Is Daesh fascist?

The shifting sands of Western opinion on Syria are as changeable as the seasons or the fashion industry’s opinion of what is the ‘new black’.

Two years ago, our government wanted to bomb the Syrian government into submission – then the tide turned last summer and there were great calls to take in refugees – and now, since the events in Paris, it has been decided we must bomb Daesh – there is little talk of helping refugees any more.

Last night, Hilary Benn portrayed the fight against Daesh as an anti-fascist struggle, invoking memories of the International Brigades as he did so.

Between 1936 and 1940, thousands of British anti-fascists, including many socialists and, famously, George Orwell, heroically took themselves off to Spain to fight Franco and defend the democratically elected government against his attacks.

At the time, a huge debate raged within Britain about what to do about the Nazis. The socialists knew what to do – fight, and did so in Cable Street – whereas the Tories were, with one very notable exception, in favour of appeasing them, or even joining them.

Socialists describe fascism as an all-out attack on working class organisation supported by big business but with a support-base drawn from small businesspeople squeezed by a specific crisis of capitalism.

All known fascist movements have specifically attempted – successfully or otherwise – to ban or oppose trade unionism. Banning trade unions was the very first thing Hitler did when he came to power. Only through doing could he hope to take the drastic steps necessary to impose his order on Germany – and then the world. Mussolini and Franco did the same in slightly different ways. Without trade unions, you can abolish free speech, freedom of assembly, or any kind of freedom.

Fascism does not always specifically target one particular community – in the UK today, fascists hate Muslims; in Germany, of course, it was the Jews; Mussolini took no real interest in the Jews until it became a way to please his ally, Hitler. The Italian fascists’ genocide was delivered in what is now Ethiopia. Fascists need a scapegoat to unite people against in order to get everyone to agree to dictatorial powers to deal with the “menace” posed.

The response to fascism it to fight it wherever it is to be found – in the streets, in meeting halls and, yes, on the internet. The first step is to be prepared to call a fascist a fascist – not a “member of the far right” or a “Nationalist”. Only by exposing fascists as such can they be separated and isolated from the rest of society – only by defining fascists as such can a campaign be fought to unite the community against them. Why is this? Because fascists seek to take all of our freedoms away – whether it is religious freedom, the right to play darts in the pub, to join a trade union or to attend a meeting of the local crysanthemum-growers society or chess club. But if members of these groups don’t recognise fascists as fascists, they might not unite against them.

Fascists seek to divide us one from the other on the basis of skin colour, religion, nationality, sexuality, political persuasion and gender, among other things. Only by doing so successfully by peddling prejudice and blaming specific groups for the ills and woes of capitalism.

Fascists necessarily reject religion, and this is what separates them from extreme religious zealots such as Daesh. Daesh is hate-filled violent, murderous, intolerant, sexist, homophobic and possibly seems even worse than some forms of fascism in some respects to some people, but in essence it is a quasi-religious or pseudo-religious movement which lacks the social base of fascism and does not see itself specifically as a solution for capitalism based upon smashing working-class organisation.

Others have been called fascist – including the PLO, Israel and Ken Livingstone – but calling something fascist, however horrible it is or may seem to some, does not make it so. Misnaming something “fascist” undermines the fight against fascism and can be used – as we have seen int he student movement recently – as an excuse to deny platforms to controversial speakers.

We should not, therefore, draw lessons from previous anti-fascist struggles when asking ourselves how to fight Daesh. We should not be suggesting, for instance, that the International Brigades should be formed and that socialists and other anti-fascists should be heading to Iraq and Syria to join the “70,000” ground troops we are being told want to fight Daesh.

What we should be doing is fighting their lies and their propaganda and helping and listening to refugees about the countries they have fled. People in bombed cities often take sides against the people that are bombing them – especially if they lose loved ones in the rubble. Bombing is not a way to unite people against Daesh. Doing that will involve the building of genuine social movements across the Middle East to challenge their own governments and create a feeling that the problems affecting people can be solved by the people themselves – not by Western bombs and not by idealogues armed with Kalashnikovs.