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Blogwatch: How to defeat fascists and their terror
Scoop Blogwatch: How to defeat
fascists and their terrorism
A New Zealand blog about progressive ideas
The indiscriminate mass murder and injury caused in India's financial capital is getting worldwide sympathy for the innocent victims.
In due course, political leaders will turn their attention to (1) the objectives of the fascists and (2) the best way to marginalise and ultimately nip this ultra-reactionary force in the bud before it, like a virulent disease, spreads its evil tentacles still further afield.
Early reports suggest that those that organised the mass butchery in Mumbai are motivated by the same ideology of prejudice and hate that produced the Saudi Arabian-origin Al Qaeda, the Afghani and Pakistani Taliban and various off-shoots in west Africa through to south east Asia - sometimes collectively referred to as Salafists.
Like the fascist movements in Europe in the
1920s and 1930s, these groups represent an existential
threat to those that do not belong to their definition of
orthodoxy.
In the 21st Century version of the fascist threat, the group that carried out the attacks in Mumbai belongs to a movement that represents an existential threat to non-Sunni Muslims (80 per cent of Muslims are Sunni), namely Shiia and other Muslim denominations from the mystical sufi through to pantheistic and esoteric interpretaions of Islam. The fascists represent an existential threat also to Hindus, indigenous Christians and Jews, to agnostics and atheists -to anyone that belongs to either a pre-Islamic or post-Islamic faith.
So in
answer to (1), it seems that a primary objective of these
facists is to impose a strict, Saudi Arabian-style of law
and society in place of the dynamic, democratic, vibrant and
multi-ethnic society that exists, for example, in the
Republic of India.
The government of Pakistan, which
recently had elections which were won by a party led by a
member of the minority Shiia sect of Islam (a minority in
Pakistan as almost everywhere else in the Muslim world with
the notable exceptions of Iran, Iraq, Bahrein, east/ south
Lebanon and Azerbaijan), is an anathema to them.
The
democracy movements and free political parties in other
major Muslim nations (Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey, Nigeria
and Bangladesh) are all anathema to Salafist
fascists.
It is a pretty absurd thought: India, on its
way to becoming a global economic and cultural powerhouse,
is universe away from the tyranny of Saudi Arabia, stuck as
it is in a peculiar 10th century bedouin re-interpretation
of Islam - an interpretation that would have been laughed
out of the mosque by Muslims of the 7th-10th centuries when
Islamic civilisation was born and offered the world
much.
As ultra-reactionaries, they also represent a
malignant threat to women's civil and individual legal
rights, to universal education, to trade unions and workers'
social rights, to the idea of equality before the law - or
indeed, anything that is vaguely defined as "liberal"
"secular" or "progressive".
These sort of movements
glorify a mythical past and, while they offer no solutions
for ordinary people in the present, nevertheless get their
recruits among those that feel threatened and insecure,
rather than challenged and liberated, by all the
opportunities and complexities of modern industrial life in
an an increasingly competitive global market place.
In
short, they are the scum of the Earth.
But how to
defeat them effectively, that is the question for decision
makers.
We know from our grandparents about the
terrible price paid by Europeans, Middle Easterns and North
Africans between 1939 and 1945 by the failure of political
leadership after World War I and throughout the
1920s.
We know in 2008 that German culture is not
rotten to the core. Our grandparents might not have agreed
in 1933, when Hitler's party was gaining popularity in the
polls in Germany.
So how is it that during the 1930s
Germany, Italy, Spain and other States came to be led by
what were, in 1918 and the first half of the 1920s,
marginal, tiny organsiations with ambitions for mass
destruction and pain but only a small dedicated
following?
Was there something that the leaders of
France, England, America and Russia could have done beween
1918 and 1925, or by 1932 at the latest, that would have
diminished the chances of the rise of the Nazis and their
fellow travellers by the mid '30s?
We know that the
German and Italian fascist parties prospered as unemployment
soared, as inflation destroyed wealth and savings. We know
the fascists used the humilitations imposed on Germany and
Italy (by France and England primraily) as a rallying call
when looking for recruits.
We know they singled out
those they deemed not part of the "mainstream" as a
convenient excuse to blame for either being party to the
cause of thier national humilitation, or the cause
itself.
Was there anything France and England, America
and the Soviets, could have done better to help nip the bud
of rising fascism in Germany, Italy, Spain and elsewhere in
central and eastern Europe in the early 1920s?
If the
modern fascist movement is getting its largest numbers of
recruits in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Sudan - then
what is needed is a massive investment in the economic
development of those territories.
Sudan could be a
major agricultural exporter - if the EU, US and Japan would
both remove their economic apartheid tariff barriers on
Third World farm produce, and if the rich nations would
invest properly in the nation's ports, roads, airports and
energy generation.
Pakistan has the potential of
India. There must be economic development opportunities in
Afghanistan and Somalia.
There is no question that had
the Four Powers invested a Marshall-type Plan in Germany in
1918, instead of waiting until American taxpayers took up
the challenge after 1939, then the chances of fascism taking
hold in Germany in the 1930s could have been
averted.
But it is clear that massive investment in
infrastructure development, and opening markets, won't be
enough to eradicate the Salafists in the
short-term.
Tragically, the mass murders will continue
in spite of the best efforts of States, and the U.N., to
fight back with counter-terror operations because the
terrorist organisations have grown significantly since first
being established (with Saudi funding) to battle the Soviets
in Afghanistan in 1979.
The world didn't help with its
failure to properly invest in Afghanistan after throwing the
Taliban out in late 2001 - Afghanistan should have been very
quickly absolutely showered in First World
investment.
The U.S. Government didn't help by its
conduct in Iraq, that provided free propaganda opportunities
for those claiming all Muslims are the victims of a "Western
conspiracy".
The U.N. doesn't help by not resolving
long-standing injustices - particularly the consequences of
the 1947 U.N. General Assembly partition of
Palestine.
The fascists utilise every real and
imagined injustice for their own purposes.
Their evil
plotting will continue - the latest attack perhaps designed
to create conflict between India and Pakistan, and between
Muslims and Hindus in India - fascists hope to make gains
out of social chaos and conflict.
How quickly we empty
the reservoir of the potential recruiting grounds where the
ignorant young conscripts live, however, will undoubtedly be
related to how quickly economic and social development is
promoted in the backwater regions of Africa, the Middle East
and Asia where the Salafists are strongest.
ENDS
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