Well perhaps it might be helpful to define what I mean when I use the word 'fascist' since I brought it up. I mean a military industrial complex which increasingly seeks control of its own people as well as other peoples and nations. I mean a political rationale which attempts to gain respect in the world forum through dominance, intimidation and dehumanization of anyone who protests its increasing grab for power or stands for a more equitable point of view. I mean a government of elites who, by decree or in practice, strip world citizens of civil liberties, human rights and self determination. Just as the basic concepts that signify 'socialism' or 'capitalism' or 'humanism' take many historical shapes, so does the basic concept 'fascism.' Fascism is 83 days of 24 hour curfew in Palestine under which a person can be shot for sneaking out to go to the market for food. Does this not recall to the mind the Warsaw ghettos. Fascism is a newly published 'doctrine' of justification for bombing and invading a country which has attacked no-one... a 'doctrine' of justification for potentially bombing and invading a string of countries. Fascism is the arrogance and rhetoric which attempts to justify in the name of freedom the prolonged starvation, radiation and denial of medicine to millions of Iraqi people. It is the totalitarian mentality which answers a call for peace with the simplistic words "you're either with us or against us."
There is nothing 'meaningless' about the Frankfurt School. In fact, I would say that Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Fromm, Benjamin, et. all, as intellectuals and Jews fleeing Germany, were intimately familiar with both the concept and the reality of fascism. Their critique is relevant. One cannot tacitly dismiss the first generation Frankfurt School in this discussion nor can you label and discount "the left." We are not in a contest of sound bites and nobody is going to make me eat my words. Most people are far more intelligent than the media assumes. What should we care if the media decides that we have used a word that has historical context instead of a newer, more digestable, more postmodern word. The media has interests and people are beginning to understand this. When that German minister called it with the Hitler remark eight corporate media conglomerates gasped with indignation but billions of people around the world no doubt cried out at the news stand 'you tell it sister.' I had not thought about it, but perhaps I prefer this 'dated' word precisely because it *has* historical and conceptual meaning. It is an emotional word, a grave word, and I use it to describe a grave and emotional world situation. I am not for letting the media limit my discussion by declaring certain words off limits. If we allow this then they will keep taking away the words until we are left with horror devoid of expression. When I see evidence of the rise of a fascist government, my own government, it is my duty and my nature to say 'yep, looks like fascism to me.' When I hear a person express frustration at the lack of visible resistance to what is shaping up to be unchecked global military domination, the least I can do is offer my solidarity. Maybe this is oh-so-twentieth-century of me, but it is relevant. I really don't care what Reuters would think. I care what Michael thinks, and the rest of you because you are the people who matter in this discussion.
Lisa S.
on 10/01/2002 4:47 PM, Devine, James at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> This is almost like self-enforced 'political
> correctness' from concerned parties of the left.
> Don't use that word 'fascist', they'll just make
> us eat our words.
I think the problem is that the word "fascism" has been over-used. Back in the 1960s, it became a psychological concept (following the Frankfurt School's F-scale), which moves toward being meaningless.
> Perhaps, instead, we could say there is the
> historic Fascism to which you refer (though again
> we could argue til the next world war occurs if
> Fascism, Nazism, Francoism, or even military rule
> of Japan, among other things, were more or less
> the same). So there is 'historic fascism' and
> there is 'semantic fascism'. Lexico-semantically
> speaking, the term has usefulness--such as when
> someone calls their tyrant of a boss a fascist.
That makes sense to me, but I think Carrol was talking about the _left_ using the word.
> As for the current situation with the US national
> security-corporatist state (will 2001-? be seen
> as an aberration, the end of something, the
> beginning of something quite different, etc.?), I
> think we need to start coming historically to
> terms with it in and of itself.
at this stage, excessive rhetoric hurts an already very-weak left. It's probably best to be concrete on such things, rather than using an abstraction such as "fascism."
BTW, it used to be that "warmonger" was one of those words that had become totally rhetorical and thus meaningless to most. But the Bush administration has brought it back to relevance in everyday speech, by being warmongers in practice, every day.
BTW2, after Saddam (and before him, Milosevic), who will be official US Hitler du jour? should pen-l start a pool on this question?
JD
