Fascists Among Us

by Jeff Sparrow

  ‘Hard to get good case. Need to move swiftly,’ he said. ‘Near term target needs — go massive — sweep it all up, things related and not.’1

  The prolonged military conflict that followed reshaped the world. The Brown University Cost of War project estimates that, by November 2018, the US had committed itself to an astonishing $5.9 trillion on the War on Terror (including direct costs for interventions in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere, as well as obligations for future expenditure).2

  Those conflicts established ‘the Muslim’ as the West’s existential foe in a clash of civilisations. After 9/11, the United States found itself, as Douglas Little put it, ‘swamped by a wave of Islamophobia … the media crawled with reports of Muslim plots to destroy America that echoed xenophobic tales from the distant and not-so-distant past …’3

  ‘Islamophobia’ remains, in some circles, a controversial concept. Critics reject the categorisation of anti-Muslim sentiment as racist, usually on the basis that ‘Islam’ constitutes a religion rather than a race. Yet ‘Judaism’ is not a race. Nor is ‘Pakistani’, nor ‘black’, nor many of the other descriptors employed by bigots. Biological races do not exist. Or, more exactly, they do not exist other than as categories generated and enforced by racists.

  Despite its unfortunate etymology (misleadingly suggestive of a psychological condition), ‘Islamophobia’ refers to what we might call the racialisation of Islam, its transformation into an essentialist category providing a master explanation for the behaviour of billions of disparate people.

  In Person X’s writing we find a particularly clear illustration of how, nearly twenty years after 9/11, ‘Islam’ has become for many an essentialised, almost biological, term.

  ‘It’s the birthrates,’ he explains, in the opening section of his document. ‘If there is one thing I want you to remember from these writings, its [sic] that the birthrates must change.’4

  He goes on to argue that, ‘due to its high fertility rates, [Islam] will grow to replace other peoples and faiths’ — a claim that explicitly posits Islam as an inheritable condition, a trait passed from one generation to the other, just like skin colour, or nose size, or any of the other traditional signifiers of racial identity.5

  That passage exemplifies how Islamophobia has functioned in the post-9/11 world.

  In the 1920s and 1930s, a distinctive anti-Semitic tradition circulated throughout most English-speaking countries. Anti-Jewish racism appeared, as a matter of course, in the mainstream press, in the speeches of political candidates, and in cultural productions such as films and novels.

  The industrialist Henry Ford, an obsessive anti-Semite, compiled the prevailing stereotypes into his 1920 tract, The International Jew: the world’s foremost problem, a volume that thus provides a handy illustration. In the book, Ford denounced Jewish immigrants for what he called attempts to ‘Judaize the United States’ while fantasising that Jewish financiers were shaping the course of history according to an ancient plan. The Jew stood behind the Bolsheviks, but also ran the banking industry: ‘poor in his masses,’ Ford said, ‘he yet controls the world’s finances’.6

  Ford’s writings proved, not surprisingly, invaluable to fascists the world over in the 1920s and 1930s. In Germany, The International Jew had been through an astonishing six editions by 1922 alone. In 1931, Hitler told a Detroit journalist that he regarded Ford as his hero, and in 1938, Ford was awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, a decoration accompanied by a personal thank-you note from Hitler.7

  After the Second World War, the Ford company distanced itself from the views of its founder, whose bigotry was no longer politically palatable. The Holocaust, and the experience of Nazism more generally, had fundamentally discredited the anti-Semitic tradition.

  Islamophobia, however, didn’t have the same associations, even though as far back as 1985, the scholar Edward Said had described it as a prejudice ‘nourished at the same stream as anti-Semitism’.8 Mattias Gardell notes that the medieval Christian hostility to the ‘enemies of God’ extended from Jews to what were then called ‘Moors, Saracens or Red Jews’: Muslims, too, were said to worship devils, defame Christian symbols, use children for blasphemous rituals, and so on.9

  Prior to 9/11, Islamophobia remained a relatively minor current in the West. The War on Terror changed that, normalising a discourse that replicated, almost exactly, the key tropes of pre-war anti-Semitism. Islamophobic bigots linked all Muslims to jihad, precisely as anti-Semites had held all Jews accountable for Bolshevism.

