Fascism Is the Problem

Imagine a 21st-century Pope who ruled by 13th-century standards. Imagine hundreds of millions subjected to the whims of Papal fiat. Imagine a government that hangs homosexuals, buries “promiscuous” women alive, executes children, jails and tortures dissidents, calls for the destruction of Protestant nations, and relies upon a secret police to enforce Catholic social mores. There’s no denying that every Columbian would rightfully categorize this as a fascist and totalitarian Catholic regime. But where these conditions actually exist, in nations subject to strict state-enforced Islamic rule, many rush to couch their remarks in politically correct and empty rhetoric. En masse, the Columbia Left rejects the term “Islamo-fascist.” They call it too harsh, too aggressive, a misnomer, racist—anything but true. All things considered, they are hypocrites. The same Columbia community that came together to protest Ahmadinejad withers in the face of the greater, global threat.

If we accept “fascism” at face value, we understand it to mean an “authoritarian” and “totalitarian” state. Scholars make further nuanced distinctions. Columbia’s Robert Paxton notes an “obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties.” Umberto Eco references fascism’s “cult of tradition, rejection of modernism, qualitative populism, appeals to a frustrated majority,” and “obsession with illicitly wealthy enemies.”

Sound familiar? It should.

Islamo-Fascism isn’t a pretty term. It isn’t meant to be. Rather, it describes reality for the untold millions denied basic human rights. Critics of the term take as much offense to the juxtaposition of “Islam” and “fascism” as they do the disturbing certainty to which oppressive governments freely abuse and manipulate Islam. They’ve let superficial concerns obscure a matter beyond contention. Call it what you will, but theocratic fascism exists in Islamic states.

Contemporary Islamic regimes and extremist organizations fall victim to an age-old practice where a small but powerful group of elites manipulate religion as both a means and an end to their rule. While they are not categorically European fascists, they rule as such. Upon religion the state seeks to build a collective and unified identity.

Astute observers will draw a similar parallel to communist regimes who sought to orient society around ideological dogma, albeit a secular philosophy. For decades the American Left turned a blind eye toward the horrors of communism. Fellow travelers promoted “acceptance” and “understanding” of foreign ways and practices. American inteligencia called attempts to “pigeonhole” communist states as inherently totalitarian and hopelessly inhumane “dangerous rhetoric” and “needlessly aggressive.” It proved an effective charade. To this day, few Americans understand communism for what it was: simultaneously the greatest threat to a free and God-fearing West and history’s most prolific human rights abuser.

As these nascent Islamic regimes grow militarily and acquire nuclear weapons, we find ourselves in an equally perilous position. Republicans and conservatives spent the better part of the 20th century combating aggressive authoritarian powers. We’re not about to stop now.

Should Ahmadinejad disappear tomorrow, countless individuals throughout the world would go on living broken, battered, and besieged. The tyrant is emblematic of a far more terrifying ideological and political construction. The banners and posters flown proudly one Monday in September, however much they contributed to our weighty sense of self-importance, mean nothing in context of the larger struggle. Society must make a choice: do we give into platitudes and political correctness, or do we tackle the reality at hand?

This global conflict did not begin in Lerner’s Roone Arledge Auditorium. It won’t end there either. This does not, however, absolve us of our responsibilities. Good and evil, absolutes unwelcome within Columbia’s gates, exist. It is neither an act of aggression nor warmongering to call something what it is. Don’t believe the anti-American demagogues who promulgate such rhetoric. They made their bias all too clear: “Ahmadinejad Bad,” they scrawled on their posters, “Bush Worse.”

The liberal who champions civil rights and human liberty cannot now temper his criticism. The well-intentioned progressive who eschews reality in favor of political correctness serves no greater interest. Their misguided words reverberate powerfully. George Santayana, the oft miss-quoted conservative philosopher, once mused, “When experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” And repeating it we are.

The author is a Columbia College senior majoring in political science.