I really don't like the term Islamo-Fascism. Fascism is a model of economic development and authority management which is every bit as modern as Keynesianism, Neoliberalism, Communism, and Hybrid Socialism. Benito Mussolini himself said that Fascism would be more properly named "Corporatism" and that he chose the word Fascist because it had resonance with Italians specifically because of the Roman terminology. Whababists don't want a state apparatus delineated into distinct profit-making corporations in an aliance with a military strong man - they want a backwards looking feudal region overseen by brutal gangs acting on behalf of a shadowy cabal of clerics. That's not fascist at all, fascism is part of the modernity they are fighting against.

In an objective sense of the term, the United States is a Fascist Republic. Islamic Fascism is exemplified by Pervez Musharraf and Saddam Hussein. They are fascists (which is why the US helped them get into power in the first place), and they happen to be islamic.

Our enemies from the Middle East are in fact Theocrats and Neo-Luddites. Not he same thing at all.

-Frank

I've been writing about toxic spills for the last six hours (yes, that would be since before midnight in my time zone), so I may not be reading you right, but I believe you're falling into the trap of reading "corporate" as meaning "corporation" in the sense of the modern incorporated business entity. It does not, quite simply—though it isn't wholly exclusive. Teasing out the difference is beyond my cognitive abilities right now.

The United States, meanwhile, can be fairly definitively said to not be Fascist—it pays none of the attention or respect to labor that that ideology calls for, nor is there any move to seize religious property or ensure that arms production does not produce extreme profit—let alone any attempt to disperse concentrated wealth. It's practically anti-Fascist, some sort of authoritarian plutocracy instead.

Also, I'd be curious to see sources for the claim that Hussein was Islamic, at least in any sense more significant than "never explicitly declared otherwise". Not that I have any strong evidence-based reason to believe otherwise, but given how entirely (and, to some neighboring countries, infuriatingly) secular his rule was, I would be at least mildly surprised to learn that he was a practicing Muslim.

~J

Well, the Japanese corporations portrayed in Shadowrun weren't exactly faithful representations of the business world at the time, either. Its just one of the ways the game world is going to hell in a handbasket; you take something from the zeitgeist and you spin it in a suitably dark direction, and then kick the whole thing on its side with the introduction of magic.

In that respect, its less important to be academically accurate than it is to sound good. "Islamo-fascism" sounds scary; its got "fascism" which has always been scary, and "Islamo" which sounds a little like a Muslim theme park character. I'm not an expert on foreign relations, I'm just saying a guy in a big, furry suit oppressing me is scary.

I think if the timeline were being written today, there'd be less focus on Japanacorps. I think the NAN probably wouldn't exist, and making American Indians into domestic terrorists probably wouldn't be the first idea that leaps into peoples heads. There'd be more focus on religious extremism, more focus on government corruption and abuses of civil liberties, and there'd be more evil American companies than there were evil Japanese companies. I think extra-territoriality would be less en vogue, and instead there'd be more of a focus on corporations controlling governments, secretly or not. The idea of out-of-control government is probably scarier today than fractured government.

One of the main themes of cyberpunk (I'm guessing, since I haven't much cyberpunk and I'm not trying to pass myself off as an expert) is the loss of humanity to technology, and that was hot shit in the the early '80's. But now technology has advanced, we've lost a lot of humanity to it (if the widespread use of bluetooth cellphones is any indication) and nobody seems to mind all that much, so this probably wouldn't get as big a treatment if we were just coming up with the setting today.

I'm guessing global warming, environment change and the End of Oil™ would get a bigger treatment than it did in the 80's.

I don't say this to antagonize the purists, but the SR timeline does feel a bit antiquated to me. It was written as a dark, dystopian and fantastic version of things to come, and for the time it was very good (certainly the timeline was one of the first things that grabbed me when I started to seriously get into the system), but after 20 odd years it seems quaint. Remember when anyone gave a crap if Japan was taking over the world? (Cue Archie Bunker theme song) Those were the days...

Well, it is in Korea, but it is not in fact Korea. It's only about half of it.

~J

Are we wandering off topic or are we saying an updated SR timeline should include a serious dissertation on the state of modern Islamic totalitarianism?

Nope. And if you won't do the trivial research to see how the Baath in Syria and Iraq were both deliberately modeled on the Nazi's you'll have to take my word for it.

Anyhow if you want a fun filled world of Islam mostly triumphant, here's one.

http://www.dansimmons.com/news/message/2006_04.htm

To me, a shadowrunner could be a natural evolution of the "civilian contractor".