ISIS: All the marks of a fascist regime are present in this organization.
ISIS and radicalized Canadian youth. North American and European youth succumb to a new fascism.
by Tom Thorne
At the time of writing Canadian youth are in Iraq and Syria fighting for ISIS. Estimates by the Canadian Government say they number about 130, but these are only the people authorities in Ottawa seem to know about. Canada is not alone. Young Americans and Europeans are also in Iraq and Syria fighting for ISIS.
Canadians fighting abroad for ISIS are often born Muslims, but now we are seeing converts to Islam who are not from a Muslim background joining these jihadist groups. The Canadian Muslim community is on record denying these people. Several radicalized non-Muslim people have been turned away from mosques once their jihadist notions were revealed.
The youth who engage jihadism are in a state of anomie with Canada and also mainstream Muslims who practice the peaceful tenets of Islam. They may say they are now Muslim but they are a far cry away from it really means to be a Muslim and practice peace, stability and a productive life contributing to Canadian society.
They also reject their own Canadian backgrounds and yearn to become contributors to the defeat of western countries including Canada involved in the middle east conflicts. They see the West as some Great Satan. They claim that the West is corrupt and without a moral compass on the world stage.
Radicalization for those without a Muslim background is a two step process. First they have to convert. Second you have to reject the real peaceful and respectful tenets of Islam for the perverted notions expressed in Islam’s name by ISIS or the Taliban in Afghanistan. Finally they must ultimately endorse terror as a means to achieve their ends. This decision puts them at odds with Canada and it is especially drastic when they burn their Canadian passports in ISIS propaganda videos on the World Wide Web.
This means that what goes on in their heads is at least a 180 degree turn from what they know. A Canadian radicalized in this way has to surrender any ideas about democracy and replace it with totalitarian doctrines that are fascist in their origins. Fascism is basically a thought system where views are fixed and the response to any other view is a rigid one way response. Other views are infidels and therefore subject to abuse and even death.
If these young people have any religious or social ideas from the West once radicalized they reject all they know, not for Islamic values but for jihadist ideas that use Islam badly to perpetuate their deeds of violence and social mayhem. Real Islamic values have no conflict with Canadian values.
These converts to jihadism decide to fight for a dark side which to them is a justified fight, believing that it is the right and only way to correct the world’s ills. You have become a true believer keyed to violence, war and human dislocation. If you adopt ISIS you are capable of helping to create thousands of refugees in the Middle East and a terror in Iraq, Syria, and also Canada and elsewhere in the West if the opportunity arises.
In order to better understand this phenomenon I reflect back on the Flemish, Dutch and French youth who after 1940 willingly joined the Waffen SS to aid their German conquerors. These units saw service on the Russian Front fighting for a racist regime locked in by Nazi anti Bolshevism propaganda and the destruction of the Communist Soviet State. Nazi distortions enabled them to summarily kill and murder wherever their armies went in Eastern Europe. There is a parallel to ISIS today.
This propaganda was simultaneously bound up with expanding Germany’s influence and frontiers into Eastern Europe for living space with the idea of enslaving a slavic race of humans. If you had a slavic background you had no human rights. Anyone in areas under ISIS control who cannot prove they are Muslim can summarily end up as a refugee or dead.
Young Europeans from conquered countries were seen by their Nazi masters as racially pure Ayrans who could be committed with Germans to set up a Nordic state with slavs as subjugated inferior peoples. They fought as these young Canadians do for ISIS an enemy of their own people, history and ideals of democracy. They were radically turned.
How does this anomie develop? How do young people make such as decision? In World War 2 none of the Flemings, Dutch or French young men who joined the Waffen SS were drafted or coerced. They all volunteered or fell for the SS and Nazi propaganda that surrounded them. The SS State within a state created glorious Ayran myths to justify the most heinous crimes on the Russian front and a glowing elite system to attract recruits to be their new SS supermen. In many ways ISIS recruitment in the West is the same.
When the propaganda says you are superior or always right it is an attractive lure that contributes to casting off your old values and simultaneously suspending critical thinking. Your own culture becomes unattractive and bankrupt. Recruits see themselves as winners where before they were losers or victims. These young people may be leaving behind student debts, and an economy that tolerates 25 percent youth unemployment or underemployment. Many of them have higher educations and also skills very useful in the Information Age to ISIS.
This World War 2 Waffen SS example sounds all very familiar when young Europeans saw almost 10 years of the Depression before 1939. Their experience was not the same as Canadian youth in that time who could join the Canadian military after war was declared on Germany and contribute to a Nazi defeat. Many of the young men who went to war in Canada had also undergone or were brought up through ten lost years of economic depression.
In Europe the youth could only cooperate with the Nazi conquers if they were to have any kind of life in the Nazi New Order or at least that’s what they thought. Resistance seemed futile because the Nazis were so confident and strong by 1940.
We see the atrocities and beheadings of ISIS as they try to cut a Calif out of Iraq and Syria. In order to do the wicked things that ISIS does you must always be right and without doubt of any kind. The Nazis had a similar mentality.
You have to be morally numb to kill civilians who cannot prove they are Muslims or create refugees on a huge scale to build your new state on tension and anxiety. ISIS adherents must suspend their moral compass to build a state capable of withstanding the influences of the West and its leader, The United States, their Great Satan upon which they can pile all their angst and vitriol.
That is the anomie displayed by North Americans and Europeans who join ISIS. This force can justify any excess as it makes its point. It is kind of logical madness where might is always right and any other view is sufficient reason to kill. Adherents can behead journalists on TV and film their filling of mass graves with victims.
Compassion is suspended and brains are turned off. However when this kind of mentality is disciplined it can be a formidable force to stop. The SS was exactly like this in World War 2 as our troops found out in the 1943 Italian Campaign and after D-Day in Normandy.
The focus is on being superior in all things, being so radical that moral judgement is suspended indefinitely. It is unleashed disciplined terror with no appeal to any reason or justice. It is the new fascism and it requires the same answer we gave to the Nazis 75 years ago.
There is one problem however. The moral compass of the West is not clean or without blemish. This week a report was released that has the potential to fuel ISIS recruitment and can be used to justify the current ISIS activities. In short the propaganda war can now easily turn on the West and particularly the United States.
It seems that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) clearly used torture of the most heinous kind to extract information from alleged terror suspects after 9/11. The order to do this ultimately came from President George W. Bush and others in his administration. This damning report tells that no really useful information was obtained from these torture sessions and how the information was obtained through torture was sanitized for White House decision making.
Now we face a propaganda war on top of the hot war going on in Iraq and Syria. ISIS is a fascist organization and it feeds off propaganda such as using our turned young people to denounce their own Western values. Now the CIA will be shown as an arm of the Great Satan and ISIS will justify their harsh regime with that as a backdrop.
Bombing ISIS armies is only one step to destroying this force. Fighting them on the ground through second parties will also have no real effect because they are well motivated, ruthless true believers and without any normal standards of restraint.
© Copyright 2014, Tom Thorne, All Rights Reserved
