How To Define Irony -- "Islamofascism"
I started writing this in November, but faltered, and started again, and faltered again. I find the entire topic just too important to treat lightly, but too emotionally fraught to resort to the bludgeon of didactic accusation. Telling people "You're evil!" just gets you dismissed.
I'm not trying to make that accusation. Ah, but just making the argument that the words used to vilify those that wish us dead could be better applied to many of our leaders. . . . I hope you can see the difficulty. The trouble: Those should know of our country's history with fascism have been blindsided by sloppy use of the word. Over the decades, few remember what the word actually meant to those that coined it.
Back in late October, the younger arm of the Republican Party sponsored Islamofascism Awareness Week, a ". . . protest is as simple as it is crucial:"
to confront the two Big Lies of the political left: that George Bush created the war on terror and that Global Warming is a greater danger to Americans than the terrorist threat. . . . According to the academic left, anyone who links Islamic radicalism to the war on terror is an "Islamophobe." According to the academic left, the Islamo-fascists hate us not because we are tolerant and free, but because we are "oppressors."
I can't really argue against that line of reasoning. It's just too rife with complicated simplification, gliding over vast nuance with the respect and tenderness of a trowel over spackle. Unfortunately, filling holes in reality is no way to appreciate fact. For example, who exactly is the "academic left?" What is this freedom and tolerance, specifically? Never mind those gross simplifications. Those squishy definitions are too often squeezed into inappropriate places, allowing the definers to gain quick but inappropriate advantage in a fast-and-loose argument. In fact, "free" and "tolerant" seem to be abused just as much as "Islamic" and "fascist." Maybe I should start getting a better definitional grip on those terms first.
Let's start with Islam. I won't have to go into much detail here for reasons that will become, hopefully, clearer later in this piece. As far as I know, Bin Laden and his ilk really do want to bring about at least the capitulation of the West. Whether or not all of them want to establish religious rule worldwide has yet to be seen. Right now, the terrorists most widely publicized seem to strike by tearing down the rule of those they deem enemies, rather than actively building governance. Furthermore, they seem to strike mostly at those that try to impose rule over Muslims, carrying on as if the Crusades of the Middle Ages happened only yesterday. Where these religious fundamentalists do rule, they seem to feel a draconian version of Islamic law, or Sharia, works.
Admittedly, I don't have as firm a grasp on Sharia as I do on more familiar Western concepts. Essentially, Sharia represents a collection of laws governing everyday life, from what can be eaten, to how one prays, to how businesses conduct business. I'll focus mainly on business under Sharia. What little I do know about this involves a prohibition of usury (charging interest when lending) and a complex system of inheritance very different from the traditional Western primogeniture traditions where businesses and property are bequeathed to eldest sons.
(Some scholars note these two major differences between the traditions led to the ascension of western economic influence: when control of a business is passed intact to an individual, the capital it controls has the opportunity to expand in scope and influence; businesses that can incur interest-bearing debt in order to take advantage of expansion opportunities wield an advantage over those constrained to very limited and restrictive pools of available capital.
(Ah, but I digress.)
The most notable element to highlight here: privately owned businesses exists -- indeed, they represent the principle economic model - in the Islamic Sharia East. This distinction becomes very important when one delves into the origin of our next fathomable term.
I'm still puzzled as to why the College Republicans chose to describe the enemy du jour as "fascist," rather than, say, Islamic Dominionist, a group which aims to impart Sharia by force if necessary. One can be a religious totalitarian, after all. But no, they chose "fascist." To be fair, Rumsfeld at one point referred to The Enemy not as "terrrorists," but as "radical fundamentalists" or something like that. The exact phrase he used seemed so clunky and overly-complex that everyone immediately noted it -- death for a phrase. After a few weeks, IIRC, "Islamic fascism" and the later conjoined "Islamo-fascism" became vogue descriptors.
This strikes me as the work of word master Frank Luntz, ". . . a magician with a gift for the politics of words and what words best connect with the hearts and minds of the public." Luntz specializes in finding how words are defined not by their users, but by those that hear them. Check out the headline motto on his company's site: "It's not what you say, it's what they hear." Truer words may never have been spoken. Luntz has done extensive work for the Bush administration, outlining, for example, how the talking heads should frame the whole global warming er, "global climate change" debate. You see, Luntz is credited for changing the very term the Bushies use for referring to the effects of atmospheric carbon build-up. See Page i in the PDF: "It's time for us to start talking about "climate change" instead of "global warming. . . ." (He also makes some great observations on that page about the behaviors of "environmentalists" and how those behaviors have alienated centrists voters, observations I believe are dead-on target.)
