Ethnic cleansing in Iraq - Call them what they are: Fascists

In the 1930s and 1940s bright, often educated and cultured young Europeans, many of whom loved Bach or Beethoven, were inspired by an evil but charismatic leader.

They committed themselves to a cause with utterly fantastic objectives. These included the eradication of one race and the conquest and enslavement of others. They beieved they would rule Europe and swathes of the Soviet Union and its fertile hinterlands. Opponents would be eradicated. Compromise and tolerance were dismissed as weaknesses, the kind they mistakenly imagined defined their enemies.

Their methods and efficiency, their brutality and seeming indomitability, initially at least, were terrifying. For a brief period — far too long for the hundreds of thousands they butchered — it seemed as if they could not be defeated. A civilisation that had endured for thousands of years seemed in jeopardy and that it might be swept away by wave after wave of motorised barbarians. However, their absolute defeat, even if it took nearly 50m lives and six long years, is one of the great comforts history has to offer.

Yesterday’s report from Amnesty International that it has evidence that Islamic State militants are carrying out “a wave of ethnic cleansing” against minorities in northern Iraq and that they have turned the region into “blood-soaked killing fields” puts these extremists in the same category as the Nazi einsatzgruppen, the death squads who industrialised murder in territories conquered by the Nazis in the 1940s.

It would, however, be as fantastic as the idea of a renewed caliphate ruled by a religious leader to suggest that these seventh-century but motorised barbarians represent a threat comparable to the one facing the world in 1939. They should however, be described in similar terms. They should be called facists, just like their European predecessors from 75 years ago. Not only would this be an accurate description but it would also make it possible to discuss the atrocities in Iran and Syria without defining them as problems created by Islam, albeit radicalised and criminalised Islam.

That, in its efforts to destroy Islamic tradition, the Islamic State razes shrines and mosques and behaves with appalling savagery in the areas it holds suggests that they have little in common with the confident, tolerant and culturally adventurous Islamic states of medieval times. Rather, they represent a 20th-century totalitarian state. And, just as it is with any tyranny, the only important question is how long can it last? How long before it is destroyed from the inside or from the outside ... a year maybe? Six years? Longer even?

The UN is already preparing for that inevitability. The organisation is to send investigators to Iraq to examine crimes being committed on “an unimaginable scale”, with a view to holding perpetrators to account. “We are facing a terrorist monster,” Iraq’s human rights minister, Mohammed Shia Al Sudani, told the UN. Just as those who, at the 1942 Wannsee conference, planned the murder of all the world’s Jews, were defeated and held to account so too will the leaders of this latest manifestation of murderous fascism. That day of reckoning cannot come quickly enough.