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exactly so, and such pedantry was also about buying into ruling class pundits' complacent assertions that such regimes are merely military dictatorships and not really fascist and thus really not so bad-and surely not worse than the bogeyman of Stalinism-so why flip out like "ultra-lefts" with their political theater of exaggeration etc. Moreover, leaving that aside, closer inspection reveals that these brutal regimes and their supporters really did have a lot in common with the "fascists" of the 1930s with they and their followers being open admirers of the same. I remember back in high school circa 1970 getting into a discussion with an exchange student from Italy about the Greek Colonels and parroting our party line that they weren't fascist. The Italian comrade became completely flabbergasted asserting that I had a complacent and pedantic attitude that thought "military dictatorship" was merely just some other garden variety of class dictatorship like "bourgois democracy" that we don't need to get too bent out of shape about. On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 8:49 AM, JoaquĆn Bustelo <jbust...@bellsouth.net>wrote: > ====================================================================== > Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. > ====================================================================== > > > On 6/19/2010 12:02 AM, DW wrote: > > I think Joaquin is simply pandering to populist lingo with his defense of > > the term "Fascist". > > Well, like duh ... > > That was my point. That the meaning of words is socially determined, you > can't just keep insisting that everyone else is wrong if they use a term > more loosely than you, especially when "everyone else" includes 99% of > the people that use the word. > > For example, I believe that "strictly speaking," you won't find a > fascist movement in Latin America because such movements are a product > of imperialist democracies. But it would be foolish to take up the > cudgels against calling Pinochet or the Argentine gorillas "fascists" > (just as it would be foolish to keep on explaining that the Argentine > dictators weren't REALLY gorillas but members of the species homo > sapiens and so on). > > The point of such polemics is really to establish and re-enforce the > boundaries of the sect, or in this particular case, of the family of > Trot sects. That's what it's really about. > > ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com