Reader and LC anomdragon wishes to know, and we wish we could answer.

Well, not really, now that we’ve actually read the slobbering snotwit’s drivel, but you get our drift. Ladies and Gentlemen, we give you the retarded rantings of one Eric Margolis:

The latest big lie unveiled by Washington’s neoconservatives are the poisonous terms, “Islamo-Fascists” and “Islamic Fascists.” They are the new, hot buzzwords among America’s far right and Christian fundamentalists.

So new, in fact, that His Majesty clearly remembers using them back in, say, 2002. But mayhap all that was old is new again? Or maybe Eric is just too much of a dumbass to pay attention to those he is trying to write about?

President George W. Bush made a point last week of using “Islamofacists” when recently speaking of Hezbullah and Hamas – both, by the way, democratically elected parties. A Canadian government minister from the Conservative Party compared Lebanon’s Hezbullah to Nazi Germany.

The National Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany was, by the way, democratically elected, something that would seem to make the comparison even more apt, even by Eric’s exacting, pro-Islamofascist standards. No, the Austrian Maniac (and we’re not referring to Arnold Schwarzenegger here) didn’t come to power via a Putsch, or coup. He tried that once, which is how he ended up with a lot of time to write that heap of execrable crap known as Mein Kampf while occupying a cell in Landsberg.

Instead they got themselves elected for the Reichstag, after which the paper-hanging son of a bitch managed to talk Hindenburg into appointing him Chancellor.

So obviously Adolf Hitler, having duly observed the rituals of democracy, shouldn’t be called a fascist either. At least according to Eric Margolis. Just so we’re clear on just where he stands. By the way, Eric, that brown shirt really does make you look fat.

The term “Islamofascist” is utterly without meaning, but packed with emotional explosives.

Something that most reasonable people would agree is vastly preferrable over the very real explosives that the Islamofascists use.

It is a propaganda creation worthy Dr. Goebbels,

Who, by the way, was appointed by a democratically elected Chancellor, so why Eric is using it as a pejorative here is a bit unclear. Apparently only some duly elected fascists are really fascists.

We’re much more simple in our worldview: A fascist is a fascist no matter how he managed to slither his way to power and should be promptly disposed of in any way possible, without mercy or remorse.

…and the latest expression of the big lie technique being used by neocons in Washington’s propaganda war against its enemies in the Muslim World.

Our EVIL propaganda war against the peaceful Islamofascists, presumably. We’re still waiting for an explanation with regard to the inappropriateness and meaninglessness of the term “Islamofascist”, by the way.

This ugly term was probably first coined in Israel – as was the other hugely successful propaganda term, “terrorism”…

…and we’re now officially no longer holding our breath waiting for an explanation. “Terrorism” is just a propaganda term. It is not at all a highly descriptive and, dare we say?, appropriate term used to describe the methods used by terrorists. We suppose “terrorist” is a propaganda term as well?

–- to dehumanize and demonize opponents and deny them any rational political motivation, hence removing any need to deal with their grievances and demands.

We weren’t aware that much help was needed in dehumanizing and demonizing creatures whose preferred way of “fighting” is to blow up kindergarteners and pregnant women.

As the brilliant humanist Sir Peter Ustinov so succinctly put it, “Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.”

That would be the same “brilliant humanist” who once observed, speaking of paleosimian suicide bombers: “What is the difference between somebody who goes into a coffee house with the intention of killing as many people as possible - and does so - and somebody who’s in an aeroplane at the height of five miles, unobtainable by any anti-aircraft gun, and lets their bombs drop as scientifically as possible, in order to kill as few people as possible?”

Well, let’s see, Pathetic Peter… The difference is, as you yourself point out, that the former deliberately enters a defenseless civilian building with the deliberate intent of killing as many innocent people as possible, whereas the latter deliberately targets military facilities while spending much effort avoiding killing innocent people.

