The New Marxism

Fareed Zarakia was on the Daily Show last night talking about the London bombings. One comment he made got me to thinking. He was talking about the disaffected youth being attracted to al Qaida and mentioned that not so long ago they would have been attracted to Marxism.

There are several parallels that can be made between Marxism and the militant version of Islam sometimes called islamofascism.

A big one is their total disregard for innocent life. To their adherents, both movements are more important than any individual's life or even any group of individuals.

Both want to set up a utopia with a dictatorial central government. Both believe that this must be a violent revolution vs the French Revolution.

Both attract disaffected young men from middle class families in industrialized nations. Much has been made of the nationalities of the 9/11 hijackers but most of them grew up in Europe. The number of terrorists with connections to Britain is surprising. More big-name bombers and attempted bombers are British than Saudi.

Both see their cause as inevitable.

Both movements intend to make mainstream religions subservient. Under Marxism, religion is discouraged. Under islamofascism, only the Suni version of Islam is allowed.

Both movements have charismatic but sociopathic leaders. Both Che and bin Laden are immortalized on t-shirts.

When implemented, neither movement has been the utopia that was promised. I think that the USSR was the world's longest-lived communist country and it finally fell apart from economic stress. The Taliban embodies islamofascism and Afghanistan was a wretched place under the Taliban.

Both movements see the combination of democracy and free market embodied by the US as weak and decadent.

There are significant differences in content between the two movements. Marxism is a political movement with atheism as its official religion while Islamofascism is a religious movement with the goal of recreating the Caliphate to handle politics.

On the surface the two are distinct. Marxism is open to all but Islamofascism is only open to Muslims. This difference vanishes when you take conversion into account. For example, Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was a convert.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, Marxism has declined. Many who would have been Marxists are affiliated with the Greens or various anarchist groups, or both. While they believe in violence, they tend to smash windows and burn buildings under construction and they are not part of an actual armed revolution.

It is likely that there will always be disaffected youths and that in wealthy nations, there will be enough to take up the cause of violent revolution. When viewed in this light, there can be no resolution with the terrorists. They are not as interested in building something new as with tearing down the old.