I double dare you, no I triple dare you, to find ANY intelligent educated source that says these two groups are "exactly" alike. Can't wait to see that link
I was tired and going for impact. They are certainly "alike" as I said, because they are ideologically driven terrorists, believing in the eternal return and the unending struggle, yada yada.
If I had a lot of time I probably could make the case they're alike enough that careless usage of "exactly" would be allowable. They are reflections of each other - they "mirror'.
"A dare, a triple dare." This source certainly sees great commonality in their roots. I've bolded a pertinent bit:
Conversation with Aziz Al-Azmeh on Islamism and Modernism Part I
iran-bulletin.org
Aziz Al-Azmeh*, although he does not make an explicit connection between al Qaeda and Baathism, I'm fairly sure would agree with me as saying they're "alike." In an interview with Iran Bulletin he notes:
Let me finally assert that modernism as I have described it is by no means an even process; historical movements and trends never are. It is uneven, varying in amplitude and form with time, place, class, and so forth. So the overall global trend is at once combined and uneven.
And it was not uniform or fully accomplished, of course, even in Europe itself, where modernity has a history as chequered and uneven as over there where we come from; history knows no consummate conditions. One of the manifestations of this unevenness, East and West, is anti-modernism, which will ultimately take us to Islamism.
Beginning in provincial anti-capitalism in the late 18th century (most spectacularly Hamann and his enormous influence and analogues, for instance), and in Aristocratic-conservative and often (but not necessarily) Catholic anti-Jacobinism (de Maistre, Burke), this developed over the course of the 19th century in terms of bourgeois and occasionally royalist movements banding together ideologically against the spectre announced by Marx and Engels in 1848.
Conservative ideologies, glorifying Culture, tradition, social instinct, hierarchy, and decrying the deleterious effects of French ideas of progress, historicity, reason, and in certain forms, democracy or even revolution. This was a bloody history, which among other things caused highly authoritarian rulers to legislate for (almost) universal suffrage (Gladstone and Bismarck, for instance).
But there was a tremendous ideological armature correlative with this conservatism, and this can be very broadly characterised as Romanticism - intended here not as a sickly or otherwise fiery poetical sensibility, but in the technical sense: this Romanticism gives Culture premium over history, has an organismic and vitalist conception of society in that it conceives societies as individuals by analogy with organic beings, as beings essentially the same, which do not so much change over time as weaken and strengthen, or atrophy and die, and which react to matters culturally imported as a body reacts to the intrusion of a parasite.
This Romanticism therefore conceives history as cyclical, and of order - strength and health - as abidance with the conditions of permanence (Culture, Shari`a, dharma in India). Political action is therefore one of RESTORATION, and locates assumptions about reason in history in the realm snares of outsiders, for what is of value is social instinct, individual and independent of reason.
As for the form of state its takes as the paradigm, it is not only the anti-modernist one based on bringing social instinct and state form into correspondence (hence an Islamic state, or an authentically German Reich, or an ancestrally legitimate French monarchy -- or, today with Le Pen, authentically French republic replete with monarchical and Catholic associations and resonances), but also a highly Napoleonic state which, by totalitarian social engineering would coerce society out of its alienation from its past, and re-make it what it once way (incidentally, Sudan has a ministry of social engineering).
Now these currents, through the globalization from the nineteenth century of ideological modules of nationality, notions of the People, through novel forms of writing and communication, no less than through new educational systems and the new intelligentsia and state-promoted political discourses, became, along with notions of progress and of democracy, socialism, and others, the staples of public discourse and the necessary correlatives of political and social action world-wide, including the Arab world. Religious discourses were, as I have said , marginalized, but NOT engaged in any systemic or systematic manner. It is not surprising, therefore, that these Islamic anti-modernists should be characterised as modern, and in a sense even modernist in some of their positions.
Both Ali Shariati and Sayyid Qutb were great admirers of Alexis Carrel - a famous eugenicist of the 1920s, cultural advisor to the Marechal Petain, who railed against degeneration within, and advocated the cause of a small saviour minority which will bring health to the body of society diseased by degeneration.
You would do well to read all three parts of the interview very carefully - URL:
iran-bulletin.org
Al-Azmeh was discussing the islamist fundamentalist development but it basically differs only in "vocabulary" from movements like Baathism
Baathism, al Qaeda, and the Komheneist terrorists of various stripes all are part of the European terrorist tradition and derive their methodology from fascism and leninism, indeed are far more of that tradition than they are of the Muslim tradition.
