RealClearPolitics – Articles – Are We Fighting ‘Islamic Fascists’?
Fascism, Nolte said, is “resistance to transcendence.” By that, he meant that fascism was a rebellion against the liberating but destabilizing transformations of modern society.
I do see many of these same factors in the growing popularity of radical Islam in the Middle East. The baseline for this movement remains the Iranian revolution of 1979, which exploded in the region’s most modern and, if you will, “transcendent” state. The Shah’s Iran was rushing to embrace the global economy. Its elite was liberal, secular, international — and also wretchedly corrupt. Ordinary Muslims felt, with some justice, that they were being left out of the spoils of this new Iran — that their hard work was being used to buy mansions on the Cote d’Azur. That radical populism lives on in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, dressed in his ostentatiously humble golf jacket.