What's a Fascist?

jrootham wrote:

I think strong words are certainly appropriate.  I just think they should be unequivocally correct.

Illegal, unconstitutional, repressive, authoritarian, incompetent, police state.  Those are the words that come to my mind.  

Anybody else have suggestions?

My suggestion is that you read "I will bear witness" by Victor Klemperer. This is a fascinating day to day journal of a Jewish university professor who was born in Dresden and survived the Holocaust for a few reasons. First, he married a gentile, which means that he ended up a less persecuted category, Indeed, he was allowed to continue to live in Dresden throughout most of the war in a ghetto populated by Jews married to gentiles. The second reason he survived is that he missed the final round up of Jews to be sent to their death because the British happened to fire bomb Dresden destroying the local Gestapo headquarters and in the process all their records.

He and his wife were able to escape Dresden with the rest of the refugees, once Klemperer removed the yellow stars from all his clothing. His misfortunes are our blessing because his miraculous survival allows us to witness the true nature of how tyrrany was practiced in Nazi Germany, without being filitered by hindsight because it is written as it happened, daily.

In anycase, the reason you should read this day to day journal is because it starts in 1933, and goes through to 1945. While you are reading it I want you to count how many time Klemperer states something along the lines of "the persecution can't get any worse than this!"

Cueball wrote:

jrootham wrote:

I think strong words are certainly appropriate.  I just think they should be unequivocally correct.

Illegal, unconstitutional, repressive, authoritarian, incompetent, police state.  Those are the words that come to my mind.  

Anybody else have suggestions?

My suggestion is that you read "I will bear witness" by Victor Klemperer. This is a fascinating day to day journal of a Jewish university professor who was born in Dresden and survived the Holocaust for a few reasons. First, he married a gentile, which means that he ended up a less persecuted category, Indeed, he was allowed to continue to live in Dresden throughout most of the war in a ghetto populated by Jews married to gentiles. The second reason he survived is that he missed the final round up of Jews to be sent to their death because the British happened to fire bomb Dresden destroying the local Gestapo headquarters and in the process all their records.

He and his wife were able to escape Dresden with the rest of the refugees, once Klemperer removed the yellow stars from all his clothing. His misfortunes are our blessing because his miraculous survival allows us to witness the true nature of how tyrrany was practiced in Nazi Germany, without being filitered by hindsight because it is written as it happened, daily.

In anycase, the reason you should read this day to day journal is because it starts in 1933, and goes through to 1945. While you are reading it I want you to count how many time Klemperer states something along the lines of "the persecution can't get any worse than this!"

Klemperer's diaries should be required reading in all Politics 101 courses.  

@ Cueball #108

I don't think anyone needs to get his or her head around or study anything, because I think we all see these violent and oppressive acts and make the connections. The only difference (and the point of this thread) is that some of us are questioning the appropriate use of words in describing those acts.

So yes, these acts are clear symptoms of a society on the road to oppression and authoritarianism. I don't think anyone has blinders on about that.

I know there are plenty of people who toss around the word fascist when the landlord stops by, and I don't imagine that will ever stop. But it is good to look at what the word actually means sometimes.

And if I may be allowed a little joke, once again I don't think anyone is going to be changing anyone else's opinion here, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Insisting that we all think the same..... how fascist is that?

I commented that there can be more definitions to a word upthread. there is another thing we could consider.

Facism is not the word we are looking for. It is a loaded word, just as Nazi is, but it is an example of the word we are looking for not the word itself. Even if it is a good example-- it is not the generic word.

The fact that we don't use 6079's words oppression, authoritarian, may not be because these are not the best words but because we live in an over the top world where we are so desensitized that we have to find more and more shocking evocative words to describe the same things.

So when I said there are now multiple meanings, this is what I mean. A new generic meaning is being added to the more specific meaning of Facism and this is to produce a word that provides a sense of degrees to the words Authoritarian.

The word Facism is therefore in transition from a specific word that forms an example of a type of authoritarian regime to a generic word for authoritarian regime that includes a sense of degree and connotation more powerful than the word authoritarian itself.

We can each choose to embrace this transition or reject it and ultimately whichever definition survives decades from now will decide who won. In the meantime, as I said there is no clear cut right and wrong here although the word authoritarian may be better in some respects.

An additional semantic problem is the backwards logic used for words like this in transition. Every characteristic of the word Fascist may be taken as a defining characteristic even if that is not the case. Since Fascism was a political idea that took on a number of ugly characteristics we could debate which of these should become the defining ones when we make it a definition that is more general for a behaviour, act or type of authority but since we are dropping the specific definition, its political source, it is open for debate and time will tell, which of these characteristics are notional, coincidental and which are defining to meet the new definition of the word.

Until that process is over-- pretty much everyone is right.

I think no western country is a standalone fascist nation. Fascism requires international collaboration today as much as the Nazis needed allies and collaborators in the countries they marched into and bombed for humanitarian reasons. Fascist countries are still bombing and invading countries for humanitarian reasons same as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis proclaimed to have done. And Germans really did believe that there were foreign threats to German national security. They were terrible lies then in Nazi Germany as much as they are lies today here in Canada and USA.

The Russian war museums are said to still refer to all western countries as fascist after a number of western attempts to reverse the Russian revolution and to install fascists in China, Spain, and corporatocracy have propped up a madman in Berlin. So what is the situation today?

The situation today is that the so called "North Atlantic" Treaty Org nations are expanding militarily into Eastern Europe and surrounding Russia and China militarily. The fascist nations are right back at it with wanting to rule the world. Military supremacy and military aggression is a hallmark of fascism, and that's what we have today with the head fascist nation threatening other countries militarily, and illegally, same as Hitler and the Nazis and axis countries did in the 1930s and 40s.