It’s one thing having to shoot an asinine argument to shreds, but when the idiot making the argument shoots it to shreds himself, it’s just sad.

And it’s definitely not “brilliant.” Nor is being unable to draw a distinction between deliberately murdering civilians and deliberately avoiding same particularly “humane”, so we think that we can safely discard the notion that Peter Ustinov is a “brilliant humanist.” He is, at best, a moderately entertaining actor who ought to stick to what he does best.

Both the terms “terrorism” and “fascist” have been so abused and overused that they have lost any original meaning. The best modern definition I’ve read of fascism comes in former Columbia University Professor Robert Paxton’s superb 2004 book, The Anatomy of Fascism.

Paxton defines fascism’s essence, which he aptly terms its “emotional lava”

If you get started on vaginas, you’re out of here. Just warning you ahead of time.

as: 1. a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond reach of traditional solutions;

Much like Islamofascists vowing to destroy the entire West through global Jihad in order to save the Caliphate, perhaps?

2. belief one’s group is the victim, justifying any action without legal or moral limits;

Such as using a mythical belief that Jews are the reason for all of your ills as an excuse for gunning down pregnant Jewish women and their children in their cars, perhaps?

3. need for authority by a natural leader above the law, relying on the superiority of his instincts;

Osama bin Laden? Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? Hassan Nasrallah? Mahmoud Ahmadingeling?

4. right of the chosen people to dominate others without legal or moral restraint;

Sounds like a bunch of radical Islamists using the Koran to justify any and all action against infidels to us.

5. fear of foreign “contamination.”

As in outlawing booze, western music, kite flying, Bibles, showing of ankles, foreign churches of any denomination etc. etc. within your borders?

Are you trying to PROVE that Islamofascism is the correct term here? Because, if you are, we’d like to congratulate you on your effort. And then we’d like to know just what in the name of blue blazes was going on with your first few paragraphs. Would you kindly STOP doing our work for us here?

Fascism demands a succession of wars, foreign conquests, and national threats to keep the nation in a state of fear, anxiety and patriotic hypertension.

Would 1,300 years of wars of aggression and conquest qualify?

Those who disagree are branded ideological traitors.

And dragged outside and shot. If they’re lucky. Yep, sounds like Islamofascists to us.

All successful fascists regimes, Paxton points out, allied themselves to traditional conservative parties, and to the military-industrial complex.

You don’t get much more conservative than insisting on living in the 7th century, really.

Highly conservative and militaristic regimes are not necessarily fascist, says Paxton. True fascism requires relentless aggression abroad and a semi-religious adoration of the regime at home.

Oh, so therein lies the rub. The radical Islamists adore their regimes in a wholly religious fashion.

None of the many Muslim groups opposing US-British control of the Mideast fit Paxton’s definitive analysis.

Actually, they pretty much all of them fit to a tee. They fit so much that one cannot help but wonder if Paxton were thinking of them when he wrote his definition.

The only truly fascist group ever to emerge in the Mideast was Lebanon’s Maronite Christian Phalange Party in the 1930’s which, ironically, became an ally of Israel’s rightwing in the 1980’s.

And it’s official. Eric is clinically insane. The lights are on in the house, but no matter how much we bang on the door, nobody answers.

It is grotesque watching the Bush Administration and Tony Blair maintain the ludicrous pretense they are re-fighting World War II.

It would be, if that was what they were doing. Sadly, here in the real world, they’ve never done so.

The only similarity between that era and today is the cultivation of fear, war fever and racist-religious hate by US neoconservatives and America’s religious far right, which is now boiling with hatred for anything Muslim.

Just like the cultivation of fear, war fever and racist-religious hate directed at the poor, oppressed, misunderstood Nazis and Japs. Gotcha. Do you want your Thorazine now, or shall we go on a bit first?

Under the guise of fighting a “third world war” against “Islamic fascism,” America’s far right is infecting its own nation with the harbingers of WWII totalitarianism.

Those evil totalitarian bogeymen Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.

