The Fascism-Industrial Complex: How Xenophobia & Nationalism Lead To War & Terror
The media and right-wing politicians were quick to latch on to last month’s Brussels bombing to support a narrative of nationalism and xenophobia that leads to more war and terrorism.
LONDON — (Analysis) The horrific terror attacks in Brussels on March 22 were
a chilling reminder that radicalism, no matter the ideology that inspires it, is a threat
to humanity as a whole, since its expression comes through violence and bloodletting.
bombing, leaving the nation reeling:
“Belgium is observing three days of national mourning. The nation held a
minute’s silence at midday (11:00 GMT) on Wednesday. Belgium’s king
and queen have visited the airport and met some of the 300 people
injured in the attacks. About 150 people remain in hospital, 61 in intensive care.”
Needless to say that this loss in human life and display of senseless violence profoundly
left a scar on Belgium and Belgians, driving home the reality of violent extremism.
will bear the scars of such vicious attacks for years to come. Trauma is easily inflicted,
but takes a great deal of time to properly heal, especially when the only narrative
offered by way of a solution is hate itself.
While buildings and streets have already been swept clean, it is the psychological
wounds, and the manner in which they have been allowed and, it must be said,
encouraged to fester, which are a source of grave concern.
Within days of the attacks on Belgium, the terrorists self-proclaimed faith — Islam
— brought far-right flag bearers, and other proud xenophobes out of the woodwork
to spill their Islamophobic venom and broadcast their racist agenda of
ethno-sectarian segregation and ostracization.
If Americans thought the shameless racism of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump
was bad, they weren’t counting on Europe’s very own fascist complex.
Racism in Europe is not just a state of mind, or even a political banner.
It has become an industry unto itself — a new vibrant sector in an
otherwise tired global economy.
And here we were thinking Europe lost its entrepreneurship.
Europe’s dangerous demons
Sarcasm aside, Europe is indeed battling dangerous demons. Demons which the world,
and mainly Europeans themselves, thought died long ago with the fall of
Nazism in 1945 — back when Germany was gripped by a terrifying ideology that
claimed millions of innocent lives.
Then, anti-Semitism was almost a state religion, a political truth professed and
preached not just by state officials, but state institutions. The media also played
a key role in popularizing, rationalizing and otherwise mainstreaming the hate of
the Jews, the hate of this elusive “others” fascists are always so keen on targeting.
Today this hateful, sadistic nihilism is coming back to haunt the world.
In this age of globalism, and globalization, fascism, too, has become a
global brand.
And while hate might not be a new concept, state officials, industry leaders
and other movers and shakers’ show a startling willingness to promote the
cultural, ethnic and sectarian narratives which, in the end, might destroy
the very freedom they claim to protect.
It would be wise to remember that fascism does not rhyme with
civil liberties.
wake of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack in France, who suggested
that all Muslims share the guilt of terrorism. He stated: “Maybe
most Moslems are peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy
their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible.”
Not only does this statement ignore many protests against terrorism in the
Muslim world, but fast forward to 2016 and the rhetoric remains very much
the same — if not even more sinister in undertones.
Take comments by Laurence Rossignol, France’s minister of family, children
women who choose to wear the hijab are like “Negroes who accept slavery …
Of course there are women who choose it [the veil] … There were American
Negroes who were in favour of slavery.”
Who said colonialism was dead? Quite clearly the miasmas of imperialism
and ethnocentrism survived America’s grand world democracy-building project
and that little charter known as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
But what’s truly behind Islamophobia? What if Islam is just a convenient scapegoat
in a Middle Eastern game of thrones? What if, and it is a big IF, this rising
fascism against all things Arab, Muslim or vaguely Islamic-looking is actually
the manifestation of unfettered capitalism?
In other words, Muslims have become a target of choice not because of their faith,
or their alleged potential link to radicalism, but because of their geography, and
Western powers’ hunger for control in the Middle East. Fear and hate here
have been engineered as conduits for imperialism — a mean to justify wars
and mass killings.
Imperialism is the ultimate expression of capitalism
of capitalism. Looking today at the phenomenon we call globalization,
it appears rather evident that Lenin had an intuitive understanding of capitalism’s
core nature.
Lenin’s observations were a reflection of the crises the world was then witnessing,
mainly World War I. His pamphlet was meant as an intervention in the sharp
political debate which had torn apart the International Socialist Party at the start
of the war, and to question whether or not socialism as a movement could, and
should back governments’ war efforts.
