The Image of The Muslim and The Reality of White Neo-Fascism
The violent attack by a Muslim officer at Ft. Hood is a tragedy in an increasingly militarized state now magnified by anti-Muslim fanaticism. The call by the ultra-conservative “fringe” (now comfortably navigating, however, in the mid-stream of the Republican Party) to expel and ban all Muslims from the U.S. military is simply another step in what is by now the firmly established foreign and domestic “Orientalist” policy of the U.S. government.
The orientalist construction of the non-Western “Other” and the reciprocal construction of the West as the normative standard have a long imperial history. Edward Said’s analysis is still applicable. What is new is the troubling similarity to early 20th Century attacks on Jews throughout much of Europe.
The Muslim of the early 21st Century is becoming the Jew of 100 years ago. The attacks against Muslims take place in the context of militarism, nativism, corporativism, and the mainstreaming of an ultra-rightwing populism that brings together tea-baggers, white supremacists, and neo-Know Nothings like Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Drudge, and Rush Limbaugh, with all sorts of opportunists within the political establishment. The mass element of the new right may express resentment towards a multicultural society; it also expresses the will of authoritarians without authority, totalitarians without totality, for a central authority that lashes out against all threats to their fascist aspirations, leashes in all resistance and brings the country back to the mythical unity of the past.
Militarism, nativism, hatred of foreigners, and the corporativist vertical alliance between big capital, and sectors of the middle class: These are together elements of fascist terror for which only one component seems to be lacking: political control of the machinery of government.