When the black hat doesn't fit
In the responses to last week's column, it has been intriguing to see how neocons and confused conservatives seduced into supporting the Trotsky-Wilsonian World Democratic Revolution have attempted to defend the intellectually incoherent concept of "Islamo-fascism."
Strangely, the most common response to my demonstration that violent expansionist Islam shares very few similarities with the historical Fascists of Italy that could not be as easily applied to anyone from Alexander the Great to Tiglath-Pilasar was to supply a list of purported similarities between the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei and the violent global jihad of which Osama bin Laden is the primary figurehead.
This seems bizarre until one realizes that in the maleducated mind of the average, public-schooled American, Fascism and Nazism were not merely 20th Century totalitarian ideologies which happened to share a fondness for central authority, mass rallies and designer uniforms, but were in fact the same.
This bait-and-switch defense is a mendacious and cynical attempt to take advantage of American historical ignorance, especially since the two major elements of Nazism which are shared by the global jihad, virulent expansionism and anti-Semitism, simply don't apply to the Italian Fascists. Space does not permit a detailed comparison of the ideological differences between the two totalitarianisms, but suffice it to say that they were no more identical in theory than in practice.
And personal relations between the two dictators aside, the relationship between Italian Fascists and German Nazis was actually much closer to the ancient one between Roman legionaries and barbarian German tribesmen than the fraternally authoritarian one that is commonly assumed by the historically challenged.
Austrian Nazis assassinated the Fascist Chancellor of Austria, Engelbert Dollfuss, in July 1934, in revenge for his banning their party in the previous month. Benito Mussolini then thwarted Hitler's first effort at Anschluss by sending 50,000 troops to the Italian-Austrian border and forcing the Germans to back down. It is ironic that prior to Churchill taking power, il Duce was the only European leader who ever dared to call one of Hitler's many bluffs.
Even the Fascist-Nazi military alliance, the infamous Rome-Berlin Axis, was an accident of diplomacy that should never have come to pass. It seems few have heard of the Stresa Front, the anti-German Anglo-French-Italian alliance of 1935. It collapsed primarily due to an astounding diplomatic blunder by British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, who betrayed both of Britain's allies by reaching a separate and contradictory accord with Germany, the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, only two months later. This error was compounded by British hypocrisy and incompetence in addressing Italy's colonial aspirations in Abyssinia at the League of Nations.
Winston Churchill wrote of His Majesty's Government's alienation of a historical ally thusly: "In the fearful struggle against rearming Nazi Germany which I could feel approaching ... I was most reluctant to see Italy estranged and even driven into the opposite camp." His biographer William Manchester adds: "England had chosen 'to depart from the principle of collective security in a very notable fashion.' The French would moan but cling desperately to Britain, their only sure ally. The Italians could go elsewhere. And, he [Churchill] predicted, they would."
Furthermore, it is worth noting that when the Fascist Grand Council deposed Mussolini, the Nazis immediately set up a military occupation of northern Italy, a puppet-state called the Republic of Sal. The Fascist government of Pietro Badoglio, on the other hand, signed an armistice with the Allies and subsequently declared war on Nazi Germany.
Now, it must be said that there are some who admit "Islamo-fascism" is unrelated to Italian Fascism but insist that the lower-case "fascism" merely indicates a reference to the secondary definition provided by the American Heritage dictionary: "oppressive, dictatorial control." The fact that unemployed Islamic schoolboys in Britain and jihadist insurgents in Iraq are not in a position to oppress anyone, control anything or dictate to anyone doesn't seem to have occurred to these linguistic apologists.
The reason that the media propagandists do not attempt to push the term "Islamo-Nazi" is because it is quite obvious to everyone that the enthusiasts of violent expansionist Islam are not Nazis, notwithstanding their similar inclination for Judenhassen. But the Fascists were not Nazis either, just as the global jihadists are neither Fascists nor fascists.