  ‘Maybe most Moslems [sic] peaceful,’ tweeted the media magnate Rupert Murdoch, ‘but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible.’10

  After Auschwitz, Ford’s reference to a ‘Jewish problem’ sounded unmistakably sinister. But, after 9/11, Murdoch’s employee Bill O’Reilly could repeatedly denounce ‘a Muslim problem in the world’, a phrase later adopted by Trump.11

  In the 2000s, only fringe fascists dared use terms like ‘Judaisation’. But groups pledging to ‘Stop Islamisation’ sprung up across Europe and the US, promising (as the American organisation explained their mission) ‘to rouse public fears about a vast Islamic conspiracy’.

  Once, bigots had railed against the ‘the kosher food racket’;12 now Islamophobia fostered new campaigns against halal certification.13 Old-school racists mocked traditional Jewish clothing; new-style racists campaigned against the burqa.14

  Almost every aspect of early-twentieth-century anti-Semitism repeated itself in twenty-first-century Islamophobia, often with substantial institutional support. The Centre for American Progress documented a tightly organised and well-funded Islamophobic network of pundits, blogs, and organisations operating in the United States, funded by seven charitable foundations spending $42.6 million between 2001 and 2009.15 Another report by the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the University of California Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender listed 74 Islamophobic groups (including the David Horowitz Freedom Center, the Middle East Forum, the American Freedom Law Center, Jihad Watch, and the Investigative Project on Terrorism) funded to the tune of $206 million between 2008 and 2013.16

  Crucially, Islamophobia lacked a direct historical identification with Nazism. It also sounded quite different from the racism fought by civil-rights campaigners and other activists in the 1960s and 1970s. As a result, while the most enthusiastic promoters of Islamophobia came from the right, the new bigotry attracted some figures previously thought of as ‘progressive’, such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Bill Maher.17

  It’s worth exploring one example in detail. In the wake of 9/11, the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci complained that Muslims ‘breed like rats’. In a series of bestselling books, she popularised the ‘Eurabia’ conspiracy theory developed by the prolific autodidact Bat Ye’or (Gisele Littman), in which globalists were said to use immigrants to ‘Islamise’ the continent.

  As Matt Carr argues, the Eurabia narrative depends on presenting Muslim immigrants from many different nations as essentially identical, something he calls ‘flat-out barking gibberish’. In some iterations, the theory essentially reconstructs an Islamophobic presentation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, with Islamists presiding over a secret alliance with Third Worldists and neo-communists in ‘a powerful jihadist coalition against Western democracies and their allies’.18

  Yet Fallaci’s role in popularising such conspiracies exemplified how Islamophobia enabled the far right to emerge from the shadow of Auschwitz. She had, after all, spent her childhood in a Partisan band fighting Mussolini’s troops. She was not recognised as a right-winger — in fact, she enjoyed a reputation as an anti-fascist.

  Had such a mad notion as ‘Eurabia’ centred on a ‘Jewish plot’, its proponents would, rightfully, have been shunned. Yet versions of the Eurabia idea appeared in work by Melanie Phillips, Bernard Lewis, Niall
Ferguson, and many, many other widely published writers.

  In his bestselling book America Alone, Mark Steyn expanded on the same concept, warning about the ‘Muslim world’s high birth rate’, and telling readers to ‘start with demography, because everything does’.19

  Compare the lines with which Person X begins his manifesto:

  It’s the birthrates.

  It’s the birthrates.

  It’s the birthrates.

  Steyn, a Canadian polemicist, belongs to the tradition of racist populism rather than fascism. Nowhere does he argue for his readers to violently destroy their perceived enemies. Nevertheless, the spread of Islamophobia — according to one study, Murdoch’s Australian papers published 3,000 negative stories relating to Islam in a single year20 — equipped genuine fascists like Person X with an important tool: a widely accepted racist conspiracy theory that they could fit to their own ends.