When war was declared in 1914, socialists in the German parliament voted
unanimously to fund it, arguing that they had to defend civilization against the
despotism of the Russians. Meanwhile, French socialists said they had to defend
revolutionary France against Prussian militarism, and so on, across the board.
Lenin’s Bolshevik Party in Russia was the only socialist organization which
opposed Russia’s war efforts on principle. Lenin’s argument was that the
war was an imperialist conflict in which all sides were trying to grab more
territory and extend their power and influence or, at the very least, hang on
to territories to which they had no right in the first place.
Lenin’s writings in Imperialism aimed to describe colonial expansionism as one
of the horsemen of unfettered capitalism – unfettered being the key word.
contributor to the International Socialist Review, told MintPress News:
“Lenin did not claim that there was no imperialism before the late
19th century. As he explicitly noted, ‘Colonial policy and imperialism
existed before the latest stage of capitalism, and even before
capitalism. Rome, founded on slavery, pursued a colonial policy and
practiced imperialism.’”
The point Lenin is driving home is that the new form of imperialism which
emerged at the turn of the century was rooted in financial greed — the desire
to control wealth, and through it project political power.
“general arguments about imperialism, which ignore, or put into
the background the fundamental difference of socio-economic
systems, inevitably degenerate into absolutely empty banalities,
or into grandiloquent comparisons like ‘Greater Rome and
Greater Britain.”
Is it that far-fetched to assume that capitalism required more than it
already had?
That capitalism required more lands and more resources to fall under
the control of its corporations and their owners, which neoconservatism
raised to the status of multi-billionaires, while the other 99
percent was left to scrounge on leftovers?
It would not be the first time that capitalism has used a proxy conflict to run
and honey” tirade in 1066. The Church’s ambitions then were not a simple
case of religious zeal, but an imperious need to amass greater riches.
Then, too, an excuse had to be given, and so the liberation of the Holy Land
was offered by way of justification to the masses. Then, too, Islam was
the designated enemy of Western civilization. Rather it was that Muslims
controlled those very resources the Western Christian world wanted for itself.
Today, it is radicalism, and the War on Terror, which have allowed
for Western governments to remain in a state of perpetual war.
In Libya, NATO exploited a U.N. Security Resolution condemning
late Muammar Gaddafi. On March 28,Abdelkader Abderrahmane, an independent
“NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya, coming shortly after the uprising
against Moammar Gadhafi, was hailed at the time as a
‘humanitarian intervention.’ It was, at least according to the
UN Security Council resolution used as authorisation, intended
to bring about a ceasefire and end attacks against civilians
that ‘might constitute crimes against humanity.’”
Once again, Muslims, Islam, and all those who loosely fit Islam’s ethnic markers
— as if faith had a nationality – have been demonized, to be better
dehumanized, and then eventually destroyed.
for The Guardian in 2013. “It is precisely the intrinsic endlessness of
this so-called “war” that is its most corrupting and menacing attribute.”
Towards this anti-Middle Eastern, anti-Islamic build up, the media acts
as echo chambers to officials’ narrative of war – on both sides of the Atlantic.
The anti-Muslim narrative
Throughout Europe and the United States, governments deliberately provoke
anti-Muslim hatred in response to those very crises they manufactured
through careless politicking: the refugee crisis, radicalisation, wars and so on.
A cover of the Sun, a wholly owned subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp
Since open colonialism is no longer in fashion, imperial powers must seek other methods of “interventionism” to rationalize their military presence beyond their own borders. Corporate profits are at the core of any campaigns we have seen play out over recent decades — profits and control over resources, and markets. As Amir Samin, the prominent Egyptian-born intellectual said in an interview with l’ Humanite: “Colonialism is Inseparable from Capitalism.”
Who can forget U.S. presidential Republican candidate Donald Trump’s calls in December 2015for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”? Since then, the Republican frontrunner has made a series of increasingly fascistic and violent demands. From his suggestion that Muslims be put on a national database, to hypothetical internment camps, the billionaire wannabe politician invokes fascism unapologetically.
Needless to say, the narrative he is playing into is scaring the daylight out of
Muslims, foreigners, and other people of color. Although Muslims remain
the main recipient of Western hatred, it is their otherness which is being singled
out – an otherness which is shared by millions across the Western world.
