Here's the last omake I had in reserve in my boxes. I've finally decided to post it. It's called 'Islamo-communism: a Cold War concept to win the cultural battle' and I hope you enjoy it as much as the previous ones.
The post-World War II wars of decolonization were not just a fertile period for radical left-wing concepts, with the return to favor of the concept of imperialism. In the wake of these wars, and even more so with the Algerian wars, concepts from the other side of the political spectrum emerged, the most important of which was Islamo-communism, so dear to the French far right.
Islamo-communism can be defined as a neologism referring to the supposed proximity between communist ideologies, personalities or parties and Muslim or even Islamist circles, with communists being the useful idiots of a Muslim aim to Islamize Europe or even the Western world. Before going any further, it's worth pointing out that this concept, even if it is right to emphasize the support given by Warsaw Pact forces to the Algerian FLN forces and then to its state (diplomatic, economic and military support), to make the Algerian struggle a prelude to the Islamization of Europe is totally false, since the FLN, in its discourse and structures (military, state and militant), is characterized by the most orthodox Marxism-Leninism, and makes no reference whatsoever to Islam as a political goal or mobilizing element of the Algerian masses.
From the point of view of the history of political ideas, this concept is in line with another polemical concept aimed at discrediting a political ideology by associating two figures that are repulsive to those who believe in the relevance of this concept: Judeo-Bolshevism. This conspiracy theory asserts that the Jews, behind or among the Bolsheviks, are the masterminds behind the Bolsheviks' seizure of power in October 1917 and the true leaders of the USSR; more broadly, it sees them as responsible for Marxism, as well as for the Communist movement in general. What's more, in addition to destroying Western civilization and values, this so-called movement also aims to destroy the French nation. Here, too, we find a conspiracy reading grid denouncing the announcement of two destructive political or cultural forces aiming to destroy Civilization and its values.
This concept also reflects the great fears of this political movement. Indeed, in their discourse and worldview, extreme right-wingers convey an organicist conception of the community they wish to constitute (whether based on ethnicity, nationality or race) or claim to want to reconstitute. Moreover, this organicism implies the rejection of all universalism in favor of "autophilia" (the valorization of the "us") and "alterophobia" (the fear of the "other", in this case the Arab, the Muslim or the Communist, assigned to an essentialized identity by a game of permutations between the ethnic and the cultural, generally the cultic). Right-wing extremists thus absolutize differences (between nations, races, individuals, cultures).
Having described the ideological roots of Islamo-communism, we can now turn to the history of this concept between 1944 and the present day. After the war, the extreme right remained marginal on the political scene. The existence of organizations returned at the end of the Algerian war in the 1960s with the OAS, Occident and then Ordre nouveau or the GUD, as we shall see later.
Although marginal on the scale of French society, this concept found fertile ground for its dissemination through three social groups: anti-communist Catholics, civil servants in the State apparatus and the Army.
For the first group, this can be explained by the fact that Catholic anti-communism is, in part, in line with the anti-communism of the Right, and is marked by a political conservatism haunted by the fear of collectivization, the annihilation of social hierarchies and the overthrow of the established order. But it is above all characterized by its refutation of Marxism and its radical atheism. As for Islamism, this rejection can be explained by religious and cultural reasons: the Catholic religion is the only true religion, and France and Europe have Catholic roots, so they must remain so, both as the majority religion and from a cultural point of view.
As for the second group, this takes the form of state anti-communism. Here, we're more concerned with the communist aspect of this notion. Indeed, the bipolar division of the world and the party's unwavering loyalty to the USSR earned it the epithet of "party in the pay of foreigners" from the 1920s onwards, leading to mistrust of the party and all the causes it supported - such as the Algerian people's struggle for national liberation, or those of other colonized peoples. Moreover, in the context of colonial wars, the vigor of communist actions led to a hardening of state anti-communism.
