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Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> 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.
Evidently you don't follow the news. Are you not aware that the
principal reason for invading Iraq was to secure control of oil
resources for US oil companies, and that the American troops are
serviced not, as for the past 200+ years, by the US military, but by
"independent contractors" with "no-bid contracts" that just happen to
have been awarded to the company which the vice-president of the US
headed until he nominated himself for vice-president in 2000? (Which
contractors, incidentally, will not provide meals to soldiers coming in
from, say, sentry duty if they arrive back on base outside the set
mealtimes.)
The same system of "no-bid contracts" was also used for "relief" in
New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and it continues to be a miserable
failure.
> 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.
In fact, if you had read what I wrote, you would see that I pointed out
that the term is now again being used in its pre-Soviet propaganda
sense.
> (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.)
Also, you seem not to have taken the hint that you're using "curse"
unidiomatically.
There have not been "Tories" in the US, but there was a "Whig" party
until just before the Civil War.
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