  In his manifesto, Person X asks himself a rhetorical question about why, given his belief that all immigrants deserved death, he targeted Muslims in particular.

  The decision was, he explains, purely tactical. ‘They [Muslims] are the most despised group of invaders in the West,’ he says, ‘[and so] attacking them receives the greatest level of support.’21

  His focus on demographic change reflects another key development of the post-9/11 era: a new hostility to refugees and migrants. By its nature, the War on Terror intensified the developed world’s focus on border policing, generalising Islamophobia into a broader anxiety about race and immigration. David Renton argues that the War on Terror:

  served to racialise a wider set of people than just Muslims, making everyone ‘white’ or ‘black’, ‘Jewish’ or ‘Hindu’. It … trained mainstream journalists to see minority groups as united around political projects; and [gave] the nod to essentialist views of white ethnicity, in which immigration, above all Muslim immigration, is a collective suicide in the face of a militant enemy.22

  Again, the experience of the 1930s demonstrates how the process works. In 1938, the leaders of the democratic world had convened a meeting — the so-called Évian Conference — to discuss the refugee crisis produced by Nazi anti-Semitism. Hitler responded by taunting the attendees as hypocrites. If they disapproved of German racism, he mocked, why didn’t they welcome refugees to their own countries?

  ‘I can only hope and expect,’ he said, ‘that the other world, which has such deep sympathy for these criminals [that is, Jews], will at least be generous enough to convert this sympathy into practical aid. We, on our part, are ready to put all these criminals at the disposal of these countries, for all I care, even on luxury ships.’23

  The resolve of the ostensibly anti-racist democracies to maintain their borders — in other words, their determination to repel desperate people seeking aid — became, as Hitler understood, a powerful legitimator of Nazi racism.

  After the war, Hannah Arendt lamented how the Jews ‘whom the persecutor had singled out as scum of the earth … actually were received as scum of the earth everywhere; those whom persecution had called undesirable became the indésirables of Europe’.24

  The same phenomenon re-emerged after 9/11, as the rich nations greeted families driven from their homes by military conflict (often, conflict resulting from Western interventions) with detention, harassment, and demonisation. That treatment legitimised further abuse, in precisely the manner Arendt outlined.

  Person X called his manifesto ‘The Great Replacement’, borrowing the title from a 2012 book by the French philosopher Renaud Camus. Camus drew on existing French traditions of anti-immigrant racism (in particular, Jean Raspail’s 1973 invasion novel The Camp of the Saints), and merged them with the Eurabia thesis to argue that France faced a conspiracy from leftists to destroy the nation via immigration.25

  Camus’ thesis has provided a rallying cry for the right all around the world (even though most of his writing remains untranslated). In Europe, it motivated the German anti-Islam movement Pegida and the fascist group Generation Identity. In 2012, the American alt-right leader Richard Spencer entitled the first edition of his Radix Journal ‘The Great Erasure’;26 Canadian alt-right celebrity Lauren Southern produced a YouTube documentary entitled ‘The Great Replacement’ that received some half a million views.27 Symptomatically, when American fascists marched at the Unite the Right rally at Charlottesville, they chanted, ‘You will not replace us’ (or ‘Jews will not replace us’).

  Versions of the argument have appeared in the mainstream, with, for instance, Tucker Carlson (the replacement for Bill O’Reilly on Fox News) warning about ‘demographic change’ and the ‘genocide’ facing white men.28

  But rhetorical support for the theory has mattered less than the reinforcement provided by state policy.

  After 9/11, the Bush administration linked immigration enforcement to the fight against terrorism, bringing the various agencies concerned with policing immigration under the umbrella of the newly created and extraordinarily powerful Department of Homeland Security, which received a huge funding boost. That coincided with an expansion in immigrant removals, the rate of which doubled between 2001 and 2011.29 The process was bipartisan, reaching a crescendo under the Obama administration. The supposedly progressive Barack Obama deported an astonishing 2.7 million people — a figure that amounts to about 1,000 immigrants a day, for eight years.30

  The growth of what the Nation calls the ‘deportation machine that Obama built for President Trump’ could not help but amplify the rhetoric of the far right. If immigrants weren’t dangerous, why was the American state both deporting and imprisoning them? If there was no demographic threat, why was the DHS such a huge agency, boasting more than 48,000 staff devoted exclusively to immigration enforcement?31

  The practice of government legitimised the rhetoric of the right, just as much as the rhetoric of the right made possible punitive government practices.

