Curse of new fascism

Nowadays, the word “fascism” is mostly used as a swear-word - sometimes appropriately, more often in too exaggerated a way.

The Stormtroopers of the new fascism include Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (with its mass executions of male prisoners and its sex-enslavement of captive women), the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan (with their mass execution of pupils at a school in Peshawar in northern Pakistan on December 16 last year), al-Shabaab in Somalia and Kenya (with its massacre of Christian bus commuters and then of quarry workers in northern Kenya in November and December last year), and Boko Haram, with its reign of terror and sex-enslavement of girls in northern Nigeria.

There are many other, less well known variants of this violent extremism in other countries. It has followers across the world.

What distinguishes Islamic fascism is that it seeks to return all people across the world living in modern nation states, whether by persuasion or by force, to a form of state set up by the prophet Mohammad 1400 years ago in Arabia.

This form of rule was set out by Mohammad in the Koran in which violent conquest on behalf of the faith is set out in several chapters (or suras) as an obligation on Muslims, under certain circumstances.

Islamic fascists today take these teachings, as well as the history of Mohammad – as set out by early Muslim scholars in the hadiths (or prophetic traditions) – as an ideological injunction to be followed today by themselves, in rejection of modern principles of human rights and democracy.

Unlike the teaching of Jesus in the doctrine of the tribute money (set out in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke), or the secular political history of the nation state embraced both by the Freedom Charter and the South African constitution of 1996, traditional Islamic law, or Sharia, sees no separation between church and state.

Modern followers of jihad (Arabic for “struggle”) then consider it their sacred duty to wipe out contemporary forms of government which they perceive as non-Islamic, even those run by fellow Muslims, and to wipe out those who support democracy or criticise or oppose their ideology – including other Muslims – as much as the SS believed it was their mission to wipe out the Jews, and spread the power of the German Reich throughout the globe.

As the Paris murders show – yet again – there is no global barrier to this new global fascism. And as with the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini, no appeasement of it will work. We have to learn a very harsh and cruel reality. It will determine the lives of our children and grandchildren, even more than it will our own.

Paul Trewhela was a political prisoner from 1964 to 1967