Re: Racism

Scripsit Peter T. Daniels:

"Fascist" has been rescued from the brink of meaningless opprobrium
(which seems to be what Jukka means by "curse") by the Bush
administration, which has largely embraced fascism in the classic
Mussolini sense of interpenetration of business and government.

Thank you for this illustrating example of curse use of "fascist". You just want to bash Bush, and you use whatever verbal weapons lie around. "Interpenetration of business and government" takes place in a wide range of political systems, so wide that it does not characterize anything without quite a many clarifications, and if you tried to clarify what you are saying, your comparison would vanish in a puff of logica.

Actually "fascist" lost its denotation in the 1940s at the latest, when the Soviet communists started using it as a curse word for their opponents including Nazi Germany, Finland, etc. Perhaps they wanted to avoid the word "Nazi", short for Nazionalsozialismus, due to its association with nationalism and socialism. They were so successful that Nazis were generally called fascists, despite all the differences between the two political movements and systems. In fact, if you haven't read history, and read it carefully and critically, you might even fail to see any differences and you might wonder what I'm writing about. The Soviet propaganda had _some_ triumphs.

(I guess the expression "Italian fascist" still has some denotation, though obscured. It is rather typical that a word that was specifically invented to describe a particular political movement in a particular country, and a nationalistic movement at that, "needs" such an attribute to have any denotation. It's like "British tory" or "Spanish phalangist", except that mostly by accident, "tory" and "phalangist" have not been taken into worldwide curse use.)

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Racism
    ... which has largely embraced fascism in the classic ... Mussolini sense of interpenetration of business and government. ... Thank you for this illustrating example of curse use of "fascist". ... want to bash Bush, and you use whatever verbal weapons lie around. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Racism
    ... (which seems to be what Jukka means by "curse") ... which has largely embraced fascism in the classic ... Mussolini sense of interpenetration of business and government. ... Surely it's the Bush administration and/or its supporters who have given ...
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  • Re: Racism
    ... that has no denotation; ... (which seems to be what Jukka means by "curse") ... which has largely embraced fascism in the classic ... The Bush administration uses the word "fascist" in a non-derogatory way to ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Racism
    ... (which seems to be what Jukka means by "curse") ... which has largely embraced fascism in the classic ... Mussolini sense of interpenetration of business and government. ... The Bush administration uses the word "fascist" in a non-derogatory way to ...
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