A vital region aflame and on the march. Unresolved disputes over old imperial boundaries breeding terrible violence. A fanatical belief system stitched together from religious traditions, romantic cults of violence, and modern ideologies, then fanned by fire-breathing, charismatic leaders and propped up by timid plutocrats terrified of the masses. Genuinely well-intentioned progressives finding themselves the unwitting supporters of murderous fanatics. America and the Jews savagely attacked as the hated representatives of all that is wrong with the modern world.
No doubt about it, Europe was a frightening place in the 1930s and '40s.
From Fascism to Jihadism is a neat article. It draws some amazing similarities between pre-WWII Europe and the Middle East of today. He goes on to list them in detail. For example ...
Legitimate grievances left unanswered and protests deflected by cynical elites. John Maynard Keynes rightly predicted the disasters of the punitive peace of Versailles. The Russians and Slavs groaned first under the czars and then the commissars--and, boy, were they angry. Since the end of the Ottoman Empire, the people of the Middle East have largely been ruled by a succession of autocrats who have delivered neither freedom nor prosperity (the Gulf petrocracy aside) and have worked mightily to deflect their peoples' understandable rage elsewhere. The Palestinians and their interests have been cynically neglected by the Arab states, steadily sold out by their leaders, and treated unjustly by Israel.
His conclusion is almost predictable.
So how can understanding these parallels help us forge a successful policy in the Middle East? To begin with, while it is episodes of terror that have focused our attention on jihadism, it is not an episodic phenomenon. The Arab Middle East has brought forth a movement whose full-fledged worldview seeks the destruction of Western society, beginning with its foremost representative in the Middle East. The fact that this worldview draws much of its rhetoric and symbolism from a hallowed religious tradition--and that it has numerous points of contact with legitimate concerns and grievances--is what makes it more than mere crime and gives it traction, and even suasion, in broader communities (emphasis added).
It's a very good article. I certainly hadn't thought of the similarities between these time periods. I wonder how often this has happened in history?