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During the early 1920s, outsiders and many Germans were struck by the fanaticism and violence of a fringe political movement in Munich: the Nazis. At first, many dismissed the hatred Hitler expressed as an aberration borne out of the defeat in the Great War of 1914-1918; others suggested that Nazism appealed to all of the “losers” in society. The U.S. ambassador to Berlin arrived at a different conclusion and sent a long report to the State Department. In it, he argued that all levels of German society were infected with a great anger not rooted solely in the way the war turned out, but anger against the modern world. Toward the end of the decade, the Nazis appeared to be fading away but the Great Depression of 1929 gave their anger new life and millions now listened to the “little man” from Munich. Once in power after 1933, Hitler’s anti-civilization message became a way of life and the revolt against modernity quickly spread to all layers of German society. By the mid-1930s, various forms of fascism spread to other nations. What made Nazism different were its genocidal practices, its hatred of the West, of democracy, and of Jews. When the war began in the late summer of 1939 and spread to the USSR in 1941, state-sponsored terrorism became the order of the day. The entire world knows how it turned out. Europe and Russia were converted into a huge charnel house and those the Nazis hated were converted into pale columns of blue smoke. It took a coalition of the world’s powers lead by the United States, the UK and the USSR to bring down the Hitlerite system. Today, the West is once again faced with a new great hatred: Islamic-Fascism. The faces have changed, the |
location has moved eastward, but the message and cult-like subservience remains the same. Everything the West prizes—openness, democracy, tolerance, music, films, and Judeo-/Christian tradition— these new fascists despise. Osama bin Laden is Hitler’s child, his suicide armies a modern-day version of the SS, soldiers of destruction. How deep this new fascism runs in the fabric of the Muslim world is hard to say. But as one listens to the imams in many mosques, listens to Arab and Middle Eastern TV programs, reads the hate-filled propaganda on the web, it is as if Hitler and Goebbels have come back from the dead. Islamic-Fascism is no different than Nazism in its early years. Just as millions in Germany believed they were cheated and raped as a nation at war’s end in November 1918, millions in the Muslim world believe that the promise of Islamic glory was thwarted with the rise of the industrial West. Just as Hitler looked back to the First Reich, the new fascists look back to the glory days of the Caliphates when the Muslims had a foothold in Spain and their armies reached the gates of Vienna. This great anger and hatred of the West has been building for centuries. From |
time-to-time, it made a breakthrough but was contained. Islam has had other Osama’s. But in an age when TV and the web give terrorists worldwide exposure, the new fascists found their venue and their man, Osama bin Laden. His aim is to destroy the West by any means possible and on Sept. 11, 2001, he and his minions inflicted a major wound. The Muslim world was no longer powerless and the soft-spoken Osama was a hero to millions. Like Hitler, bin Laden has carefully constructed his persona. A tea drinker, removed from the world; a man who likes the mountains, the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan are his Berghof, an Alpine retreat. Just as the SS “worked toward their Führer,” his soldiers know what he wants: the complete disruption of civil society in the West, the disruption of democratic societies, and the draining of billions of dollars and Euros into security-related areas. Their aim is to make security conditional and paralyze the West and other regions. Meanwhile, other terrorist organizations such as Hamas are also Nazi-type organizations. In the early 1930s, the Nazis had their soup kitchens, charitable organizations, schools, and the like. Hamas is viewed as a charity by many. In truth, it is a violent organization, a school for terrorists and its focus is on the young. Many hope that terrorism will run its course but this seems unlikely. It is more likely that the new Islamic-Fascism will have to be rooted out like Nazism 60 years ago wither through direct force or some form of containment.
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