William: Robert- I suppose it may be splitting hairs, but isn’t Israel about the Jewish faith? I mean it’s not like they’re all secular Jews – they’re linked by faith as much as bloodline.
Jews by blood but who have never been religious are not granted citizenship to Israel, although they are allowed to immigrate/reside there (green card equivalent).
RL: So Israel’s about the Jewish faith? “So what,” I would say. What does that have to do with anything?
William: Lindsay- I’m just saying it makes it not blatantly fash. Just kind of crypto-fash. There is a pretense not about race/bloodline.
OK, I can go along with that. I have always worried that these Lefties people calling Christian fundies Christo-fascists and the Islamists Islamofascists were going too far.
But in India, those Hindutvadis, well, they are pretty close to real deal fascism. They are not racist fascists. I suppose they are religious fascists. But the Hindutvadis are far more fascist than the Israelis or Islamists are.
There is a real question and a good debate going on regarding whether a religiously based fascism is even possible. But there was something resembling that in Croatia under World War 2. There was a racist-fascist (Nazi) regime called the Ustashe that killed Serbs, Jews, and, well, anyone who was not a Croat. However, a number of Serbs were given opportunity to convert to Catholicism and become in effect Serbs. The opportunity was given at gunpoint. It was covert or die, just like the Muslims did and sometimes still do. This would seem to be a Nazi-like regime that seemed to be based on religion at least in part.
There were also Chetniks roaming around in the mountains. These were Serbian Far Right guerrillas, often with a Serbian Orthodox priest traveling with them in the bands, who killed everyone who was not a Serb – Catholics, Muslims, etc. I believe they also fought against the Nazis though. The Chetniks would seem to be a sort of religiously-based racist fascism. There were also much more numerous Communist guerrillas roaming around the countryside at the same time, and they and the Chetniks did not have good relations.
Some Leftist theorists have recently been suggesting that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was actually fascist in a sense, and they laid out a theory on why that was. I am not sure if I bought it though.
