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Entry: Islamo-Foosball Awareness Week Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/islamo_foosball_awareness_week#10239 Post contents: 1. <i>The problem with this misnaming of one’s enemies is that it creates inaccurate pictures of what is going on right now.</i>. And what’s going on right now is a religious war, soon perhaps to approach the extent and intensity of the last super religious war, The Thirty Years War I join in the excoriation of “Islamofascism” as a label, if for no other reason than the label hides rather than identifies the actual danger the West is facing. Almost all the wars we have fought for the past 160 years have been nationalist conflicts – even the Cold War –, not religious conflicts. And all the wars of the last 220 years have been ideological. The conflict in Northern Ireland isn’t a religious conflict, at least not in this century; it is a nationalist conflict. So also are the Zionist/Palestinian and the Croat/Serb/Albanian conflicts. What is more, beginning with the Enlightenment, political order has been "liberal" in the best sense of the word, embodied in the "no test" clause and the first amendment of the US Constitution. Religion was to be "privatized", and social order would replace it with nationalism. But Osama is not a nationalist. He is a man of religion. His struggle is not against a national group or a political order. He is fighting the West's own conception of itself since 1689. And the man of religious fights for different reasons, and fights differently, than the nationalist, ideologue, or someone pursuing The State’s interests. If one wishes to defeat the man of religion, one needs to fight him differently. The fifth chapter of Martin van Creveld, <i>The Transformation of War</i>, 1991, discusses “what war is fought for”, including religious war. His book is obligatory reading in any case. So to keep comparing a religious war to an ideological, nationalist, or statist war is a recipe for defeat. We in the West are particularly caught short. For we haven’t had a religious war since the Battle of the Boyne. We better learn again what religious war is all about. I also submit that a decadent and secular society will be defeated by a religious one. 2.Much harm indeed happens when terms are ill defined. Fascism is used four ways, and it strikes me that only one of these ways is correct. i. For the pedestrian world, “fascist” has come to mean any coercive act. ii. For Cultural Marxists, “fascist” means anyone who isn’t a.... Cultural Marxist. iii. For many political thinkers, “fascist” is synonymous with the Browns, be they Nazi (extremist nationalist/racialist) or Fascists proper. I think Roger Griffin’s work on fascism gives the best and most precise definition when used this way, a “palingenetic and populist form of ultranationalism”, – a particular kind of nationalism that looks for a violent rebirth of a nation. iv. Finally, it means Mussolini’s movement, Fascism proper. John Lukacs has argued for this meaning. We can dismiss meaning i and ii. I shall argue that the fourth meaning is correct, and the third is either to vague or obscurantist. Fascism, Mussolini’s movement and Naziism are really quite different movement when seen in their respective “deep structure”. Naziism is in fact simply extremist nationalism of the racialist, rather than tribal, sort. Mussolini when out of his way in 1932 to ridicule Nazi racialism. Only in 1938, to placate ‘Dolf, did he adopt racialist laws. What is more, it is open to question if Fascism was even a nationalist movement. It seems to me that there is a pronounced difference between, say, a nationalist like Gabriele D’annunzio and Fascism. That difference, I submit, is twofold: i. For a nationalist, The State is the servant of the “nation”; the nation in fact makes the state. For Fascism, the relation is reversed: The State through force, hammers together a nation. I follow John Lukacs here. ii. Yet the ultimate <i>telos</i> of Fascism is more than nationalism. Born out of the military experience of the <i>arditi</i>, and maturing in the <i>squadristi</i>, Fascism is almost a kind of warrior cult, glorifying struggle and war. It would be worth asking if it is simply the Spartan polis reformed. Its connection with Futurism almost makes me wonder if Fascism is a kind of aesthetic movement. Emilio Gentile also seem to be on to something in seeing Fascism as analogous to religion. 3. Nietzsche hated all kinds of racialism and nationalism. He might have liked Fascism, at least seen aesthetically. Yet he would have hated Fascism’s populist dimension. Sent at: 2008 05 16