Once Luntz gets an assignment, he doesn't sit about the office doodling with his scratch pads. He identifies the language used, the language needed, the message to be sent, and starts intensive -- and expensive -- market research with live audiences giving real-time opinions about how they feel about whatever is being said. He pioneered to the Instant Response focus group, a fascinating process to see. I invite you to watch Luntz in action on the fifth estate. It's a joy to note someone who can identify with laser precision not the meaning of the words people use, but the meaning the listeners hear.
I suspect a Luntz research panel was convened to determine the best replacement term for Rummy's clunky language, a term that would impart sufficient terror without actually saying "terrorist." Well, as a nation we spent the better part of the 1940s battling actual fascists, and the better part of the following five decades codifying that fight through popular culture. Think of the continuing images of ganz-stupping Nazis on the Hitler History Channel, and the clockwork Hollywood re-treatments of WWII battling.
Yes, I can imagine that "fascist" carries an excellent negative connotation with the American populace. Still, outside of our associations with the word, what does it mean?
We hear it just about everywhere today. Anyone attempting to limit freedoms today is accused of fascism. It's become a bit of a joke. One key element to all the namecalling, though, seems to imply fascism has something to so with top-down totalitarian rule. The governments usually described as fascist -- Franco's Spain, Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy -- seem to support that generalization. Ah, but why were the Nazis in Germany not accused of Socialism? After all, they called their party the National Socialists. The answer seems to lie in economic policies that upheld corporate and private ownership. After all, one can easily be described as totalitarian without being accused of fascism. Stalin's Soviet Union or Mao's China, actual "socialist" states, come to mind as excellent totalitarian examples.
Benito Mussolini
To find an answer for the fascism question, I decided to go as close to the definitional source as I could. It seems Benito Mussolini coined the term (or took credit for its coinage) in an essay signed by him in 1932, The Doctrine of Fascism, first published in the Enciclopedia Italiana. From the Wiki article:
A key concept of the Mussolini essay was that fascism was a rejection of previous models: "Granted that the XIXth century was the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy, this does not mean that the XXth century must also be the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy. Political doctrines pass; nations remain. We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the 'right', a Fascist century. If the 19th century was the century of the individual (liberalism implies individualism) we are free to believe that this is the 'collective' century, and therefore the century of the State."
Christopher Hitchens, in fact, makes this very association in an essay cited in support of the College Republican's call for their week. He compares old school European fascism with the Islamists:
The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. ("Death to the intellect! Long live death!" as Gen. Francisco Franco's sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories.
Hitchens makes more points in defense of the association, but I'd like to end on that last, emphasized point, the nostalgia. That nostalgia, it turns out, gives fascism its name.
Mussolini termed his nascent political movement after the Italian word for the weapon shown above, a fasces. From the Wiki: "The traditional Roman fasces consisted of a bundle of birch rods tied together with a red ribbon as a cylinder." To continue:
A corps of apparitores (subordinate officials) called lictors each carried fasces as a sort of staff of office before a magistrate, in a number corresponding to his rank, in public ceremonies and inspections. . . .
Traditionally, fasces carried within the Pomerium - the limits of the sacred inner City of Rome - had their axe blades removed. This signified that under normal political circumstances, the imperium-bearing magistrates did not have the judicial power of life and death; that power rested, within the city, with the people through the assemblies.
An association with a fallen and supreme empire would indeed appeal both to the nostalgia for lost grandeur and the authority resurrection of that authority would mean for the people living in the very Pomerium. The fascio made a perfect symbol for Italians, as did the Nazi reference to themselves as the Third Reich, the third incarnation of the Roman Empire.
Let's continue. Divorce yourself from Hitchens' rhetoric about death cults and nostalgia, and return instead to the economic aspect of fascism I touched on earlier. Let's read Mussolini's original description of Fascism, one that rejected the Marxist movement: "Fascism [is] the precise negation of that doctrine which formed the basis of the so-called Scientific or Marxian Socialism. (p. 30)" (Emphasis mine.) In contrast to the communists, fascists centralize a recognition of private enterprise:
The corporate State considers that private enterprise in the sphere of production is the most effective and usefu [sic] instrument in the interest of the nation. In view of the fact that private organisation of production is a function of national concern, the organiser of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction given to production.
