Social Matter

Let me start off with a short biography.

Bernhard Falk used to be a regular physics student. Smart, tough, determined. At university (where else?), he became a radical communist through fellow students and joined the terrorist “Anti-Imperialist Cells”. Several years later, he was tried for attempted murder and several bombings. In jail, he converted to Islam (European prisons are full of Muslims) and started calling himself Muntasir bi-llah. Now he’s an important figure in the German Salafi scene. After discussing this matter with a friend of mine, he said: “If you want a picture of Islamization, imagine leftist hipsters who stop trimming their beards.”

Bernhard Falk still hates you, but black flags are more fashionable now.

Some of you may know the infamous German politician Daniel Cohn-Bendit. This fellow is a radical leftist and member of the Green party, notorious for supporting left-wing terrorism and pedophiles. Following a deeply ingrained instinct to denounce everything he dislikes as right-wing, Cohn-Bendit described the jihadist attackers from Paris as fascists. Conservative MP Alec Shelbrooke calls the Islamic state fascist in his article for the Mirror. Even George W. Bush used the term Islamofascism. But is radical Islam actually fascist? I think this choice of words is misguided. Fascism is an overused cliché, a buzzword, a spell used in strange democratic rituals. Our civilization is dead-serious about accusations of fascism (although there was a time when everything, including but not limited to the police, the church, teachers, street signs and clothes were deemed fascist). When our establishment calls somebody a fascist, they mean that this person is actually evil, not “misguided and from a broken home”–evil. Also, by using a word from European history, they attempt to hide the fact that it is an imported problem.

Radical Islam is a declaration of war. It declares war not only on the modern West, its way of life and its values. Islam also declares war on the remains of classical bourgeois society, the thing historical fascism tried to defend against the collectivistic stampede of the Left. Strictly speaking, fascism can only exist in its time, as German historian Ernst Nolte explained. Using the term beyond its era is always more metaphor than analysis. Specifically, Islam has the opposite direction for its violence. Radical Islam, just like fascism, can be described as a reaction to certain global trends.

However, Islam fights a bottom-up war, while fascism preferred a top-down approach. Radical Muslims represent the avant-garde of yet another collective that longs to be emancipated. They started a war against the West, against the World of Masters, of which they cannot and do not want to be a part of. Fascists, on the other hand, were part of the World of Masters and did everything in their power to defend and preserve it. When I speak of the World of Masters, I do not mean the Cathedral with its deranged values and geopolitics. I am talking about the remnants of European civilization.

In terms of mainstream political thought, the West is dead. Yet civilization remains. It is under attack from all sides, but it remains. The property-owning bourgeois. The pipe-smoking philistine. He is the foundation of civilization. He went fascist in the 30’s to defend his way of life; he represents what radical Islam hates. A burning hatred for the “old white men who control everything” – that’s something a radical Muslim feels. Or a communist. Does it matter?

Islam can never be fascist because fascism is a movement of the besieged bourgeoisie. If we wish to borrow a term from European history to describe postmodern Jihadi Islam, it would be more logical to call it Islamobolshevism. It is a rebellion of the poor, of those who are missing out. Islamobolshevism is aglow with the idea of Salvation. Its cadres want to capture the masses and lead them into an archaic fairy tale world where everyone is equal before Allah.

Radical Islam promises the emancipation of a revolutionary collective, united only by a universal ideology. Jihad wants to liberate a group that is marginalized both on a global scale and in its Diasporas in the West. And it is ready to accept everybody. Speak the Shahada and you can join in on the struggle against oppression and decadence. Fueled by dreams of a world revolution, Islam strives for a blissful global commune of equals under the banner of the Prophet.  The idea of a solidary community made up of pure revolutionaries who want to end an oppressive system appeals to disenfranchised young males. Hence, Islamobolshevism.

Of course, the notion of comparing communism and Islam is not new. Winston Churchill pointed out that red revolutions are basically a copy of Jihad and the Soviet Union used Islamic resentments to complete their destruction of Russia during the Civil War. In November 1917, soon after the Revolution, Lenin issued an appeal To all the Muslim workers of Russia and the East, in which he proclaimed the liberation of Islam from the chains of reactionary monarchist Christians:

“Muslims of Russia…all you whose mosques and prayer houses have been destroyed, whose beliefs and customs have been trampled upon by the tsars and oppressors of Russia: your beliefs and practices, your national and cultural institutions are forever free and inviolate. Know that your rights, like those of all the peoples of Russia, are under the mighty protection of the revolution.”

Three years later, Stalin, at that time responsible for the Soviet affirmative action program, wrote that Sharia law is fully compatible with Marxism-Leninism. The Soviets rallied the Muslim underclass in Central Asia and other Muslim parts of what used to be the Russian Empire to fight against their former “oppressors” and, more importantly, against the feudal structure of classical Eastern societies. Devout Muslims who supported Marxist revolutionaries in slaughtering yesterday’s Islamic authorities: such was the first taste of (post)modern Jihadism.

“If it wants to destroy European civilization, it is fine with me” – Communism

At the same time, Wahhabism, Islam’s version of political Puritanism, waged war against the century-old institutions of the Ottoman Empire. In the decades to come, Muslim revolutionaries would destroy monarchy after monarchy; lately, they started deposing and killing secular leaders (who, like Saddam Hussein, could actually be described as Islamic fascists). Even in the USA, the Black Panther Party managed to unite militant socialists and Islamists while gaining the sympathies of white liberals. Obviously, radical Islam is merely another form of universalism. A low-church structure, the struggle of being holier than the next person, the creation of a memeplex able to infect the disenfranchised youth and even parts of the establishment. The evolution of modern Jihad surely reminds one of the history of Leftism in the West.

Al-Qaeda is painfully similar to the Third International and it is not all that hard to see a reflection of the young Soviet Union’s revolutionary fervor in the Islamic State.  It is important to understand that the very notion of Islamic revolution and worldwide Jihad has nothing to do with what some thinkers on the Right call “Islamic Traditionalism”.  As modern radical Islam emerged, it started by killing off century-old Islamic authorities, overthrowing traditional monarchies and purging those whose ideology was not pure enough. Islamobolshevism is not “medieval” or “reactionary” in the way liberals portray it – it consists of brainwashed underclasses who want to light the earth on fire and kill their “oppressors”, just like in that old song which I can easily imagine being sung as a Nasheed:

Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!

Arise, ye wretched of the earth!

For justice thunders condemnation:

A better world’s in birth!

No more tradition’s chains shall bind us;

Arise, ye slaves, no more in thrall!

The earth shall rise on new foundations:

We have been nought, we shall be all!

The Umma shall be the human race. The alliance between Islam and the Left is no coincidence. Postmodern Jihad – Islamobolshevism – is a dangerous phenomenon that never has been and never will be an ally to the Right.  Don’t fool yourselves: an alliance of Arab underground rappers from Berlin, fanatical warlords and disenfranchised goat-herders is not going to save the world. It might have a chance of destroying it, though.