Eastern fascism is as bad as Western fascism
For some strange reason, holier-than-thou partisans of political correctness in the West do not get nearly as upset about Eastern fascism and neofascism as they do about Western fascism and neofascism. The most obvious example of this curious attitude is the tendency among self-proclaimed, broad-minded multiculturalists in the West to denounce Islamophobia much more often, and with much greater virulence, than they ever dare to denounce Islamic terrorism. For them, Western neofascist populism is what they call a “racist” reaction to Islamic violence, even though Islam is a universal religion open to all the world’s “races”. The multiculturalists nevertheless consider Western populism to be much more dangerous than Islamic terrorism itself because it incorrectly assumes that all Muslims are potential terrorists.
The fact that the ultra-Islamic terrorists themselves have considerable popular support throughout the world-wide community of Muslims, in some countries much more than in others, does not seem to faze them at all. Nor does the fact that the ultra-reactionary Islamic movements supporting those terrorists also believe that all Westerners are inherently anti-Muslim. Nevertheless, the multicultural sycophants, posing as professional anti-racists, refuse to simultaneously denounce all the other kinds of racial or cultural discrimination that exist in this world. Nor will they admit that every kind of ultra-conservative amalgam, no matter of which cultural origin, is just as bad as every other kind. In so doing, they are being just as “racist” as any of the populists that they pretend to detest so much.
Ultra-orthodox factions inside every religion (not only Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but also Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Shintoism, animism, etc.) believe that everyone who does not think exactly the same way as they do are necessarily out to get them. Similar fanatics in all the secular ideologies (neoliberalism, ultra-conservative nationalism, totalitarian socialism, etc.), are also just as paranoiac about every rival system of belief, religious or secular.
Some of those ultra-believers even manage to combine some particular form of religious fanaticism, such as fundamentalist Christianity, with some other particular form of secular fanaticism, such as ultra-conservative nationalism (aka imperialism), and develop complicated phobias against anyone not afflicted with both of those thought diseases at the same time. They believe in both of them so much that they do not feel it is possible that any decent human being could possibly not think the same way. The fact that those two systems of belief are based on totally opposite and contradictory principles (a universal religion versus a geographically-limited empire) does not even occur to them. As one such true believer in both those ultra ideologies, former US president George W. Bush, expressed it not so long ago, “You are either for us or against us”.
Based mainly in Western countries, politically correct intellectuals of the ultra-liberal persuasion are constantly denouncing powerful Western leaders like George Bush as fascists, imperialists and state-terrorists. But because those same intellectuals are trying their very best to accommodate every kind of non-Western immigrant and/or First Nations minority possible, they strongly object to the use of words like “fascism” or “imperialism” in any non-Western (non-European-origin) context. They are a lot like those anal-retentive historical purists who claim that only Italian fascism from the first half of the twentieth century should be considered real fascism, and even exclude German nazism and Japanese militarism during the same period, or Italian neofascism nowadays, from their ultra-discreet definition of that concept.
Unfortunately for the multicultural purists, however, most people using the English language nowadays have adopted a much larger definition of such words. Judging from all the mainstream media outlets that I have been consulting over the past several years, the word “fascism” now refers to any ultra-conservative form of ideological atavism that glorifies any one of a number of imaginary, “golden-age” tribal, ancient or medieval approaches to contemporary problems. Even if it does not fully manifest every specific characteristic of Benito Mussolini’s twentieth-century political formation.
So why do multiculturalists like Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor look at the world according to this binary system of greater Western evil versus lesser Eastern evil? One possible explanation comes from the classical liberal definition of good government as being based on “keeping the peace”, in the sense of seeing police officers as peace officers and judges in the liberal system of justice as “justices of the peace”. This idea leads them to believe that people who have often been mistreated by “our side” in the past, such as native peoples and immigrants from non-Christian countries, need to be over-compensated for that poor treatment, not so much with money as with a “turn the other cheek” kind of mentality.
Those goody-goody liberals want so much to be seen as kind, benevolent and ultra-inclusive friends and neighbors to every “non-Western” person they can find, that they are willing to practically turn themselves inside-out to accommodate everyone not belonging to their own cultural group of evil sinners. This ridiculous way of thinking has the same kind of antisocial origins as the tendency among many like-minded Western jurists to identify with aggressors (criminals), rather than with victims of crime, giving the bad guys dozens of advantages in court over their much less interesting victims, just in order to prove those jurists own pretentious magnanimity.
Keeping the peace, however, like every other liberal principle, is not really what it initially seems to be. In our class-based global village called human society, hundreds of millions of under-privileged people make only one dollar per day while a few thousand over-privileged people make millions of dollars per day. In such a world, keeping the peace really means using the justice system to make sure that those near the bottom of the heap do not get so upset at their inferior status that they start rioting in the streets, or making “unrealistic” demands on their more prosperous betters. Paternalist liberal politicians try to show everyone that we all can live together peacefully in spite of our income differences, or our cultural differences, and let their equally benevolent friends in big business get on with the job of “creating wealth for everyone”. So, you under-privileged ones, please don’t rock the boat and get so angry all the time. We are doing our best, after all, to make sure that there is room for everyone under the sun.