State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management. (pp. 135-136)
Okay, for the finale I'm asking one and all to bear with me. I'm not trying to take cheap shots at the United States. Not at all.
I intend to back those shots with evidence, to show that the shots I take are far from cheap.
I would like to suggest that many of the traits that define "fascism" apply sometimes more appropriately to our very own country than they do to a band of Islamic Fundamentalists -- a group rarely associated with Roman nostalgia or known for their leaders' opposition to collective economic systems. Near the end of the entry, I earlier noted connections between our corporate leaders in the early twentieth century and the fascist regimes in Europe, connections that almost brought down the executive branch of the United States in an attempted coup. Some of our most influential corporate leaders gave material support to the enemy.
In 1938 Henry Ford received the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle as a birthday present from Adolph Hitler. He was given the medal in his office in Michigan by two officials from the Third Reich. . . . Ford never returned this medal, even after WWII.
Today's neo-conservative leaders often sound way too much like the old school fascists than I like. Check out this set of quotes 6_bleen_7 has annotated with sources. Here's a taste:
"If we remain strong and focused and tough when we need to, if we continue to speak clearly about right from wrong and defend the values-which are not American values, but God-given values-we can achieve peace." George W. Bush, Manchester, New Hampshire, 5 October 2002
"Remain strong in your faith, as you were in former years. In this faith, in its close-knit unity our people today goes straight forward on its way and no power on earth will avail to stop it." Adolf Hitler, in a speech at Coburg, 15 October 1937
"The short-term objective of this country is to find an enemy and bring them to justice before they strike us. The long-term objective is to make this world a more free and hopeful and peaceful place. I believe we'll succeed because freedom is the Almighty God's gift to every man and woman in this world." George W. Bush, Portsmouth, Ohio, 10 September 2004
"I would ask of the Lord God only this: that, as in the past, so in the years to come He would give His blessing to our work and our action, to our judgment and our resolution, that He will safeguard us from all false pride and from all cowardly servility, that He may grant us to find the straight path which His Providence has ordained for the German people, and that He may ever give us the courage to do the right, never to falter, never to yield before any violence, before any danger." Adolf Hitler, in a speech given at Würzburg, 27 June 1937
There are lots more where those four are found! Also, consider how Hitler, Franco and Mussolini took power. Naomi Wolf did, and she has compiled a list of ten steps dictators use to turn a democratic country into a fascist one:
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
2. Create a gulag
3. Develop a thug caste
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
5. Harass citizens' groups
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
7. Target key individuals
8. Control the press
9. Dissent equals treason
10. Suspend the rule of law
Does any of this sound familiar? It bloody well should.
Finally, consider that our country has a much greater symbolic association with fascism than Bin Laden's minions. Let's start with our currency. Here's the back of a 1942 US Mercury dime:
"The reverse of the coin depicts the fasces, an ancient symbol of authority, with a battle-ax atop it to represent preparedness and an olive branch beside it to signify love and peace. With World War I raging in Europe, these were emotional themes in 1916."
Moving on, note our government's meeting spaces and icons, such as the backdrop behind the speaker's podium in the United States House of Representatives, or the seal of the United States Senate:
What about our own nostalgic heroes? How do we honor their name? With fasces, of course.
Check out those armrest pillars. Look familiar?
Though Bin Laden doesn't seem to define his struggle as battling the creeping specter of revolutionary socialism as did Mussolini -- and as do the entire Bush family, going back at least four generations -- Joe Sixpack probably doesn't know that. I suspect the term "fascism" therefore resonates positively with those who long for a past where the United States fought wars for a clearly defined reason. Thank you, Mr. Luntz. Furthermore, Bush and his cronies are famous for talking only to their base. Remember also that their base is amazingly religious.
Therefore, accusing the target of this "war," as Rumsfeld did, of too much religious fundamentalism -- while accurate -- probably equals a very un-nuanced slap in the face to the base. Another pejorative, one that does not call into question the wisdom of blind faith, had to be used. Hence: Islamofascism.
