The successful Hitler

Andrew Bostom has drawn my attention to my formulation that Muhammad was a successful Hitler, an idea that, in fact, came to me as I was reading William Muir’s The Life of Mohamet, which Dr. Bostom sent me in 2004.

The idea is quite simple. It’s that Muhammad created a supremacist hate movement of world conquest that lasted, that is with us permanently, that is still effective, that has a billion followers, that keeps attracting more people to it, and that keeps getting non-followers of it (like Dinesh D’Souza) eagerly to cringe and surrender to it, while Hitler’s supremacist hate movement of world conquest burned itself out and was destroyed in 12 years, leaving its home country and capital a smoking ruin. Why the difference? Because Muhammad worked out a highly flexible and therefore sustainable ideology and program of subversion, conquest, and domination (as well as a sustainable way of life), while Hitler’s ideology and program had no internal brakes. It was pedal to the metal, aiming at the instant and total destruction of other countries and of Western civilization as a whole, and thus making it necessary for other countries utterly to destroy Hitlerism

Dr. Bostom has recently researched the deep connections between Islam and Nazism. His underlying point, which I will have more to say about later, is that, far from today’s radical Islam being some offshoot of Nazism and Fascism, as the neocons suggest with their irresponsible and mind-destroying phrase “Islamo-fascism,” Nazism can reasonably be seen as a short-lived, unsuccessful version of Islam. Not that Nazism developed out of Islam, but that it had profound similarities to Islam, especially with regard to its stand toward the Jews. The Nazi leaders, as well as Nazi intellectuals such as the SS theoretician and exterminationist propagandist Johannes von Leers (who advocated the elimination of every Jew on earth), became aware of their common ground with Islam and explored it in depth, in addition to forming political alliances with Islam. Indeed, von Leers came to believe that Islam was superior to Nazism, and converted to Islam after the war.

Below are past discussions of the “successful Hitler” at VFR.

Who was Muhammad? (Feb 2005)

Who was Muhammad? As I continue to read in William Muir’s classic biography, The Life of Mahomet, an answer comes to me: he was a successful Hitler.

The cover of Islamikaze (August 2005)

… Worse, this death cult is not an extreme or atypical outgrowth of Islam, as is believed by so many naive people who refuse to acquaint themselves with the most rudimentary truths about the “religion of peace.” The same corrosive hatred that emanates from the Palestinians, the same vindictive lust to dehumanize and torture the infidel that is shown by the terrorists and kidnappers in Iraq, is found on almost every page of the “holy” Koran. Muhammad, the teacher and model for all Moslems, was, quite simply, the greatest hater in history. As I’ve said before, the key to understanding him is that he was a successful Hitler. Hitler killed too many people too fast, and so was defeated and destroyed in 12 years. Like the Nazis, Muhammad and his successors embarked on a program of dehumanization and genocide, but they pursued it gradually and intermittently instead of all at once, and so the movement they created is still going strong after 1400 years. What a curse—what a curse on the world. Yet it is our inescapable fate to deal with this curse—to understand it and speak the truth about it, to combat it and drive it back, to put it in a situation where it cannot harm us, and never to let down our guard again.

The jihadist mentality (August 2005)

I’ve been looking at Andy Bostom’s forthcoming book, Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims, a collection of primary and secondary sources about jihad, many of them appearing in English—and in many cases in any Western language—for the first time. The sources leave no doubt about the military, conquering, enslaving character of the jihad to which Muslims are called, and about its centrality in Islam. As Ibn Warraq writes in the Forward [readable online], it is remarkable and instructive that these important writings were not brought to light by any of the renowned doyens of Islam scholarship we’re always hearing about, but by a self-taught amateur in the field whose real profession is as a research medical doctor.

Here are two e-mails I wrote to Dr. Bostom last night about the book.

Andy,

The quote of the 10th century Maliki [one of the four schools of medieval Islamic scholarship] jurist on p. 27 of your book had me laughing out loud in amazement. The sheer unembarrassed baldness in the way he says,

“We Malikis maintain that it is preferable not to begin hostilities with the enemy before having invited the latter to embrace the religion of Allah…. They have the alternative of either converting to Islam or paying the poll tax, short of which war will be declared against them.”

