'Anti-Americanism is a form of fascism'

14 October 2006

Narrow nationalism, hatred of Jews, and chauvinism find their meeting place in anti-Americanism, the acclaimed French thinker Bernard-Henri Lévy tells Allister Heath

Latter-day fascists are at it again, he argues. ‘Today, all of the forces over the world who share a narrow nationalism, chauvinism, hatred of cosmopolitanism, hatred of Judaism, and anti-Semitism, their flag is anti-American. America is a word used to convey all these hatreds together. So I’m anti-anti-American because if we let this anti-Americanism flow, it will spark off a disastrous fascism.’

The founders of the extremist Islamic movements shortly after the first world war, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, were all inspired by the same books on which the Nazis also drew, Lévy argues. ‘When you see the texts of the Baathist theoreticians or those of the Muslim Brotherhood, they have their inspiration in European theoreticians of the 1920s and 1930s, racists, eugenicists, and also anti-Americanism. They talk of democracy not being adapted to the Arab world, about democracy being a Western theory, a French one, an American one.’ To make their views more attractive, the early Islamic extremists shrouded themselves in the flag of anti-Americanism and quoted from German thinkers of the day, followers of Oswald Spengler and Martin Heidegger, he says.

‘When one says that Islamism â” I mean radical Islam, not Islam, of course, I make this clear â” when one says that radical Islam is a fascism, it’s not just a metaphor, it’s literally true. There is some transportation of concepts, some contamination of texts, a rhetorical and textual continuity between the old European fascism and the new Islamist fascism.’

The same is true of anti-Semitism, Lévy adds. ‘Islamist anti-Semitism does not come from another spring, another source, than European anti-Semitism.’ Both share the same influences, he argues. ‘The founders of Islamism read the European thinkers who said that democracy was not a universal value, that relativism was a law of humanity, that America was a nightmare, that the French Revolution was something that had to be forgotten, that the German theory of the good communitarian nation, well rooted in the earth of an organic society, is better than the abstract Franco-American definition of a community of citizens. They read, they adapted and they re-expressed.’