One
of the little known realities of twentieth century history is the role
played by Hitler’s Nazi regime in kindling the contemporary
conflagration known as the Global War On Terror.With the incessant and
very effective propaganda war being waged by the Islamo-fascist movement
in the media and the Internet, many of the deeper underlying issues in
this conflict are being obscured, intentionally so.
When US
analyst Stephen Schwartz coined the term Islamo-fascism to describe Al
Qaeda, its multitude of franchises, and the Tehran regime, he elicited
considerable argument. To date academic analysts and scholars remain
divided on the use of this term. This is unfortunate insofar as these
regimes/movements and the underpinning methodology of public control are
clearly fascist in every respect, once the veneer of fundamentalist
Islamic propaganda is stripped away. Schwartz cites his own definition
as ‘Islamofascism refers to use of the faith of Islam as a cover for
totalitarian ideology’.
Every revolutionary warfare movement needs
cannon fodder, and the primary cannon fodder are disaffected people.
The root of the Jihadist movement underpinning Al Qaeda is the
progressive economic and political decline of the Islamic world,
relative to the industrialised world.
While the Jihadist view is
that this is a consequence of Western oppression, the reality is far
simpler. Nearly all of these nations were recipients of generous
economic and military aid during the Cold War, as they sold their
allegiance to the West or the Soviets since the beginning of the Cold
War. With the fall of the Soviet Union, that source of external subsidy
vanished overnight, and they had to compete in an increasingly
globalised and active world economy. With little or no industrial base,
and excluding the handful of nations with significant petrochemical
wealth, most of these nations were not viable economically. This was
further exacerbated by arcane legal systems, often almost medieval, poor
levels of public education, poor governance and dysfunctional public
institutions, and often absolutist or authoritarian governments. Nation
states in this condition cannot compete in a modern global economy, and
the result was increasing poverty, unemployment, and a sense of
helplessness.
These
are conditions no different from those which spawned the Bolshevik
revolution, and the rise of Hitler’s National Socialist German Worker’s
Party (NSDAP). The only missing ingredient was a shared ideology which
provides a supporting belief system to unify recruits. Fundamentalist
Islam with its anti-Western, anti-Jewish and anti-wealth belief system
was that ideology, and the result is what we see today.
Another
way of looking at this problem is that only Turkey and Iran had made a
genuine transition from the medieval form of governance where church and
state were linked, and the genuine separation of Church and State, as
occurred in the West during the reformation period centuries ago, only
remains in Turkey, since Iran’s secular regime collapsed. As a result of
this, political meddling by clerics remains at the root of the problems
we see today in the Islamic world.
By far the most active in this
respect have been Wahhabi fundamentalists, a deeply conservative and
extreme sect in Sunni Islam, which for a variety of historical accidents
became the official state religion of Saudi Arabia. Wahhabist clerics
receive generous state subsidies, for both domestic activities and
missionary activities on a global scale. Wahhabism is the ideology
underpinning Al Qaeda, and the defunct Taliban state which was crushed
in Operation Enduring Freedom.
The
Islamic nations of the world had considerable exposure during the Cold
War to Soviet revolutionary warfare doctrine, which was standard
curriculum material for any students sent to Soviet and other Warsaw
Pact nation universities to gain free undergraduate and postgraduate
education. Suffice to say, classics like Lenin’s Gosudarstvo i
Revolutsia (The State and the Revolution) were compulsory reading. To
this pool of sociopathic knowledge infused across Islamic nations must
also be added the extensive training in insurgency techniques provided
by US and UK special forces and intelligence instructors during the
1980s Afghan war of liberation against the Soviets. Therefore the
technique of destabilising governments and political institutions by
sustained insurgency is well understood across the Islamic world, and
considerable study material especially of Soviet origin remains
available.
Having cannon fodder in the form of a materially
disadvantaged and disaffected populace, a ex-Soviet cookbook for
practising insurgency, and an ideological framework of Wahhabism are
essential ingredients for mayhem, but not enough to construct a
genuinely effective globalised insurgency. The glue which is needed to
hold these together is a developed ideological doctrine and propaganda
framework.
The
Soviet model was never going to be a candidate in this environment,
since too much of Soviet propaganda technique was centred on exploiting
class divisions in industrialised societies, and too much was centred in
ideas like ‘Pan-Slavism’ and ‘internationalism’. The ‘ideal’ communist
had to fervently believe in the brotherhood of all men, and accept that
only class enemies were evil, and that people of any nationality could
be liberated and brought into the fold given enough indoctrination. A
revolutionary Islamic movement needed an ideological doctrine and
propaganda framework which was chauvinistic in cultural values, and
racist in focussing hatred on non-Islamic nations or groups, especially
Jews.
The ideal model for this environment is of course the
destructive creation of Dr Joseph Goebbels, Reich Propaganda Minister,
and chief ideologue of Hitler’s NSDAP, the Nazi propaganda machine and
its associated doctrine and technique.