As for the last group, this took the form of anti-communism in the Army combined with a certain cultural hostility to Arab or Muslim culture. The start of the Cold War was marked in 1947 by the exclusion of the Communists from the government, where they had held positions related to national defense. With Indochina bogged down and the first Algerian war underway, the PCF sought to regain influence among the contingent. The party campaigned against a French army accused of being the servant of American imperialism in Europe and Asia. In return, the surveillance of communist organizations fueled obsidian sentiment within the armed forces. Moreover, military leaders were determined to combat both the enemy on their borders (mainly Germany and Austria, supported within the Warsaw Pact by the USSR and its Socialist bloc allies) and the enemy within (mainly the PCF), that fifth column likely to undermine the war effort at home. Begun during the Indochina War (1946-1954), this fight against Communist "subversion" also involved the implementation of a doctrine of counter-subversive warfare. This was developed during the first Algerian war, and was also based on anti-communism. Convinced that there was collusion between the PCF and the FLN, the army also intended to win the "revolutionary war" against global communism in Algeria. It should also be noted that anti-communism also developed in the cadres and lower echelons of the army serving in Algeria and in the decolonization conflicts confronting French soldiers with Muslim populations, and not only at the highest levels of the military hierarchy. During these harsh, asymmetrical confrontations, these soldiers and their commanders developed a strong cultural hostility to Islam, as for them it was a cultural marker of colonized populations who had forced them to stay away from home in difficult conditions (poor hygiene, climate subject to wide temperature variations, death likely to occur at any moment in guerrilla warfare, etc.).
It is also important to note that these groups are not exclusive, and that certain individuals adhering to this analytical grid may be at the intersection of the aforementioned groups: for example, an individual who is both an executive in the French army and a supporter of Catholic anti-communism.
Nevertheless, these groups were not the inventors of this ideological concept, since it was the GRECE that theorized it and articulated it with the elements seen above. Created in 1968, GRECE (Groupement de recherches et d'études pour la civilisation européenne) is a "think tank with an intellectual vocation" seeking to revive far-right political thought following the discrediting of this political current in the aftermath of the Second World War. This think tank asserts that the essential struggle of the New Right must be above all metapolitical. It therefore claims to be a "right-wing Gramscism", to "act in the ideological and cultural field, prior to the seizure of effective (political) power. Indeed, according to the concept of the "cultural battle" developed by the Italian communist thinker Antonio Gramsci, political struggles are largely played out in the mind, on the "cultural front", that of ideology, and the conquest of power presupposes that of public opinion: Thus, the role of political ideas such as Islamo-communism is to win cultural hegemony by turning common sense into far-right common sense - the meaning and purpose of cultural hegemony, no matter which political current takes up this method of conquering power - by mobilizing political ideas to influence public opinion in the direction of far-right discourse, ultimately to win political power through an electoral or other process.
Nevertheless, this ideological concept would be much less easily disseminated without the material supports needed for mass distribution, such as newspapers and other print media. In the case in point, these media for disseminating the concept take the form of the following far-right newspapers: Défense de l'Occident (1952-1982), Jeune Nation (1959), Minute (1962- 1983), Europe-Action (1963-1967), Militant (1967).
In view of this description of the extreme right's revival of Gramscian concepts, it would be wrong to consider that the political battle is merely a matter of ideas circulating in the public arena, since Gramsci linked this to actions on the ground, such as strikes and social struggles. For the "New Right", this will take the form of a set of organizations tasked with occupying the field against their left-wing or far-left counterparts, by means of hard-hitting actions (intimidation of left-wing activists, political violence, symbolic gestures, political graffiti, etc.) or counter-demonstrations. Among the multitude of organizations created during the first Algerian war, the most important in terms of militant numbers and political actions were the following: Association Action doctrinale et politique (1958-1965); Occident (1964-1968); Front Algérie française (1960); Front national pour l'Algérie française (1960).
In this way, the concept of Islamo-communism, although not based on solid foundations, will have fulfilled its role as a mobilizing concept in the cultural battle, since in the years to come, even if its fortunes will vary, it will have contributed to the resurgence of an extreme right that is no longer just a disparate collection of groupuscules, but a political force to be reckoned with in the political field of the Cold War in the decades to come.
Excerpts from "Historical Dictionnary of the french Far-right from 1944 to Today" by Jeanne Boulanger (1985)