  After the Second World War, Aimé Césaire published an essay entitled ‘Discourse on Colonialism’ — in part, an argument about Nazism. In it, Césaire linked fascism to the brutality inflicted on the colonial nations, a brutality that damaged the perpetrators nearly as much as the victims. By supporting repression and torture in Africa or Asia, Europeans legitimated a violent hostility to democracy on their own continent. With each act of imperial cruelty, he concluded, ‘civilisation acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a centre of infection begins to spread’.32

  Something similar happened during the War on Terror. As the Cost of War Project notes, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other theatres, American troops detained hundreds of thousands of people, often handing them over for detention to regimes notorious for abuse. Terror suspects were incarcerated without trial, including in Guantanamo Bay where more than one hundred people remain in custody more or less entirely outside the rule of law. Targeted killings, waterboarding, detention without trial: all of these were well established by the early 2000s.

  Not surprisingly, political rhetoric within the West became increasingly inflected with what the journalist David Neiwert calls ‘eliminationism’, a discourse in which dissidents became not opponents to be argued with, but threats to be neutralised or destroyed.

  ‘Everybody got it?’ the right-wing cable host Bill O’Reilly asked his listeners in 2005. ‘Dissent, fine; undermining, you’re a traitor. So all those clowns over at the liberal radio network, we could incarcerate them immediately.’33

  Now, in one sense, O’Reilly’s outburst (and the others like it — Neiwert provides a huge list) was intended as a provocation rather than a genuine proposal. Yet he made such jokes at a time in which real brutality had become state policy.

  If enemies could be detained without trial or killed abroad, why not at home? That implicit query provoked the pundit Ann Coulter’s response to the detention of John Walker Lindh, an American caught fighting with the Taliba
n.

  ‘We need to execute people like John Walker,’ she said, ‘in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realise that they can be killed, too.’ She later doubled down on the ‘gag’, suggesting that she actually wanted Lindh burned alive on prime time TV.34

  The immediate beneficiaries of the new, post-9/11 politics were, by and large, the traditional parties. In the US, the polling company Gallop noted that president Bush’s nationwide address after the attacks elicited ‘widespread public support for a war against terrorism, as well as the highest presidential job approval rating ever measured by Gallup since it began asking the public for its evaluation of presidents over six decades ago’.35

  Yet the ability of establishment politicians to capitalise on that consciousness quickly faded, particularly after the Global Financial Crisis. The new racism gave rise to a different kind of right-wing politics, one that Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin describe as ‘national populism’, that others call ‘right-wing populism’, and that I’ve elsewhere dubbed ‘outsider anti-elitism’.36

  Outsider anti-elitism had been on the rise since the 1990s, fuelled by dissatisfaction with the rule of market economics after communism’s collapse. But the post 9/11 world allowed it to come into its own, particularly when the Global Financial Crisis (otherwise known as the Great Recession) tore the world economy apart.

  Establishment parties were, after all, limited in their deployment of the new discourses about immigration and Muslims by the exigencies of government. They still had to pay lip service, at least, to treaties such as the Refugee Convention; they still needed to work with Muslim leaders to pursue their foreign-policy goals.

  Outsider anti-elitists enjoyed far more freedom. Precisely because they presented themselves as insurgents, they could dismiss the norms of the mainstream. Typically, their organisations used racism and conspiracy theories to structure a deep distrust of conventional politicians and institutions: the ‘elite’, they argued, used Muslim immigration to do down ordinary people. Outsider anti-elitism tapped into fears about a loss of national identity and traditions, spoke to those who felt themselves to be victims of economic reform and free-market economies, and capitalised on the weakening of the bonds between long-established parties and their voting base.