Contemporary Western
popular culture, exemplified by much of what Hollywood has produced on
the topic, tends to portray the Nazis either as buffoons, or caricatures
of evil. This is an unfortunate simplification of the truly destructive
nature of the Nazi regime, and its clever use of a wide range of
techniques designed to deeply seduce its followers. It is worth
observing that the popularity of Nazi ideology in fringe groups in
Western nations, despite the demonstrable moral and social bankruptcy of
Nazism, has if anything grown over recent decades.
The
Nazi model was multi-pronged, essentially populist, and was carefully
constructed to provide paths via which the socially disadvantaged or
ambitious individual could advance. A central theme of the Nazi cultural
construct was that those who would take the initiative individually, in
promoting Nazi agendas or performing a community service (of a variety
approved by the regime) would be rapidly promoted. Good ideas and the
willingness to invest effort in them were rapidly rewarded. In a
socially strongly stratified and class structured pre-Nazi Germany, the
Nazis presented opportunities for upward social mobility unseen until
then. Individuals who jumped on the Nazi bandwagon, if industrious in
their pursuits, could rise socially at a speed unseen until then in
Germany. Cinematographer Leni Riefenstahl and aviatrix Hanna Reitsch
were classical examples.
One byproduct of this arrangement was an
enormous burst of technological, industrial and social welfare
innovation in Germany, during the 1930s. Talent which aligned with the
Nazis was rewarded generously, the quid pro quo being complete
subservience to the ideological belief system of the regime. The Nazis
for instance actively recruited PhD graduates in a wide range of
disciplines to staff their bureaucracies and security apparatus. It is a
little known fact that much of the leadership staff of the SS security
apparatus held doctorates from leading German universities.
Another
key element of the Nazi model was a focus on social welfare, hitherto
unseen in developed nations, and a mechanism designed to completely
seduce the ‘blue collar’ sections of German society. This extended from
the use of youth organisations to perform community service, to the
introduction of innovative health insurance. Which citizen could not
admire a movement which would organise idle teenagers to help fix a
pensioner’s dilapidated residence, or clean up the littered town square?
The
Nazis perfected the model of complete ideological seduction of the
populace, in a manner the Soviets never mastered, despite no less
intensive effort. This is why German troops fought with such blind
fanaticism during the latter phase of the Second World War – most truly
believed, en masse, in the regime and its view of the world.
A key
tenet of Nazi propaganda was to attribute all misfortunes experienced
by Germany to influence or conspiracy of others. Therefore German
humiliation, misery and poverty in the post Great War Weimar republic,
and depression era, were attributed to the Western powers, a global
Jewish conspiracy, and the subversive influence of the Nazi’s primary
ideological competitor, the Soviet led communists. In the Nazi view of
the world, Germans were deemed to be perfect, and all misfortune the
fault of others, who had to be fought and ultimately exterminated. The
Holocaust, and other mass murder effected against opponents of the
regime across Europe were the manifestation of this deeply indoctrinated
belief.
Readers
who have followed the rise of Islamo-fascist political and
revolutionary movements across the Islamic world over recent years will
note the striking similarities in social ideology, political doctrine,
propaganda and the exploitation of social inequality, in comparison with
the Nazi model.
Is is similarity a coincidence, or is there a deeper connection involved?
There
is ample evidence to show that during the latter decade of the Nazi
regime, and following the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945, elements of
Nazi ideology found their way into the Middle East. There is a good case
to be made that initially, anti-Semitism was at the root of this
migration of ideas, but later, other aspects of Nazi model became
assimilated.
The connections between the radical ‘political Islam’
movement and Hitler’s regime now span eight decades, and most recently
involve an ongoing dialogue between neo-Nazi organisations and
‘political Islam’ centred organisations.
The roots of current
‘political Islam’ and its Islamo-fascist ideology lie in the 1920s, when
Ataturk secularised Turkey after the fall of the Ottoman regime, and
dumped the idea of an Islamic caliphate which spanned the globe.
Egyptian Hassan al-Banna, by occupation a schoolteacher, founded Al
Ikhwan Al Muslimun (The Muslim Brotherhood) in 1928, a radical
revolutionary movement centred in fundamentalist Islam as an ideological
model.
The
Brotherhood followed the pattern of European revolutionary movements,
recruiting followers disaffected by colonial rule in the Arab world, and
building up a covert organisation which by some accounts had hundreds
of thousands of followers in Egypt by 1945, and branch offices across
the Middle East. The aims of the Brotherhood were simple – recreate the
‘Golden Age’ of Islam by restoring the Caliphate, and drive the infidel
‘kafer’ colonialists out of the Islamic world. The social groupings
around mosques, and traditional Islamic welfare organisations were used
as a cover and conduit for financing the movement. By some accounts,
much of the early activity of the Brotherhood was modelled on the early
NSDAP.
