Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Celebrate Islamofascism Awareness Week

Few people are aware that Islamofascism was not simply a sloppy epithet, but an actual political movement. An obscure offshoot of the Lebanese Phalangists in the 1930s, the movement advocated totalitarianism, nationalism, anticommunism, corporatism, cool uniforms, parades, Roman salutes and grandiosely chilly monumental architecture. They proposed to revive Islamic economies by an ambitious public works program that would ornament the Mideast with enormously oversized replicas of the Kaaba faced with white marble and situated in the middle of vast dehumanizing colonnaded plazas. They also promised to both complete the Hijaz Railway and run it on time.

Their paramilitary arm, the Green Shirts, wore green shirts, matching green ties and green tasseled fezzes* and roamed the streets looking for Communists and labor union members to beat up and dose with castor oil.

They didn’t catch on.

*(You might not think tasseled color coded fezzes would be the sort of headgear that real fascists would find appealing, but they were, for obscure reasons that date back to the Crimean War.)

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