«who's a fascist?»
«fascism: no word has been used more freely by people who have so little idea what it means -- and that includes "postmodernism." "fascist!" was for years the preferred epithet hurled at anyone engaged in authoritarian behaviour, racial stereotyping or even certain kinds of design. then, for a while, the insult, suffering from a kind of rhetorical inflation, lost its bite; if used at all, it made the person using it seem like a hysteric, and it was exiled to the shadowy edges of extremism, where conspiracy theorists and other cassandras shriek their prophecies and tote up their lists of correspondences too terrifying to be ignored.»robert o paxton, author of the anatomy of fascism defines it as «a form of political behaviour marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.»
«using paxton's definition, is george w bush a fascist? nah. america in the early 2000s doesn't resemble germany in the 1930s much at all, really. but that doesn't mean this administration's encroachments on civil liberties, cheap appeals to patriotism in launching an ill-conceived and ineptly executed war in iraq, or efforts to conduct government business in excessive secrecy aren't extremely disturbing. the comparisons of bush to hitler don't shed much light on his policies, but they do show just how much fury he's provoked. usually, when americans call a politician they don't like a "fascist" it's not because we know he's got an extra-governmental squad of jackbooted thugs ready to sic on his enemies. it's because it's the worst thing we can think of to call anyone.»
via salon.com/laura miller's: who's a fascist?