In the western world, hatred of Muslims has become a key ideological hallmark of rightwing parties. We see this overtly in the United States, France, Italy, Holland, Denmark, Poland, and, most lately, Canada, and more subtly expressed in Britain and Belgium. The huge uproar over blatantly anti-Muslim cartoons published in Denmark laid bare the seething Islamophobia spreading through western society.

It’s called freedom of speech. One of the many hallmark of oppressive, totalitarian fascism, we’re sure. And the cartoons were a reaction to the ludicrous notion that you couldn’t publish cartoons of Mohammed, most of which weren’t in the least bit “anti-Muslim”, because it would be against a minority religious commandment, a religious decree outside of and above the law that would get you killed if you violated it.

And the Muslims, in their frothing, fanatical, murderous rampages post-publication dispelled any doubt that anybody might have had about the totalitarian, inhumane and oppressive nature of Islam. Not that anybody really ought to have had any doubts. Just ask Theo van Gogh. Oh wait, you can’t.

There is nothing in any part of the Muslim World that resembles the corporate fascist states of western history. In fact, clan and tribal-based traditional Islamic society, with its fragmented power structures, local loyalties, and consensus decision-making, is about as far as possible from western industrial state fascism.

Did we miss the part where Bush called radical Islam “Industrial State Islamofascism?” Oh, and while we’re on the subject of industrialism, just exactly what do you think it is that Iran is busy doing with their weapons factories, and to whom do they export their weapons and munitions?

The Muslim World is replete with brutal dictatorships, feudal monarchies, and corrupt military-run states, but none of these regimes, however deplorable, fits the standard definition of fascism. Most, in fact, are America’s allies.

Who? Saudi Arabia? They’re only our allies because they think that they are and because they’re not exactly eager to get their names on The List. In all other respects, they’re actively on the other side, funding and supplying our Islamofascist enemies behind our backs.

Nor do underground Islamic militant groups (”terrorists” in western terminology). They are either focused on liberating land from foreign occupation, overthrowing “un-Islamic” regimes, driving western influence from their region, or imposing theocracy based on early Islamic democracy.

Actually, they’re focused on all of the above, although the sequence in which they hope to achieve their goals varies. Which is, by the way, why they fit your definition of fascism right down to the last letter, as we’ve already established. But do go on making a fool of yourself. You do it ever so convincingly, and we’re not one to stand in the way of you expressing your one and only talent.

Claims by fevered neoconservatives that Muslim radicals plan to somehow impose a worldwide Islamic caliphate are lurid fantasies worthy of Dr. Fu Manchu and yet another example of the big lie technique that worked so well over Iraq.

It’s funny that those plans are repeated over and over again by those very same Muslim radicals and their imams, then. Obviously they don’t know what their own plans are. Isn’t it wonderful that we have Eric Margolis to tell them what they really mean?

As Prof. Andrew Bosworth notes in an incisive essay on so-called Islamic fascism, “Islamic fundamentalism is a transnational movement inherently opposed to the pseudo-nationalism necessary for fascism.”

Which makes it wondrously puzzling, then, that they’re following the fascist playbook to the letter.

The only thing “incisive” about Bosworth would seem to be his two front teeth.

However, there are plenty of modern fascists. But to find them, you have to go to North America and Europe.

Of course. We all knew you were going there anyway, so the next time why don’t you just skip the bumbling bromides and jump to the car chase? It’d save us all a lot of time and, as a bonus, you’d have less time to publicly demonstrate the true magnitude of your madness.

These neo-fascists advocate “preemptive attacks against all potential enemies,” grabbing other nation’s resources, overthrowing uncooperative governments, military dominance of the world, hatred of Semites (Muslims in this case), adherence to biblical prophecies, hatred of all who fail to agree, intensified police controls, and curtailment of “liberal” political rights.

