Spencer Case in The Philosophers’ Magazine – Jihadism: At Least as Bad as Nazism. Worth reading in full, but here’s a taster:
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “The Nazis believed in a master race, the militant Islamists believe in a master faith. They just disagree who among them will be the master of the master faith”. I think there are at least three reasons that the master faith is even more sinister than the ideology of the master race.
First, the master faith can more easily attract converts. Non-whites, most of the world’s population, are unlikely to find white supremacism appealing. No form of racism seems likely to unify people across races since not everyone can be part of the master race—but a master faith can do that. Moreover, Hitlerian pseudo-science is a less compelling ideology than Islamism, which claims the authority of a 1,400-year religion rich with stories and rituals. Authoritarian secular ideologies such as Nazism may be quasi-religious in their fervor, but in the end lack the psychological power that religions have.
A more easily transmissible disease is, all else equal, a worse disease. A very transmissible disease might be vastly more destructive than one that is more lethal but less transmissible. COVID-19 killed many more people than Ebola despite the latter’s being more lethal, precisely because COVID-19 is much more transmissible. The same holds for ideologies. Nazism is an Ebola-like ideology: jihadism is a bit more like COVID-19.
Second, the existence of millions of non-violent Muslims perversely makes the jihadist threat worse in certain respects. Imagine an alternate world where millions of Germans sincerely believed Mein Kampf was an elaborate metaphor for peaceful spiritual struggle, while the most thoroughly indoctrinated are genocidal extremists. In that world, Nazism probably wouldn’t have produced such extreme violence so quickly, but it would have been much harder to exclude from polite circles. Nazis could conceal themselves more easily, using the penumbra of “moderates” as a protective membrane. They could also recruit more effectively, gradually radicalizing new converts who are at first drawn in by the humane interpretations of core texts. This is the advantage jihadists have in our world.
Anti-racist activists often stress that racism can be subtle and insidious enough to go unnoticed. This can get taken too far to the point that everything starts to look racist, but there’s a legitimate point here. When racial terrorism earned Birmingham, Alabama, the nickname “Bombingham”, the problem clearly wasn’t confined to those manufacturing and planting bombs. Something similar is true of jihadist terrorists. Muslims who are peaceful, in the sense that they would never commit violent acts themselves, may nonetheless participate in a culture of violence to a variety of degrees, some of which make them complicit. They may openly sympathize with those who carry out attacks, offer excuses on their behalf, or simply decline to condemn them.
Finally, jihadism’s emphasis on martyrdom makes it especially difficult to counter. Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower describes mujahedeen in Afghanistan weeping because they survived Russian attacks—a reaction that would have been incomprehensible to the Nazi rank-and-file. Things were different with the Imperial Japanese, with their kamikaze pilots, and the Tamil Tigers, who used suicide bomb attacks in Sri Lanka. But these groups killed themselves to advance group interests. Jihadists, with their eschatological worldview, are happy to bring their countrymen with them to the hereafter. That’s why an Islamist regime such as Iran possessing nuclear weapons is such a terrifying prospect: it is impossible to deter someone willing, even eager, to be destroyed.
The danger is enormous. Fifty-seven governments belong to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, controlling over two billion people, and they are not shy in throwing their economic and political weight around Islamist goals…
Comparing Nazism and Islamism, see also:
Mick Hartley 
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