Take a country with a strong fascist past and growing fascist tendencies, get them to use the word "fascist" as an accusation, however, and you've got irony.
I'm not trying to make that accusation. Ah, but just making the argument that the words used to vilify those that wish us dead could be better applied to many of our leaders. . . . I hope you can see the difficulty. The trouble: Those should know of our country's history with fascism have been blindsided by sloppy use of the word. Over the decades, few remember what the word actually meant to those that coined it.
Back in late October, the younger arm of the Republican Party sponsored Islamofascism Awareness Week, a ". . . protest is as simple as it is crucial:"
to confront the two Big Lies of the political left: that George Bush created the war on terror and that Global Warming is a greater danger to Americans than the terrorist threat. . . . According to the academic left, anyone who links Islamic radicalism to the war on terror is an "Islamophobe." According to the academic left, the Islamo-fascists hate us not because we are tolerant and free, but because we are "oppressors."
I can't really argue against that line of reasoning. It's just too rife with complicated simplification, gliding over vast nuance with the respect and tenderness of a trowel over spackle. Unfortunately, filling holes in reality is no way to appreciate fact. For example, who exactly is the "academic left?" What is this freedom and tolerance, specifically? Never mind those gross simplifications. Those squishy definitions are too often squeezed into inappropriate places, allowing the definers to gain quick but inappropriate advantage in a fast-and-loose argument. In fact, "free" and "tolerant" seem to be abused just as much as "Islamic" and "fascist." Maybe I should start getting a better definitional grip on those terms first.
Let's start with Islam. I won't have to go into much detail here for reasons that will become, hopefully, clearer later in this piece. As far as I know, Bin Laden and his ilk really do want to bring about at least the capitulation of the West. Whether or not all of them want to establish religious rule worldwide has yet to be seen. Right now, the terrorists most widely publicized seem to strike by tearing down the rule of those they deem enemies, rather than actively building governance. Furthermore, they seem to strike mostly at those that try to impose rule over Muslims, carrying on as if the Crusades of the Middle Ages happened only yesterday. Where these religious fundamentalists do rule, they seem to feel a draconian version of Islamic law, or Sharia, works.
Admittedly, I don't have as firm a grasp on Sharia as I do on more familiar Western concepts. Essentially, Sharia represents a collection of laws governing everyday life, from what can be eaten, to how one prays, to how businesses conduct business. I'll focus mainly on business under Sharia. What little I do know about this involves a prohibition of usury (charging interest when lending) and a complex system of inheritance very different from the traditional Western primogeniture traditions where businesses and property are bequeathed to eldest sons.
(Some scholars note these two major differences between the traditions led to the ascension of western economic influence: when control of a business is passed intact to an individual, the capital it controls has the opportunity to expand in scope and influence; businesses that can incur interest-bearing debt in order to take advantage of expansion opportunities wield an advantage over those constrained to very limited and restrictive pools of available capital.
(Ah, but I digress.)
The most notable element to highlight here: privately owned businesses exists -- indeed, they represent the principle economic model - in the Islamic Sharia East. This distinction becomes very important when one delves into the origin of our next fathomable term.
I'm still puzzled as to why the College Republicans chose to describe the enemy du jour as "fascist," rather than, say, Islamic Dominionist, a group which aims to impart Sharia by force if necessary. One can be a religious totalitarian, after all. But no, they chose "fascist." To be fair, Rumsfeld at one point referred to The Enemy not as "terrrorists," but as "radical fundamentalists" or something like that. The exact phrase he used seemed so clunky and overly-complex that everyone immediately noted it -- death for a phrase. After a few weeks, IIRC, "Islamic fascism" and the later conjoined "Islamo-fascism" became vogue descriptors.
This strikes me as the work of word master Frank Luntz, ". . . a magician with a gift for the politics of words and what words best connect with the hearts and minds of the public." Luntz specializes in finding how words are defined not by their users, but by those that hear them. Check out the headline motto on his company's site: "It's not what you say, it's what they hear." Truer words may never have been spoken. Luntz has done extensive work for the Bush administration, outlining, for example, how the talking heads should frame the whole global warming er, "global climate change" debate. You see, Luntz is credited for changing the very term the Bushies use for referring to the effects of atmospheric carbon build-up. See Page i in the PDF: "It's time for us to start talking about "climate change" instead of "global warming. . . ." (He also makes some great observations on that page about the behaviors of "environmentalists" and how those behaviors have alienated centrists voters, observations I believe are dead-on target.)