I’m bowled over by his flat unquestioned assumption that everyone must yield to us, or we make war on them. It is literally a war against the whole world. And where does this idea come from? It comes from the “M” man himself. The whole religion is the projection of the personality of that one man, of his will to power, his sense that he was God’s Prophet, and that everyone must yield to him or die. That man created a nation of one billion clones of himself. That’s what we’re facing. That’s why I say that the key to understanding Muhammad is that he was a successful Hitler.

This psychological formation of theirs, their attitude of superiority, their assumption that they are endowed by their Creator with absolute rights over all humanity, is engrained in the Muslims’ essence, in the character of every Muslim, whether it is conscious or not.

This is why I believe it is ultimately hopeless to get the Muslims to speak the truth critically about Islam, as several writers on our side hope. It’s like fighting the tide. You can’t do it. The ONLY thing is for us to remove them physically from the Dar al-Harb or get them to leave voluntarily….

D’Souza calls for the silencing of Islam critics (Jan 2007)

Dear Readers, I am truly sorry to keep emphasizing the Islam issue at this site far out of proportion to other pressing issues that also deserve to be covered, but the fact is that the most amazing and most appalling things keep happening on that front and compel me to put other things aside and comment on them. Thus I just found out, at Jihad Watch, that Dinesh D’Souza writes this in his book:

In order to build alliances with traditional Muslims, the right must take three critical steps. First, stop attacking Islam. Conservatives have to cease blaming Islam for the behavior of the radical Muslims. Recently the right has produced a spate of Islamophobic tracts with titles like Islam Unveiled, Sword of the Prophet, and The Myth of Islamic Tolerance. There is probably no better way to repel traditional Muslims, and push them into the radical camp, than to attack their religion and their prophet.

Those are two books by Robert Spencer and one by Serge Trifkovic, leading Islam critics in this country who are speaking the truth about Islam in the midst of an ocean of lies. And D’Souza wants them to shut up. Specifically, he wants them to stop saying that Islam is the problem, that Islam is the cause of Islamic extremism. He wants them to adopt, as he has done, some non-Islam theory of Islamic extremism, he wants them to say that Islamic extremism is caused by Western prosperity, or Western racism, or Western alienation, or Western imperialism, or American friendship with Israel, and, once Spencer and Trifkovic have surgically removed Islamic extremism from Islam, once they’ve lobotomized themselves, then they will become members of the respectable ecumenic mainstream which will proceed to make friends with Islam.

He wants them to lie about Islam, like himself, or to be silent.

Of course it isn’t just Spencer and Trifkovic who must shut up. It’s Bat Ye’or, it’s Andrew Bostom, it’s Diana West, it’s Hugh Fitzgerald, it’s the Norwegian writer Fjordman, it’s a handful of conservative websites, including this one, including FrontPage Magazine, including, even, last November, the American Thuggee, where the truth about Islam is spoken. This is the tiny band of voices in the wilderness that D’Souza wants to silence.

Now think how amazing this is. Has it ever happened in this country—I’m not talking about some totalitarian country but America—has it ever happened that a prominent “intellectual” called on leading writers on a subject of major importance to stop writing what they’re writing, because it would “offend” someone? No, this has never happened before.* It has never happened before, because it’s only in response to Mohammedanism that Westerners adopt the posture of pre-emptive surrender, which Bat Ye’or calls mental dhimmitude. Of all the social, ethnic, religious, political movements in the world, only Islam has the ability to evoke this eagerly cringing attitude, only Islam has this faculty of inducing people to surrender psychologically to it even before it has any actual power over them. (See further discussion of this point below.)

Truly, Muhammad was one of the great geniuses of history, a successful Hitler as I have said, to keep getting people, even fourteen centuries after his death, voluntarily to embrace his program of self-abnegation, the willing surrender of their mind and identity….

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 26, 2008 12:05 PM | Send