both are based on utmost subjugation of individual to the control of the societal apparatus;
• Economically it is very much the same as well - a vertical state run and controlled economy with minor deviations and various private/state property sharing schemes that do not change type of ownership, but is only designed to create an official channel for state redistribution of wealth to its most cherished members.
• Politically both are authoritarian structures, very often either party based or religious affiliation based excluding non-members from participation and even non-political advancement.

Both types of societies are extremely nationalistic and xenophobic - since both have the same socio-economic purpose - completion and strengthening of a strong homogenous nation state.

Look at the two European countries that had the most notable run with fascism: Italy and Germany. Both countries were late to form nation states, and were still establishing themselves against opposition from other imperialist powers. Besides, they were too late to claim their slices of the colonial pie. Socio-economic conditions demanded quick mobilization of human and industrial resources - fascism offered a logical easy path.

So, not only features are similar, contextually, purposes, goals, causes, fundamentals of these socio-economic and political structures are very similar. Unfortunately, most people seem to concentrate on superficial distinctions, like the completely irrelevant distinctions between Nazis and Commies, while ignoring that fundamentally they were the same.

In the long run fascism is not what Wikipedia thinks, it is not a right wing ideology, it is a left wing social structure. And it is the left that are fascists. And in the US, we still have people brainwashed to love fascists states and leaders like Castro, Arafat, Hezbollah, Iran and a host of others.