Once Luntz gets an assignment, he doesn't sit about the office doodling with his scratch pads. He identifies the language used, the language needed, the message to be sent, and starts intensive -- and expensive -- market research with live audiences giving real-time opinions about how they feel about whatever is being said. He pioneered to the Instant Response focus group, a fascinating process to see. I invite you to watch Luntz in action on the fifth estate. It's a joy to note someone who can identify with laser precision not the meaning of the words people use, but the meaning the listeners hear.
I suspect a Luntz research panel was convened to determine the best replacement term for Rummy's clunky language, a term that would impart sufficient terror without actually saying "terrorist." Well, as a nation we spent the better part of the 1940s battling actual fascists, and the better part of the following five decades codifying that fight through popular culture. Think of the continuing images of ganz-stupping Nazis on the Hitler History Channel, and the clockwork Hollywood re-treatments of WWII battling.
Yes, I can imagine that "fascist" carries an excellent negative connotation with the American populace. Still, outside of our associations with the word, what does it mean?
We hear it just about everywhere today. Anyone attempting to limit freedoms today is accused of fascism. It's become a bit of a joke. One key element to all the namecalling, though, seems to imply fascism has something to so with top-down totalitarian rule. The governments usually described as fascist -- Franco's Spain, Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy -- seem to support that generalization. Ah, but why were the Nazis in Germany not accused of Socialism? After all, they called their party the National Socialists. The answer seems to lie in economic policies that upheld corporate and private ownership. After all, one can easily be described as totalitarian without being accused of fascism. Stalin's Soviet Union or Mao's China, actual "socialist" states, come to mind as excellent totalitarian examples.
Benito Mussolini
To find an answer for the fascism question, I decided to go as close to the definitional source as I could. It seems Benito Mussolini coined the term (or took credit for its coinage) in an essay signed by him in 1932, The Doctrine of Fascism, first published in the Enciclopedia Italiana. From the Wiki article:
A key concept of the Mussolini essay was that fascism was a rejection of previous models: "Granted that the XIXth century was the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy, this does not mean that the XXth century must also be the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy. Political doctrines pass; nations remain. We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the 'right', a Fascist century. If the 19th century was the century of the individual (liberalism implies individualism) we are free to believe that this is the 'collective' century, and therefore the century of the State."
Christopher Hitchens, in fact, makes this very association in an essay cited in support of the College Republican's call for their week. He compares old school European fascism with the Islamists:
The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. ("Death to the intellect! Long live death!" as Gen. Francisco Franco's sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories.
Hitchens makes more points in defense of the association, but I'd like to end on that last, emphasized point, the nostalgia. That nostalgia, it turns out, gives fascism its name.
Mussolini termed his nascent political movement after the Italian word for the weapon shown above, a fasces. From the Wiki: "The traditional Roman fasces consisted of a bundle of birch rods tied together with a red ribbon as a cylinder." To continue:
A corps of apparitores (subordinate officials) called lictors each carried fasces as a sort of staff of office before a magistrate, in a number corresponding to his rank, in public ceremonies and inspections. . . .
Traditionally, fasces carried within the Pomerium - the limits of the sacred inner City of Rome - had their axe blades removed. This signified that under normal political circumstances, the imperium-bearing magistrates did not have the judicial power of life and death; that power rested, within the city, with the people through the assemblies.
An association with a fallen and supreme empire would indeed appeal both to the nostalgia for lost grandeur and the authority resurrection of that authority would mean for the people living in the very Pomerium. The fascio made a perfect symbol for Italians, as did the Nazi reference to themselves as the Third Reich, the third incarnation of the Roman Empire.
Let's continue. Divorce yourself from Hitchens' rhetoric about death cults and nostalgia, and return instead to the economic aspect of fascism I touched on earlier. Let's read Mussolini's original description of Fascism, one that rejected the Marxist movement: "Fascism [is] the precise negation of that doctrine which formed the basis of the so-called Scientific or Marxian Socialism. (p. 30)" (Emphasis mine.) In contrast to the communists, fascists centralize a recognition of private enterprise:
The corporate State considers that private enterprise in the sphere of production is the most effective and usefu [sic] instrument in the interest of the nation. In view of the fact that private organisation of production is a function of national concern, the organiser of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction given to production.
