Fascism Can't Mean Both a Specific Ideology and a Legitimate Target By Scott Alexander at ACX. We must not forbid the term, for it has a meaning and a use. Yet it is now reduced to a vague meaning and Americans are increasingly saying it is alright to silence them, to do violence against them, and even kill them. When a target becomes more general, and violence against it more acceptable, we will see an increase in violence.
Dr. Alexander is even-handed as usual. He is a liberal but criticising the left more strongly on this one. He does not let people on the right off the hook and gives examples of where they have done the same. But in the end he concludes that we have reached a danger point and it is getting worse.
Still, as an entirely supererogatory matter, I personally won’t be using this word (fascist) when I can avoid it.
Update: Based on the comments, I am adding this video. It is best known as a union song that Pete Seeger sang, but it quickly broadened. As Seeger was a communist, that was quite possibly his intention. Plausible deniability was a specialty of his Oh, we're just trying to organise a union here, and they call us communists...We're only here because we're against the Vietnam War and they call us communists...We only want to clean up the environment and they call us communists. A lot of those present each time were indeed there for only that one thing. But the stark message was still the same: you were good or you were evil, and you either joined in with the singing and you didn't.
This is ten years old, and in 2025 many are now willing to criticise Obama for not being communist enough. Others believe that but will keep it under wraps, knowing he is still idolised by many on the left, especially among the older people who are sometimes the only ones you can count on to show up for protests. But the moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on. I am a dinosaur with no influence, but at least I know it. My gentle liberal friends on FB haven't yet figured out that they are speaking only to each other, unfriending a few more each year, used only as decoration in the revolution.
For all that, I don't the revolution has a snowball's chance of succeeding. I just worry about a lot of pain before it settles down. If ever.
7 comments:
Not that I'd want to read the linked article before commenting –
• There's seemingly always a bit of 'motte and bailey' when one is in a position to ask someone using the word to define clearly what they mean by it.
• It's surprisingly difficult to find an academic definition that is agreed upon -- usually 3 or 10 tenets that will be present in fascistic parties/movements. It's got both economic and social aspects.
• To Ernst Thälmann's party and the 'Antifaschistische Aktion' movement that he founded, the word was used to define ANYONE who was not a revolutionary communist of the Stalinist persuasion. If you weren't controlled by Comintern, you were a fascist. This applied especially to the other socialist parties of Germany of the time.
To Douglas2's third point, by most of my reading the term was corrupted by Stalin et al almost immediately after it was coined by Mussolini (who, IIRC, was kicked out of or left the Italian Communist Party) to mean "anybody who doesn't support International Communism" as opposed to National Soc .. Communism. I did read Mr. Alexander's essay and I think it falls apart because his premise there is some sort of even halfway recognized ideology that could be named fascism is faulty. As far as I could tell he doesn't give a definition of when political violence might be acceptable against fascists beyond some Obamaesque red lines of unacceptable governance, and the comments that try to define it wind up getting lost in largely hypothetical claims of elections being canceled and other actions. (I would like to ask some of the folks who speculate about Trump continuing in office after January 2029 if they realize he voluntarily and peacefully left office after losing the election they all say he tried to subvert).
I remember at college before Watergate that leftists were insisting that Nixon was going to refuse to step down in 1976. This repeated early in Reagan's second term, and Bush 43's. On the other side, I did hear some conservatives claim Obama was going to do the same thing.
Fascism is merely an unusual variant of socialism, based on ethnicity rather than class. It resembles other violent forms of socialism far more than it resembles any kind of conservatism. The only reason communists hated it was because it was a rival gang that wanted to control the same turf that they wanted to control.
It was a common communist tactic to try and divide the conflict into only two camps. In Europe the other camp was just called fascism. Everyone was a fascist, even, as has been mentioned, socialists and impure communists. The terminology changed in other parts of the world but the principle was the same. I'm going to add a video on this.
And the lefty Catholics always say "We're just trying to help the poor, and they call us Communists". No, they are called communists (lower-case 'c') because they are communists, whether they realize it or not. And no, they are not trying to help the poor; they are trying to use the poor to gain power for themselves. Do you understand these things, Leo?
I wouldn't single out the Catholics on that one. A lot of regular denominations have gone the same way.
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