L and R Borouman in the following article make this case regarding the Iranian terrorist regime and it's not difficult to see great similarities with the Iraq Baathist regime and al Qaeda
journalofdemocracy.org
The whole ideological fabric appears to be wo-
ven from appeals to tradition, ethnicity, and historical grievances both
old and new, along with a powerful set of religious-sounding references
to infidels, idolaters, crusaders, martyrs, holy wars, sacred
soil, enemies of Islam, the party of God, and the great Satan.
But this religious vocabulary hides violent Islamism s true nature as
a modern totalitarian challenge to both traditional Islam and modern de-
mocracy. If terrorism is truly as close to the core of Islamic belief as both
the Islamists and many of their enemies claim, why does international
Islamist terrorism date only to 1979?
...
Like both of his preceptors, Qutb lacked traditional theological train-
ing. A graduate of the state teacher s college, in 1948 he went to study
education in the United States. Once an Egyptian nationalist, he joined
the Muslim Brothers soon after returning home in 1950. Qutb s brand
of Islamism was informed by his knowledge of both the Marxist and fas-
cist critiques of modern capitalism and representative democracy. 10 He
called for a monolithic state ruled by a single party of Islamic rebirth.
Like Mawdudi and various Western totalitarians, he identified his own
society ( in his case, contemporary Muslim polities) as among the enemies
that a virtuous, ideologically self-conscious, vanguard minority would
have to fight by any means necessary, including violent revolution, so
that a new and perfectly just society might arise. His ideal society was a
classless one where the selfish individual of liberal democracies would
be banished and the exploitation of man by man would be abolished. .
God alone would govern it through the implementation of Islamic law
( shari a) . This was Leninism in Islamist dress.
...
Khomeini became a major figure in the history of Islamist terrorism
because he was the first truly eminent religious figure to lend it his
authority. For despite all its influence on the young, Islamism before
the Iranian Revolution was a marginal heterodoxy. Qutb and Mawdudi
were theological dabblers whom Sunni scholars had refuted and dis-
missed. Even the Muslim Brothers had officially rejected Qutb s ideas.
As an established clerical scholar, Khomeini gave modern Islamist to-
talitarianism a religious respectability that it had sorely lacked. 5
5 Page 6 7
Journal of Democracy 10
Once in power, the onetime opponent of land reform and women s
suffrage became a progressivist, launching a massive program of na--
tionalization and expropriation and recruiting women for campaigns of
revolutionary propaganda and mobilization. The Leninist characteristics
of his rule his policy of terror, his revolutionary tribunals and militias,
his administrative purges, his cultural revolution, and his accommodat-
ing attitude toward the USSR alienated the majority of his fellow clerics
but also gained him the active support of the Moscow-aligned Iranian
Communist Party, which from 1979 to 1983 put itself at the service of
the new theocracy.
Khomeini s revolution was not an exclusively Shi ite phenomenon.
Not accidentally, one of the first foreign visitors who showed up to con-
gratulate him was the Sunni Islamist Mawdudi; before long, Qutb s face
was on an Iranian postage stamp. Khomeini s successor, Ali Khamenei,
translated Qutb into Persian. 14 Khomeini s own interest in creating an
Islamist International it would later be known by the hijacked Koranic
term Hezbollah ( party of God ) was apparent as early as August 1979.
The Islamist Comintern
As these ties suggest, Islamism is a self-consciously pan-Muslim phe-
nomenon. It is a waste of time and effort to try to distinguish Islamist terror
groups from one another according to their alleged differences along a
series of traditional religious, ethnic, or political divides ( Shi ite versus
Sunni, Persian versus Arab, and so on) . The reason is simple: In the eyes
of the Islamist groups themselves, their common effort to strike at the West
while seizing control of the Muslim world is immeasurably more impor-
tant than whatever might be seen as dividing them from one another. . The Lebanese-based, Iranian-supported Hezbollah is a case in point.
In a more popular venue, The NY Review of Books, Ian Buruma, writes in a review of a book, much of which he doesn't agree with,
There is, however, much to admire in Berman's book too. As a general analysis of the various enemies of liberalism, and what ties them together, it is superb. All?Nazis, Islamists, Bolsheviks, Fascists, and so on?are linked by Berman to the "ur-myth" of the fall of Babylon. The decadent city-dwellers of Babylon, corrupted by luxury and poisoned by greed, infect the people of God with their wicked ways, even as the forces of Satan threaten the good people from afar. The people of God will only be freed from these abominations after a massive war of Armageddon, in which the city slickers and Satanic forces will be exterminated. A pure new world will rise from the burning ruins and "the people of God will live in purity, submissive to God."
