Breivik a Neo-Nazi?

Submitted by Edward Cline (United States), Jul 27, 2011 at 13:22

I'm firmly convinced that Breivik would have been an ardent Nazi in some notable capacity in Hitler's time, perhaps as a functionary in Hitler's outer cadre of supporters. Hitler also considered Muslims to be a useful tool to help exterminate Jews in Palestine, and approved the formation of brigades of Muslims in the Balkans (wearing German uniforms, but under the command of Germans). According to Breivik's manifesto, he also planned to enlist the aid of Muslim "extremists" to wage a war of terror on Europe. But if Hitler had won the war, I often wonder what he would have done about his Muslim "allies." After all, they weren't Aryan, and I don't think the compatibility of Nazi and Islamic ideologies would have mattered to him much. It wouldn't have stopped him from beginning to exterminate Muslims just as he'd helped to exterminate Jews, gypsies, and other "impure" folk. Islam would have been a rival ideology that also required unqualified submission to the state, in this case, a caliphate. The racial supremacist elements in both ideologies were strikingly similar, as well.

Again, I disagree that there can be any such thing as "moderate Islam," just as there could not have been any such thing as "moderate Nazism." Nazism and Islam are ideologies, not tamable or modifiable religions. The religious character of each ideology (and Nazism certainly had its religious character) is just frosting on the cake. Excise either ideology of its totalitarian tenets, demote Hitler and Mohammad from their iconic roles as exemplars of their faiths, and condemn the primitive and brutal practices that are sanctioned by the Koran and Mein Kampf, and nothing inimical to the West would be left of the ideologies. They would be emasculated of their strength and appeal to anyone wishing to lose himself in a collectivist identity. Each would require a new name. They would not be the Nazism and Islam that we know all too well.

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