Another way of explaining this peculiar kind of politically-correct liberalism comes from exceptionally perspicacious analysts like French author Sophie Bessis, who wrote a book recently called “La double impasse: l’universel à l’épreuve des fondamentalismes religieux et marchand” (“The double impasse: universal values challenged by religious and market fundamentalisms”). Unfortunately, like many other people, I have not been able to read most of her book because there seems to be a considerable delay in getting it into Quebec bookstores. So in the following paragraphs, I have had to rely on a long book review written by journalist Pierre Dubuc that appeared in “L’Aut’Journal”, a pro-union and pro-independence newspaper published here in Montreal.
As reported by Dubuc, Bessis began her analysis of Eastern varieties of religious and secular fundamentalism with the national liberation movements against Western colonialism during the 1960s and 1970s. In those days, a large number of former Muslim colonies, such as Algeria, based their definitions of their emerging nationalities on the Muslim religion. In such places, “the nation” was deemed to exclude any national minorities living in those countries, which is to say all those who did not have the same religious and ethnic origins as the majority group. In Algeria’s case that meant any people residing in that country, no matter for how many generations, who were not, or did not consider themselves to be, 100% Arab Muslims.
According to Bessis, back then the Maoist wing of the world communist movement, in its fight against both Western imperialism and Soviet “revisionism”, adopted an ultra-populist strategy of “support for the masses” (“from the masses, to the masses”) that led them to believe in a socialist form of international globalization. According to them, national liberation in every country could only take place if the people there totally eliminated any ideological influence coming from Western “cultural imperialism”, most emphatically including such concepts as democracy, liberty, fraternity and secularism. Such ideas were necessarily foreign to the various peoples in the colonies because according to the Maoists they were not compatible with the ultra-conservative versions of formerly dominant religions and ideologies, such as Islam, in which the vast majority of ordinary people (the masses) still fervently believed.
Combined with the simultaneous rise of laissez-faire globalization (aka neoliberalism), Christian fundamentalism and liberal multiculturalism in the West, that led many people in left-wing politics to become “altermondialists” instead, favoring an anti-capitalist form of globalization. Even though Maoism itself soon disappeared completely, it left in its wake the belief that every people in the former Third World had to repudiate Western imperialism completely by harking back to the feudal ideologies that they had supported prior to the onslaught of European colonialism. By mixing up several conflicting ideologies in this way, millions of left-wingers in the West became convinced that they had to hold their noses and support Eastern forms of fascism, lest they be accused of supporting Western neocolonialism instead!
Sophie Bessis’s book is largely concentrated on what happened in Muslim-majority countries, particularly during the recent “Arab spring” uprisings. She also demonstrated how the ultra-radical Islamic movements in those countries simultaneously adopted neoliberal ideas of “governance”, to replace the largely interventionist national governments that had existed for a time right after independence. As a result, the Islamic Brotherhood organizations and the even more radical terrorist groups such as the Islamic State, have largely abandoned economic nationalism and social-democracy to concentrate on developing their ultra-reactionary, cultural counter-revolutions. Even formerly “moderate” kinds of Islamic reaction, such as the Erdogan government in Turkey, are gradually becoming just as radical as their terrorist neighbors.
So far as I can tell, the Bessis thesis also readily lends itself to an analysis of many different kinds of Eastern atavism, not just Islamic fundamentalism. In India for example, the recently re-elected Hindu nationalist movement, that sees only Hindus as being true patriots, has also fervently embraced big-business neoliberalism as the focus of its economic policy. In China, the current Communist Party leadership has itself become the world’s most obvious example of an alter-globalization state, combining great Han chauvinism with a large and ever-increasing dose of billionaire domination of government.
The Western countries are also drifting towards less and less democratic brands of government. The Netanyahu regime in Israel is the most obvious example, as are some of the post-Soviet Eastern European states, such as Hungary, that have made it into the European Union in spite of their increasing authoritarianism. Since before the 2008 financial crisis, neoliberal attempts at balancing national and regional budgets at the expense of everyone except the ultra-rich, have enormously undermined European social policy. Needless to say, the current refugee crisis is also making mincemeat out of Europe’s open borders strategy, exacerbated every day by the ongoing atrocities of the Syrian civil war and the only slightly less violent situations in other parts of western Asia as well as in Africa.
North American politics has also degenerated under similar pressures, most notably by the same combination of big-business tax evasion and austerity-driven pauperization as in Europe. In the USA, neofascist elements inside the Republican Party are threatening to completely eliminate that country’s long-standing policy of accepting large numbers of immigrants, making a mockery out of the original definition of a democratic republic as a place where anyone can become a useful citizen. In Canada, the authoritarian nightmare of the former Conservative government has been replaced by the return of the Liberal Party under Trudeau the Younger. But it remains to be seen if he will not simply follow in his father’s footsteps by calling out the army to control dissent, and thereby make things even worse than the Harper Conservatives did.
The entire world therefore seems to be moving closer and closer to a bewildering variety of antediluvian political ideologies that can all be legitimately classified as pro-fascist or neofascist. But confining oneself to denouncing Western forms of fascism, while simultaneously accommodating the Eastern kinds, like the politically-correct multiculturalists do, is not going to prevent reactionary movements from setting up completely anti-democratic, inegalitarian, thought-control regimes all over the world. All that is going to do is to encourage those people to take over even more quickly than they were already planning to do.
