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Monday, October 24, 2005
Series on Fascism: Part VI
Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An Exegesis
By David NeiwertIs fascism an obsolete term? Even if it resurrects itself as a significant political threat, can we use the term with any effectiveness?
My friend John McKay, discussing the matter at his weblog archy, wonders if the degraded state of the term has rendered it useless. After all, it has in many respects become a catchall for any kind of totalitarianism, rather than the special and certainly cause-specific phenomenon it was. Anyone using the word nowadays is most often merely participating in this degradation.
Nonetheless, I think Robert O. Paxton has it right in his essay The Five Stages of Fascism:
We cannot give up in the face of these difficulties. A real phenomenon exists. Indeed, fascism is the most original political novelty of the twentieth century, no less. … If we cannot examine fascism synthetically, we risk being unable to understand this century, or the next. We must have a word, and for lack of a better one, we must employ the word that Mussolini borrowed from the vocabulary of the Italian Left in 1919, before his movement had assumed its mature form. Obliged to use the term fascism, we ought to use it well.
The following essay is devoted to that idea. Its purpose is, if nothing else, to give the reader a clear understanding of fascism not merely as an historical force but a living one.
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Click here for the full text of "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An Exegesis" by David Neiwert.
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Posted by fm on October 24, 2005 at 12:07 AM