Stalinislamofascistrotskyalidocious!! posted by Richard Seymour

How my heart went out to David T, one of the more sensible writers at HP Sauce, when he attempted to tackle the slippery topic of Islamism . He used a prophylactic, of course, finding some fictitious fault with some sinistral others who remain unnamed, (but you-know-who-they-are), and who apparently interpret Islamism purely as a liberatory force. Yet, for that, his argument was perfectly sensible if incomplete. He said:

The political themes of islamism aren't foreign. Nor are they fascism ... They are entirely comprehensible and familiar, and should be as well understood as the tenets of socialism or the principles of liberal democracy, by all people who wish to be informed.

He added:

The failure - in general - to engage with islamism, conceptually, except at the level of islamophobic caricature, is a dangerous one. Ignoring islamism is scarcely better than allying with it.

I like my arguments to be a little more argumentative than that, but it's a small lacuna of sanity in a mucky little cuckoo's nest. Now that Johann Hari has, Big Chief-style, broken out of the asylum, all that is left is for the remainder of the social misfits to follow him and leave the Chronics tied to the wall, dribbling and pissing through catheters between sedation.

Yet, it points to (ie. is not part of) a tendency - I'll put it as weakly as that - toward re-marketing tired conservative shibboleths as funky new contrarian understandings. (I blame Christopher Hitchens, for this and almost everything else. He was the one who started bleating about the 'supererogatory' nature of totalitarian regimes, 'sinister perfectionism' and so on). At any rate, a tendency, which usually manifests itself in the form of "look how the rhetoric of the far right and the far left overlap; isn't this the secret of totalitarianism - no matter what their apparent political and philosophical differences, the far right and far left have more in common under the skin than either dare admit?" Etc. Slavoj Zizek describes how “if, at a Cultural Studies colloquium in the 1970s, one was innocently asked ‘Is your line of argumentation not similar to that of Arendt?’, this was a sure sign that one was in deep trouble.” Today, by contrast, leftists and liberals are inclined to calumniate their opponents as totalitarian at the drop of a sequinned hat. (For example, Paul Berman recently describing Che Guevara as a totalitarian on the grounds that he was “pro-Soviet” – a questionable assertion in itself. Similar language has been used of Hugo Chavez by American radicals like Marc Cooper. Also, cf the Livingstone saga, the 'anti-Semitic' jibes over Labour's election posters etc).

Certain bloggers revel in this kind of anfractuous illogic. Here, for example, is a Tribune columnist who thinks that the Left is worse than Blair. I sympathise, of course. If one works for the minute Tribune, one's perspective on the Left is bound to be jaundiced. However, note the following phrases: "reactionary Islamists", "Sunni-supremacist 'resistance'", "the early-21st-century equivalent of the old Communist Party of Great Britain’s endorsement of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939". In a similar vein, one finds this . If you need supplementary evidence, take a cursory glance at Oliver Kamm's blog archive.

I have already dealt at length with the idea that Islamism is, must be, politically reactionary. I'll summarise the main point thus: Islamism is partially a conservative reflux, but also a radicalisation; it rejects imperialism, and seeks to solve the stagnation and decline of the 'Muslim world' by mobilising its best civilisational qualities against the West. Islamism can be - and has been - politically reactionary, liberal, and leftist. This is simply because the texts on which it stakes its claims are too indeterminate to yield only one definition, and only one set of recommendations. Islamic economics, for instance, (the sort propounded by the Dawa party in Iraq) amounts often enough to a watered down version of social-democracy, because the Quran has just so little to say about polities, economies, technology etc.

Similarly, the Sunni 'supremacist' resistance is neither specifically Sunni nor 'supremacist' (although only a fool would deny that such elements operate in it). For instance, recently the citizens of Fallujah have been burying their dead after a deadly American onslaught. What does a non-masochist do in the face of such brutality but resist, calling to hand whatever ideological and organisational resources are available?

