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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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