“I have always felt like I was on the fringes of what is acceptable Americanness—
being Muslim on top of being black just compounds that, especially after 9/11,”
said Dawud Walid, a local Islamic preacher and the Michigan executive
director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, in an interview
“There are actually people in our community that would literally consider
leaving America [if Trump were elected], if not permanently, at least temporarily,
to reside abroad,” he added.
If Trump has somewhat become the posterchild of neo-fascism,
he is most definitely not alone in his trumpeting of hate:
- France’s Rossignol was only too happy to volunteer her own bias towards
- Muslims, so have other U.S. and EU officials.
- Then there was David Cameron, the British Prime Minister,
- whose comments in January linked radicalism, and Muslim women’s modesty or, as he put it, “submissiveness.”
- And David Bowers, the Democratic mayor of Roanoke, Virginia,
- who approvingly invoked America’s history of interning Japanese
- Americans in concentration camps during the Second World War,
- when he declared, “It appears that the threat of harm to America
- from ISIS now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then.”
So much hatred in such a short time! It’s almost as if media and politicians
were looking to amplify latent ethnocentrism, leaving listeners to question
what they hope to gain.
Racism comes easy if fanned properly. Racism, if looked at rationally, is merely
the expression of a warped ethnic sense of self. From that perspective, racism
is a universal trait sadly shared by all. It is the weaponization of such a
social phenomenon that should cause concern.
Here racism has served warmongers best. In Britain, Cameron even branded
opponents of the authorization of war in Syria as “terrorist sympathizers.”
Extreme racism & sexism
If Islamophobia has been instrumental in supporting military interventionism
in the Middle East, while shaming any, and all attempts at humanitarian
aid or reconstruction; Western capitals’ new found “taste” for nationalism could
soon slip into extremism. As usual the main target of such bile remains
Muslims and, most particularly, Muslim women.
publish — in English one might add — we are fast approaching those days.
Aware of its global readership and media traction, Charlie Hebdo undoubtedly
wanted to reach as many homes as possible with its little piece of fascist literature.
The editors wrote,
“The first task of the guilty [Muslims] is to blame the innocent [Western world].
It’s an almost perfect inversion of culpability. From the bakery that forbids you
to eat what you like, to the woman who forbids you to admit that you are
troubled by her veil, we are submerged in guilt for permitting
ourselves such thoughts. And that is where and when fear has
started its sapping, undermining work. And the way is marked for
all that will follow.”
Of course freedom lovers will argue that Charlie Hebdo is entitled to its hate,
just as others are entitled to their opinions. That is after all the principle of
freedom of expression!
But what happens when these ideas are put into practice? What happens
when Muslims are seen as legitimate targets by radicalized nationalists?
On Sunday, a Muslim woman was purposely struck by a car in Brussels.
“A Muslim woman was run over by a car which appears to drive at speed towards
her during a right-wing rally in Brussels. This attack comes after a flare
up in xenophobic attacks against Muslims and ethnic minorities in Belgium.”
Of course such attitudes do little by way of aiding the fight against terrorism,
even though fascists would argue that their hate is only a manifestation of
their desire to eradicate terror.
As Michael Friedman, Ph.D Clinical psychologist from New York City and
member of the Medical Advisory Board at EHE International wrote for
clearly states that promotion of inclusion and tolerance, as well as building
trust with law enforcement, is critical to reducing vulnerability to radicalization.”
He added:
“A recent 2012 investigation found that widespread surveillance of the
Muslim community by the New York Police Department did not improve
efforts to identify terrorists. It has been further suggested that these
efforts reduced trust in law enforcement. In a study of 300
Muslim-Americans, it was found that lower trust in law
enforcement was associated with decreased willingness
to cooperate with police on terrorism investigations.”
If intellectuals and scholars all agree that fascism only serves to exacerbate
radicalization, then why are our officials, and corporate media so intent
on driving the bus home?
The question answers itself. As long as media and politicians continue
to serve the corporate elite instead of the public, radicalization, in all its
forms, will remain both a tool and a weapon of mass-destabilization,
mass-indoctrination, and mass-manipulation.
http://www.mintpressnews.com/fascism-industrial-complex-xenophobia-nationalism-lead-war-terror/215494/
posted by Satish Sharma at
05:10
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