The notion of the 'totalitarian' also needs to be challenged. A decent attempt was made in issue 12.2 of Historical Materialism. Dominico Lusurdo, professor of Philosophy of History at the University of Urbino (Italy) noted, after a brisk discussion of Hannah Arendt, that:

A product of organicism, or of right-wing or left-wing holism, and somehow inferable a priori from this poisoned ideological source, totalitarianism (in both its opposite configurations) explains all the horror of the twentieth century: such is today the predominant vulgate.

The author goes on to note that many aspects of Western civilisation overlapped with fascism. The Nazis admired the American South and its handling of racial distinction, while Hitler himself marvelled at the British Empire. The dehumanisation of one's enemies was not exactly absent from Allied propaganda during WWII, which allowed for two annihilating explosions - in Nagasaki and Hiroshima - to go off without much of a bang (in 1995, 59% of Americans still approved of dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). In fact, the genealogy of the idea of totalitarianism is interesting, at least inasmuch as Arendt's early text displays a great deal of concern with English imperialism and Lord Cromer in Egypt. Similarly, while Arendt eventually located the totalitarian bug in Marxism or Bolshevism (the methodological level fluctuated), she initially made a distinction between the liberatory impulse of Leninism and the deathly bureacratic animus of Stalinism. It is also interesting that in the later and more cited texts, Arendt identified only the USSR and Nazi Germany as totalitarian. No, that isn't quite true: Spain, Portugal and Italy were spared the charge of totalitarianism, yet India and China, "the lands of traditional Oriental despotism", were ripe for it.

Totalitarianism is a shifting, polysemous notion. It lends itself to such rebarbative portmanteaus as 'Islamofascism', yet contains its own immanent critique (Muslims are thus dehumanised and can be locked up in Guantanamo; but isn't this itself a kind of totalitarianism?). It allows clueless, barbie-doll 'leftist' commentators to resort to moral absolutism, avoid political complexity and assert their own monopoly on the moral high ground because they oppose what they designate as 'totalitarian'.

I'll finish by noting that religions will have, on most definitions, totalitarian impulses. The 'three great religions' are all susceptible to this charge, although their adherents may aptly and justly interpret the texts in a humanist or universalist way. The point, therefore, is to take the mono- and poly-theisms at their word and see how they are applied. For instance, imagine someone referring to 'Judeo-fascism'. If that person were, say, the mayor of London, he would have only a shred of career left with which to cover his dignity. Yet, the 'totalitarian' aspect of Judaism is precisely what Israel Shahak insisted on pointing out. After discussing racist and dehumanising passages in the Hassidic and orthodox traditions, he says:

All Jews who really want to extricate themselves from the tyranny of the totalitarian Jewish past must face the question of their attitude towards the popular anti-Jewish manifestations of the past, particularly those connected with the rebellions of enserfed peasants. On the other side, all the apologists of the Jewish religion and of Jewish segregationism and chauvinism also take their stand - both ultimately and in current debates - on the same question. The undoubted fact that the peasant revolutionaries committed shocking atrocities against Jews (as well as against their other oppressors) is used as an 'argument' by those apologists, in exactly the same way that the Palestinian terror is used to justify the denial of justice to the Palestinians.

Our own answer must be a universal one, applicable in principle to all comparable cases. And, for a Jew who truly seeks liberation from Jewish particularism and racism and from the dead hand of the Jewish religion, such an answer is not very difficult.

Precisely, the universal standard in which all human lives are worth the same. It is not, as some have it , that the Left seeks to apply a different standard to the US than to everyone else. It is precisely that we apply the same standards on the US as any other polity. It is precisely that, to use another example, the 'Jewish State' is not ethically superior to the 'Muslim State'. The warmed-up Enlightenment 'universalism' of the imperial left is entirely bogus because it refuses to judge, say, America or Israel by the standards it would apply to any non-Western state, and because it minimises the actual crimes of those states.