As Berman says:
["]There was always a people of God, whose peaceful and wholesome life had been undermined. They were the proletariat or the Russian masses (for the Bolsheviks and Stalinists); or the children of the Roman wolf (for Mussolini's Fascists); or the Spanish Catholics and the Warriors of Christ the King (for Franco's Phalange); or the Aryan race (for the Nazis).["]
And there were always rootless cosmopolitans?Jews, Freemasons, Chinese, bourgeois capitalists, Zionists, Crusaders, homosexuals, and whatnot ?to destroy root and branch. The cult of death has always been at war with the desire for the good life; unity, purity, and submission always were the promised goals of zealots, once the wicked city was razed. And pockets of liberty in the world were always vulnerable to less tolerant predators.
The cult of death is an important feature of all wars against liberalism. Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian Islamist, who was hanged in 1966 in Cairo for sedition, once wrote that the Koran pointed to a "contemptible characteristic of the Jews; their craven desire to live, no matter at what price and regardless of quality, honor and dignity." Reading this sentence in Berman's book, I was reminded of the Taliban warrior who told a British newspaper reporter that the Americans would never succeed in defeating the Taliban, because the latter love death while the Americans love Pepsi Cola. Berman quotes the famous battle cry of one of Franco's generals in the Spanish Civil War: "¡Viva la Muerte!" Point taken.[2]
Berman's most valuable contribution is his insistence that Islamism and other extreme forms of anti-liberalism are by no means exotic, or part of some peculiar clash of civilizations. The roots of non-Western extremism can often be traced to the West itself. One irony Berman does not point out, in this regard, is that some of his new allies on the American right, those of a radical Christian persuasion, also subscribe to visions of Babylonian decadence and a war of Armageddon. Still, I suppose that in the face of a common enemy, one cannot always be too picky about one's friends.
Something Japanese ultranationalists in the 1930s, Pan-Arabists, Baathists, Islamists, Indian fascists, Russian Slavophiles, and other enemies of liberalism have in common is a fatal weakness for illiberal German ideas on race and nation. The founder of the Pan-Arab movement after World War I, Sati al-Husri, was an avid reader of the Romantic German nationalist Fichte. An early Baathist, Sami al-Jundi, said:
We were racists, admiring Nazism, reading its books and the source of its thought, particularly Nietzsche ...Fichte, and [Houston Stewart] Chamberlain's Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, which revolves on race.
Jalal Al-e Ahmad, an influential Iranian radical intellectual in the 1960s, who coined the phrase "Westoxification," was a translator of Ernst Jünger, not a racist, but certainly not a liberal.
Baathism, like pre-war Japanese militarism, or even extreme forms of Hindu nationalism, borrowed a great deal from European fascism and national socialism. Like Marxism, that other great Western export to the postcolonial world, variations of fascism were attractive because they were modern, while at the same time offering millenarian visions to essentially religious people who wished to reject, or at least transform, their traditional religions. Fascism, communism, and theocracy promise totality?states or communities where the people stand as a monolithic mass behind their Führer, emperor, or god.
nybooks.com
I disagree with Buruma where he calls fascism "modern." I expect "comtemporary" would be better - there is little of modernity about fascism, marxism, etc.
But to get back to what started this post, yes I think I could make the case that Baathism and al Qaeda are very much alike if not exactly alike. They'll have no problems making a marriage of convenience - my suspicion is they consummated it quite a while ago when the Hussein regime assisted aQ in its poisons research in Afghanistan.
________________________________________________
*An "intelligent, educated source":
Professor Aziz Al-Azmeh was born in Syria, a country to which he very much belongs. He is an Arab intellectual with academic leanings.
He was once Chairman of the Arab Human Rights Organization (UK branch) and a member of the Standing Committee of the Arab Communities Conference in the UK.
He is the author of:
In Arabic:
* Historical Writing and Historical Knowledge, Arabs and Barbarians,
* "Heritage" as Power and History, Secularism,
* Religion and Society in Contemporary Arab Life.
In English:
* Ibn Khaldun in Modern Scholarship,
* Ibn Khaldun: An Essay,
* Arabic Thought and Islamic Societies,
* Islams and Modernities,
* Muslim Kingship: Power and the Sacred in Muslim, Christian, and Pagan Polities. (Due out in July, I. B. Tauris, London)
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