You know, that’s funny. The old spin of “anti-Semite” to mean “anti-Arab” based on anthropology when everybody already knows what the term really means. The reason this old canard is so funny is that His Majesty first encountered it when investigating the Neonazis of Europe and the literature and talking points that we were busy trying to stop them from spreading inasmuch as we could.

Yes, we know. It’s awfully naughty trying to suppress unpopular speech and to investigate adherents of unpopular ideologies, you’ll get no argument from us on that one. It runs completely contrary to His Majesty’s current appreciation and almost fanatical defense of Free Speech, and we’re not particularly proud to admit that we were part of it, even though it was a decidedly minor part, but it was a different time, we were much younger, Europe DOES have rather touchy and at times extreme reactions to Naziism in particular (due to the history over there, obviously) and, besides, we had our orders. No, we wouldn’t do it today, even though we hate the Nazis every bit as much as we did then. As we have learned since, Freedom of Speech is a meaningless concept if the only speech that is free is the kind that everybody agrees with already.

But that’s not the point. The point is that this old trick of somehow disarming the term “anti-Semite” by claiming that the most anti-Semitic group of them all, Arabs, are Semites too is an old Nazi trick. And the modern loony left is, much to nobody’s surprise, helplessly in love with it, as Eric just demonstrated. The reason that it’s no surprise, of course, is that they and the Nazis belong on the same end of the political spectrum.

They revel in flag-waving, patriotic melodrama, demonstrations of military power, and use the mantle of patriotism to feather the nests of the military-industrial complex, colluding legislators and lobbyists.

Actually, the real reason that we “feather the nests of the military-industrial complex” is that they provide us with the tools that we need to fight and win the war. We’d feather the nests of the likes of you as well, if we could only find a single use for you other than fertilizer. Should the war expand to the point where food shortages become a reality, your time may yet come.

They urge war to the death, fought, of course, by other people’s children.

Wars are generally fought to the death, since that is quite often the only way to stop your enemy from his rather unpleasant insistence on killing you. Oh, and you managed to squeeze a chickenhawk in there too? Good job. We thought you’d forget. Now, would you care to repeat that charge about “other people’s children” to our Imperial Self or any of the other veterans on our side, not to mention the ones currently fighting overseas? We didn’t think so either. Not that you need worry. We wouldn’t harm you. There are limits to what we’ll dip our hands in.

They have turned important sectors of the media into propaganda organs and brought the Pentagon largely under their control.

Ah, the pro-war MSM. Oh yes, barely a day goes by without jingoistic proclamations emanating from the airwaves, calling for the destruction of the entire Middle East and proclaiming the media’s undying fealty and loyalty to the President and anything he might choose to do.

Now, the neoconservatives are busy whipping up war against Syria and Iran to keep themselves in power and maintain the political dynamics of this 21st century revival of fascism.

We’re whipping up war against two notoriously fascist regimes in order to revive fascism?

Mmmmmkay…

The real modern fascists are not in the Muslim World, but Washington.

As proven by the fact that Eric Margolis, even as we speak, is locked up in a cell somewhere in the Empire, waiting to be fed, feet first, into a plastic shredder.

The neocons screaming fascist the loudest, are the true fascists themselves.

IKYABWAI.

We really thought we’d seen the last of that one when we quit trolling alt.flame for shits and giggles, but apparently it really IS always September somewhere on the Intertubes.

It’s a pity that communist and leftist propaganda so debased the term “neo-fascist” that it has become almost meaningless. Because that is what we should be calling the so-called neocons, for that is what they really are.

And you’ll continue to scream it for years from every soap box you can find, unmolestedly, which of course will prove just how fascist we really are.

Here’s a thought: Why don’t you try posting withering criticism of the regime from a Tehran Internet cafe under your own name, letting everybody know where to find you, then let us know what happens next?

Hey, don’t be shy. You’ve got nothing to be afraid of. They’re not the real fascists. We are, remember?

Blithering Buttnozzle.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 at 1:10 am and is filed under Idiotarians. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.