State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management. (pp. 135-136)
Okay, for the finale I'm asking one and all to bear with me. I'm not trying to take cheap shots at the United States. Not at all.
I intend to back those shots with evidence, to show that the shots I take are far from cheap.
I would like to suggest that many of the traits that define "fascism" apply sometimes more appropriately to our very own country than they do to a band of Islamic Fundamentalists -- a group rarely associated with Roman nostalgia or known for their leaders' opposition to collective economic systems. Near the end of the entry, I earlier noted connections between our corporate leaders in the early twentieth century and the fascist regimes in Europe, connections that almost brought down the executive branch of the United States in an attempted coup. Some of our most influential corporate leaders gave material support to the enemy.
In 1938 Henry Ford received the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle as a birthday present from Adolph Hitler. He was given the medal in his office in Michigan by two officials from the Third Reich. . . . Ford never returned this medal, even after WWII.
Today's neo-conservative leaders often sound way too much like the old school fascists than I like. Check out this set of quotes 6_bleen_7 has annotated with sources. Here's a taste:
"If we remain strong and focused and tough when we need to, if we continue to speak clearly about right from wrong and defend the values-which are not American values, but God-given values-we can achieve peace." George W. Bush, Manchester, New Hampshire, 5 October 2002
"Remain strong in your faith, as you were in former years. In this faith, in its close-knit unity our people today goes straight forward on its way and no power on earth will avail to stop it." Adolf Hitler, in a speech at Coburg, 15 October 1937
"The short-term objective of this country is to find an enemy and bring them to justice before they strike us. The long-term objective is to make this world a more free and hopeful and peaceful place. I believe we'll succeed because freedom is the Almighty God's gift to every man and woman in this world." George W. Bush, Portsmouth, Ohio, 10 September 2004
"I would ask of the Lord God only this: that, as in the past, so in the years to come He would give His blessing to our work and our action, to our judgment and our resolution, that He will safeguard us from all false pride and from all cowardly servility, that He may grant us to find the straight path which His Providence has ordained for the German people, and that He may ever give us the courage to do the right, never to falter, never to yield before any violence, before any danger." Adolf Hitler, in a speech given at Würzburg, 27 June 1937
There are lots more where those four are found! Also, consider how Hitler, Franco and Mussolini took power. Naomi Wolf did, and she has compiled a list of ten steps dictators use to turn a democratic country into a fascist one:
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
2. Create a gulag
3. Develop a thug caste
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
5. Harass citizens' groups
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
7. Target key individuals
8. Control the press
9. Dissent equals treason
10. Suspend the rule of law
Does any of this sound familiar? It bloody well should.
Finally, consider that our country has a much greater symbolic association with fascism than Bin Laden's minions. Let's start with our currency. Here's the back of a 1942 US Mercury dime:
"The reverse of the coin depicts the fasces, an ancient symbol of authority, with a battle-ax atop it to represent preparedness and an olive branch beside it to signify love and peace. With World War I raging in Europe, these were emotional themes in 1916."
Moving on, note our government's meeting spaces and icons, such as the backdrop behind the speaker's podium in the United States House of Representatives, or the seal of the United States Senate:
What about our own nostalgic heroes? How do we honor their name? With fasces, of course.
Check out those armrest pillars. Look familiar?
Though Bin Laden doesn't seem to define his struggle as battling the creeping specter of revolutionary socialism as did Mussolini -- and as do the entire Bush family, going back at least four generations -- Joe Sixpack probably doesn't know that. I suspect the term "fascism" therefore resonates positively with those who long for a past where the United States fought wars for a clearly defined reason. Thank you, Mr. Luntz. Furthermore, Bush and his cronies are famous for talking only to their base. Remember also that their base is amazingly religious.
Therefore, accusing the target of this "war," as Rumsfeld did, of too much religious fundamentalism -- while accurate -- probably equals a very un-nuanced slap in the face to the base. Another pejorative, one that does not call into question the wisdom of blind faith, had to be used. Hence: Islamofascism.
Take a country with a strong fascist past and growing fascist tendencies, get them to use the word "fascist" as an accusation, however, and you've got irony.