Bloggers and others are fond of using the term 'Islamofascists' to refer to the other side in World War III (or IV, if you count the Cold War as World War III, as some do). A Google search just now gave me 599 hits for 'Islamofascist(s)' (singular and plural), many from familiar blogs, as against 17 for 'Islamonazi(s)', of which at least one disparaged the term as unfair to Muslims.
I would like to suggest that it is 'Islamofascist' that is unfair -- to Mussolini. No, I am not kidding, nor am I defending Mussolini, though "Eric A. Blair" and others will no doubt claim that I do. On a tyranny scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the worst, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, the Kims of North Korea, and one or two others may fight it out for the 10.0 spot, with the rest all scoring 9.7 or above.
Did I mention that the tyranny scale is exponential, like the Richter scale? A 10.0 is ten times more tyrannical than a 9.0, which is ten times worse than an 8.0, and so on.
Mussolini would certainly score somewhere in the 7.0 to 9.0 range, but that puts him way behind the Islamonazis, as I think we must call them. He seems to have been more an old-fashioned imperialistic conqueror, modeling himself on Napoleon, Julius Caesar, and Augustus Caesar -- though rather less successfully, of course. He certainly didn't mind if a lot of people, including civilians, were killed in his mostly-fruitless attempts at glorious conquest. But I don't recall that he ever aspired to wipe out any religious or ethnic group. Until he was overthrown by a coup and the Germans took direct control of Italy, it seems to have been one of the safer countries in occupied Europe for Jews -- not that that was saying much, of course. He may have been particularly callous when it came to civilian casualties in his conquest of Ethiopia, but I don't believe he ever aspired to depopulate the country or even exterminate any particular tribe, just to rule it with an iron fist, enslave its people, and plunder its natural wealth. If he hadn't allied himself with Hitler, no one would even put him in the Top 20 of 20th-Century tyrants.
Given their fondness for Mein Kampf and their often-expressed (and more often acted-on) hope to slaughter all the Jews in the Middle East and perhaps the world, I think 'Islamonazi' is the proper term for Arafat and his more enthusiastic followers. Don't you?
Posted by Dr. Weevil at May 05, 2002 09:49 PM