By 1948 the Brotherhood had gained such potential, that it
prepared a coup against the Egyptian monarchy, but was disbanded by the
Egyptian government. It responded by assassinating the Prime Minister,
the regime in turn killing its leader Hassan al-Banna. The ascendancy of
Nasser’s national socialist regime then saw a sustained campaign by the
government to destroy the Brotherhood, one which has continued to this
very day. One of the casualties of the this campaign was al-Banna’s
successor, Sayyid Qutb, hanged in 1966.
Qutb
is often regarded as the father of modern Islamo-fascism, as he fused
fundamentalist Islamic ideology with the Nazi propaganda model, his
stated aim being to produce a movement which rivalled Nazism in the West
and Communism in the East. To creat this ideological model, Qutb
essentially ‘remapped’ the Nazi model into a Middle Eastern equivalent,
replacing ‘German racial purity’ with ‘Islamic religious purity’, and
adopting the tenets of Nazi anti-Semitism and rejection of Western
capitalism and liberal democracy. Key elements of Nazi propaganda, such
as the ideas of a world Zionist conspiracy, centred in the US, were
rolled into this toxic mix, together with the idea of propagating Islam
by the sword.
A then young follower of Qutb was Ayman al-Zawahiri,
more recently co-founder and deputy leader of Osama bin Laden’s Al
Qaida, who was recruited into the Brotherhood during the 1960s. In many
respects, the modern Al Qaeda is a direct offspring of al-Banna’s
movement. Al-Zawahiri, like bin Laden, is a dropout from a social elite,
he qualified as a medical practioner, his grandfather was the Grand
Imam of the al-Azhar University, his uncle the first leader of the Arab
League.
Another Islamo-fascist who was inspired by Qutb was a
young Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, later to lead the Iranian revolution
which toppled the Shah, Reza Pahlavi.
The connection with the
NSDAP regime in Germany however runs deeper, as the Nazis did their best
to support through finance and advice the embryonic Islamofascist
movements in British ruled Eqypt and Iraq through the late 1930s and
early 1940s. The aim was to destabilise British rule in these
strategically critical colonies. A key player was the Grand Mufti of
Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, implicated in a 1941 coup attempt in
Baghdad, and another graduate of the al-Azhar University. Al-Husseini
was extensively involved in anti-British and anti-Jewish Palestinian
unrest during the 1920s and 1930s, and one source claims he met covertly
with representatives of the Nazi SS intelligence arm during the late
1930s, including Adolf Eichmann, later a key player in the extermination
of European Jews.
Once
al Husseini wore out his welcome with the British, he fled to Germany
for the remainder of World War II, remaining active as a propagandist
and recruiter of Balkan Muslims into the Waffen SS Handschar and Kama
Divisions, used extensively in the latter part of the war, as German
manpower available for combat divisions declined. After the war al
Husseini returned to Egypt, and after being implicated in numerous acts
of political violence was exiled. Yasser Arafat, deceased leader of the
Palestinians, was a nephew of al Husseini.
With the withdrawal of
the British and French from their Middle Eastern colonies after the
Second World War, and the formation of Israel, the Middle East became a
hotbed of Arab nationalism, in which the fascist Baath movement became
the dominant player. The Baathists represent yet another thread of Nazi
influence, as they asimilated Nazi propaganda materials. As secular
‘national socialists’ they in many respects represented a closer
ideological model to that of the Nazis. Saddam Hussein’s Baathist
regime, broken by Coalition forces in 2003, was a direct descendent of
this political movement. Hussein’s admiration for Hitler was well
documented.
The
connections between Nazism and Arab fascism were further reinforced as
some Nazi war criminals sought refuge after the war. The best documented
instance is that of SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Alois Brunner, former
commandant of the Drancy concentration camp in Paris, who eventually
settled in Syria during the 1950s. There are claims that in total
several hundred former SS and Gestapo officers eventually found new
homes in the Arab world, these including Gestapo officer Joachim
Däumling, SS Ober-Gruppenfuhrer Oskar Dirlewanger, SS Gruppenfuhrer
Leopold Gleim, and SS Ober-Gruppenfuhrer Heinrich Selimann.
Given
the volume of publications which currently exist, connecting modern
Islamo-fascism to the NSDAP regime of the 1930s, and the well documented
activities of al Husseini in Nazi occupied Europe, the evidence that
modern Islamo-fascism has its primary ideological and doctrinal roots in
twentieth century Nazism is overwhelming.
Apologists for
Islamo-fascism and ‘political Islam’ will no doubt dismiss this material
as ‘Zionist propaganda’, but whether we are prepared to accept or
reject such historical claims, the nearly identical ideological and
doctrinal models used by the Nazis and modern Islamofascists cannot be
explained away so easily. Nor is the adoption of Nazi symbology such as
the straight arm salute used by Hezbollah, or the wide distribution by
Islamo-fascists of anti-semitic tracts such as the “The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion”, a favourite of Goebbels’ propagandists. There are
simply too many threads connecting the two ideologies to be dismissed
easily.
World War Two may well be sixty years behind us, but it is
clear that the poison which almost destroyed the world’s democracies
then is still alive and well today.
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