Rumsfeld Resorts to the F-Word
Rumsfeld uses the F-word, "fascism" to describe radical Islam with a complete, potentially willful ignorance of the economic realities behind the word, and more importantly behind the second world war.
Fascism, insofar as Nazi fascism was practiced in Germany, was the necessary physical and social repercussion of an economic austerity policy enacted by Nazi Germany's Hjalmar Schacht. Under Schachtian economic policies, Germany gutted its internal social landscape and strip-mined all aspects of the economy which were not war-related, forcing the economy into a full war drive at the very real expense of the dignity of its subjects. Oil, rubber, steel, food and labor, all of these things were forbidden for export, and their industrial uses were directed by the state toward warmaking efforts. Money was stripped from social programs and redirected to warmaking efforts. Expenditures of capital on unapproved activity were strictly forbidden. The old and sick, weak and poor, the useless eaters were left to fend for themselves and to die.
This policy is very similar to the policies of the Bush administration, which in its mad drive to make war in the middle east and reinflate the financial bubble from the 1990s, has moved aggressively to strip-mine domestic social programs such as social security and health care. My roommate Ragin died of diabetes after losing access to state-sponsored medical assistance. I've tasted the inhumane implications of these policies personally.
The most insidious thing about Fascism is that none of us--neither you nor I--are ever far from it by virtue of the implications of our poor decisions. Should we defend our decisions at any cost, never admit error, never reconcile with the need to change, nearly every political philosophy or economic policy except for that which is most carefully based on the physical realities of natural law can lead to a state of social arrangement resembling fascism. Fascism is like the cancer of democracy and republic, certain to kill it but born of its own body and from the inability to reign in some of its healthiest impulses.
The problem of Islamic terrorism stems from the utter lack of physical economic development and activity in a part of the world teeming with young unemployed men. The similarity between Germany in the 1930s and today's southwest Asia is that the dearth of economic infrastructure and incapacity for the societies who live there to organize around industry, agriculture and commerce is caused both by the economic ignorance of their own leaders, but also by the constant state of warfare which cyclically disrupts the natural processes of industry, commerce and agriculture to uplift individual people. This state of warfare, for the vast majority of the civilians in that part of the world, was brought to them against their will by the U.S. and Britain decades ago. It was enforced by blockade, by arial bombardment, by the constant suppression of civilian economy in the name of "collateral damage".
The only rational way, then, to wipe out radical Islamic terrorism, is to promote the development of physical economic infrastructure in southwest asia. The entire region, from Somalia to Turkey to India, and everywhere in between. Intercontinental high speed freight and passenger rail, nuclear power, agriculture and industry will be the cornerstones of peace in the Middle East. These and the missing social powers of unconditional love for one's neighbors and recognition of the innate dignity of every human being. If the west can give these people anything, it should be in these matters.
If fissile power is determined too dangerous to permit into the hands of states on the brink of anarchy, then the United States and Europe must refocus their attention on building next-generation (post solar) power production methods, such as dense boron hydrogen plasma focus fusion, zero point energy, virtual photon flux drives, sonofusion, and related high-density power production sources. Were even a single one of these technologies developed for commercial deployment, it would signal an immediate end to the solar-powered (wood, coal, oil, wind, solar) era. I can understand the fears of fissile proliferation. It is a boundary between the solar and the post-solar era, which we must progress beyond.
Our policies for combatting terrorism must be policies which refocus the attention of the western world from war and dispair to the exportation of industry, science, commerce, and the peace they bring. "Liberals" in the United States want peace without the process. They reject science and progress in favor of utopian vision of a pristine and depopulated planet, ignorant of the chaos and war that depopulation must necessarily bring.
"Conservatives" in the United States maintain the contradictory notions that war and bloodshed, force and fear can bring about peace and democracy, and that democracy itself, without a firm rooting in reason and natural law and an abiding sense of justice and measure, is itself something worth fighting and dying for.
It is not. Democracy is tyranny if every man is a tyrant in his heart. Rumsfeld evokes the specter of fascism in order to arouse the two minutes of hate bred into our public subconsciousness by decades of movies about nazis and fascists. This is the method his teacher, Leo Strauss, taught him. Hatred, he will learn in time, and we must learn immediately, is not a thing around which people can be organized for just and right action.
This form of irrational hatred is inimical to Christian charity, to good reason, and to political prudence. I pray for those who make it their banner. And as for fascism, America needs to let go of their hatred of fascists and stop using this disgusting political epithet out of context of its historical truth. For hatred, in the end, begets itself. Doing so dilutes the weight of history and does nothing to solve the problem of our perpetual and collectively lacking grace.