Two Fascists Have I?

CAIRO -- Two candidates claim spots in a June runoff as the country awaits official results of its first free, multi-party presidential election.

Mohammed Morsy, whose Muslim Brotherhood controls parliament, and Ahmed Shafiq, the ousted regime's last prime minister, appear to have won voting on Wednesday and Thursday here.

Liberal Egyptians and largely youthful revolutionaries who helped to bring down Hosni Mubarak last year howled with dismay and fear over the apparent outcome. . . .

Liberal activists say Shafiq and Morsy represent a choice of "military fascism and religious fascism." (“Egyptian military, Islamists claim slots in runoff”)

When liberals, even liberal Egyptians, use the word “fascism,” they invariably have no clearly defined meaning in mind, beyond that a government has made something illegal that liberals want to do. I don’t think Mubarak was actually a fascist in the correct usage of the term, and I don’t know that if the military prevails in Egypt whether they will be fascist, either.

For what tiny insight I have into Egyptian election politics, my money’s on the Brotherhood.  But if there’s any circumstance that can make military fascism the preferred choice for a society, it’s the prospect of Islamic fascism. I’m no expert on the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, but I do know that its women weren’t required to veil, it was capable of maintaining a peace treaty with Israel, and even though the survival odds for a Coptic Christian were lower than they should have been, they’ve all but vanished since the Brothers started taking over.

I also know that Islamic jihadism is the only contemporary ideology on Earth that inspires atrocities again and again that, when one makes a direct comparison with the Third Reich, forces the conclusion that, no, even the Nazis wouldn’t have done that.