ISIS members are not nihilists; the 9/11 terrorists were not cowards.

After communism, ultra-violence

Despite what the media and the American president have said and no doubt will repeatedly say, it just isn’t so.

[And neither Islam nor narco-terrorism is an "alternative to capitalism," of course.]

Still, though the analogy is far from perfect, Islam has replaced left wing revolution as the cause of some of our more profoundly alienated youth.

Unlike anarchism and Marxism, Islam is not a rationalization or expression of hatred of capitalism, and it is just silly to say that.

But it has become, especially through the halfway house of Black Muslim ideology, a rationalization and expression of the hatred felt so fiercely by so many black American youth for white America.

And for some recent Muslim immigrants to America and Europe, as well as a relative handful of white kids from Christian or non-religious families, it has become a rationalization and expression of hatred for the Occident.

But that does not in all cases mean the participants are moved by religious fervor or even, necessarily, by any degree of specifically religious sentiment.

Not every Russian patriotically engaged in The Second World War or the subsequent Cold War was moved by Communist fervor.

And not every Muslim moved to oppose what he perceives to be a war against Muslims by Christians is moved by actual religious fervor, any more than Catholics of the IRA or Protestants of the UDL were.

Tribal loyalty is different from religious motivation, though religion may partially define the tribe.

But all the same, the magnetic attraction of ISIS for some alienated youth of the Occident reminds one of the foreign volunteers of the International Brigades fighting Franco during the Spanish Civil War under the false flag of republicanism but in truth for the sake of secular utopian hallucinations.

[For those who might have missed it, the Spanish Republic of 1931 was dead when the Nationalist forces stepped ashore from Morocco in 1936, and had been born as an unstable regime supported almost exclusively by its enemies.]

Another point of imperfect analogy, just as Christians have characterized Islam as a Christian heresy, they and others before and during the Cold War so characterized both Marxism and anarchism.

But the terms can be changed, and we can see also an imperfect analogy between on the one side the pair of reforming and revolutionary Marxism and on the other the pair of pacific or moderate and revolutionary Islam.

And that leads to another parallel between the Cold War and the current struggle with Islam.

During the Cold War, the consensus was that the enemy of the Occident was not socialism or even Marxism in general, but specifically revolutionary Marxism, aka Leninism, Communism, Maoism, and so on.

And both GW and O have done everything they can to establish a consensus that today’s enemy of the Occident is not Islam but Jihader, terrorist Islam.

And just as, during the Cold War, non-revolutionary Marxists and socialists sometimes found themselves torn between East and West, today non-revolutionary Muslims are torn, sometimes opposing their own allies and allying themselves with their enemies.

You are not the enemy because you think someday Islam will dominate the world or the proletarian revolution will finally end history and the exploitation of man by man, or even because you long for that day.

You are the enemy because you take up arms, sincerely or not, to make it happen.

PS.

Yes, by the way, I am saying that, retrospectively, it would have made more sense to fight for Franco than the zombie 2nd Republic (though best, of course, would have been to flee the country, if possible without too great loss), and that generally right wing dictatorships from the interwar years through the end of the Cold War were much preferable to left wing ones, basing this solely on the measure of harm done to their own countries.

But even if we count all harm done, in general, against them I think Mao and Stalin still beat out Hitler, don't they?

And Hitler, both overall and purely domestically, was very far from typical of dictators of the right, probably being among them the grand champion of slaughter.

Of course, if he had defeated Stalin, just the harm he is believed to have intended for "slavdom" might have set a record even the worst reds would never beat. 

PPS.

Yes, I know,  there is a current of propaganda on the right that insists Fascism and even Nazism are ideologies of the left.

But it depends on the ridiculous and baseless claim that only fiscal conservatives and libertarians count as right wing, leaving totally out of account numerous Christian monarchs and such loyal supporters as Otto von Bismarck. 

And the distinguishing trait of Hitlerism, its genocidal anti-Semitism and bloody minded anti-slavism, are not even on the left-right continuum.

Razzzzzberry.