Oops! … they did it again!

Yes, the College Republicans, the eternally amusing national organization that launched the careers of Karl Rove, Grover Norquist and Rick Santorum, have once again put their collective feet in their collective mouths by aiming to piss off the liberals of academia, and instead igniting productive discussion about, and action against, social injustice among the campus left. The last time such a backfire occurred in a major way was in Autumn 2003, when the CRs organized a series of anti-affirmative action "bake sales" at college campuses nationwide, including the University of Washington, wherein cookies and such were sold for $1 for white people, 95 cents for Asian-Americans, 35 cents for Latinos, 30 cents for blacks--you get the idea. Rather than convincing the academy how terribly unfair affirmative action is for oppressed white male conservatives--the CRs' apparent goal--these events ignited discussion about affirmative action and white privilege among students nationwide in the Bush 43 era. The CRs' resulting feast of their own shoe leather was apparently free, if not quite tasty.

This year, during the week of Oct. 22-26, the CRs collaborated with noted "former leftist" and anti-academic loose cannon David Horowitz to bring us "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week," a program of propaganda staged at more than 100 American campuses, allegedly aimed at decrying the oppression of women under Islam and "the threat posed by the Islamic crusade against the West." At the UW, the CRs brought local talk-radio host (and also "former leftist") Michael Medved to speak on campus and also showed "Suicide Killers," a reportedly over-the-top film about allegedly Islamist suicide bombers.

The UW Muslim Student Association responded admirably to the UWCRs' affront with "Anti-Islamophobia and Racism Week," which consisted of a protest outside the Medved event and a four-person "Ask A Muslim" panel on campus the following week aimed at dispelling certain persistent myths about Islam. One key criticism of the premise of "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" leveled by the UW MSA and others was that it was grotesquely racist. That much is obvious and indisputable. It's also noteworthy that the CRs' latest campus campaign comes at a time when other nationally known conservative groups and individuals are engaging in a surge, so to speak, of the use of the curious term "Islamo-Fascism" in their public rhetoric, just as the Bushies begin to ratchet up their public obsession with bombing--er, ah, stopping Iran from getting the bomb.

Paul Krugman, in a particularly prescient New York Times column on Oct. 29, provided a few choice recent nuggets of such neocon froth as the following:

* Iran is the "main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11." --elder neo-con (and current Giuliani advisor) Norman Podhoretz

* If Hillary Clinton is elected, "I'm not sure we'll have the courage and the will and the resolve to fight the greatest threat this country's ever faced in Islamofascism." --GOP 2008 also-ran Mike Huckabee

* America is in a struggle against people who aim "to unite the world under a single jihadist Caliphate. To do that they must collapse freedom-loving nations. Like us." --Mitt Romney, in a recent campaign ad

Other such recent examples abound. Here's the thing: In all the dialogue I've witnessed regarding the specter of "Islamo-Fascism," one thing I've found disappointingly lacking from both sides of the debate--left and right--is a certain crucial aspect of the definition of the word "fascism," namely its economic aspect. Many have defined this as "the merger of state power and corporate power," a state of affairs promoted by none other than Mussolini himself, as well as certain more recent Western leaders who, interestingly enough, the College Republicans have supported with notable aplomb in recent years. One must wonder whether this important aspect of the meaning of the word "fascism" is part of what David Horowitz and the CRs are attempting to link with Islam in using the term "Islamo-Fascism."

That's highly unlikely, unless one believes that Horowitz and the CRs are well-versed enough in comparative religion and political science that they know something we don't know. Could it really be true that the Ummah is down with global corporate rule?

Indeed, the word "fascism"--never mind its latest absurd linguistic permutation--has all too often been subject to embarrassing abuse by ideological drama queens from both the right ("the Islamo-Fascists and their deadly fascistic ideology!") and the left ("Bush is the real fascist!"). In particular, while much of the rhetoric coming from the left that raises the specter of creeping fascism under the Bush administration has a basis in empirical observation (Bush's nationalist rhetoric, his surveillance programs, his use of torture, etc.), I've searched in vain in much recent leftist literature for explicit discussion of the role that corporate power has played in the concept, and the history, of fascism. (One noteworthy exception being Evergreen State College professor Alan Nasser's excellent essay "The Threat of US Fascism: An Historical Precedent," published last August by CommonDreams.org: see www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/02/2933/.)

The American left, both on and off campus, would do well to start using the crucial word "fascism" and its derivatives with more care, as well as invoke its mature meaning more often in our struggles against the Bush agenda.

So let's now pursue this potential dialogue that the College Republicans have so graciously if inadvertently provided us with. Let's talk about Islam--a fairly credible and peaceful faith, despite its Abrahamic origins and the ignorant distortions of the campus right. And, yes indeed, let's talk about fascism--that often-invoked, little-understood ideology with its crucial roots in the worship of corporate power. As we move creepingly closer towards the latter's unmasking in the USA, I can hardly think of a more worthy topic of profoundly public discussion.