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We Are All ‘Fascists’ Now
We are all fascists now. No, you say? Prove it. Show me in the definition of fascism where that’s not us. Or me. Or you.
We observe that the word “fascism” has become shorthand for “thing I do not like”, and “fascist” for a similarly disliked person or idea. True, but there’s more to the story. Fascism is a notoriously difficult word to define, and your defensive definition will be challenged by the same people who accused you to begin with. There is no defense in definitions.
But why should you have to defend at all? The onus is upon the accuser to prove an accusation. Yet this is not true in the arena where this accusation is hurled. We do not elect the better man — we elect the one who is better at getting elected. This is supposed to be a proxy for a definition of the word “better”, what with the invisible hand making better decisions in the aggregate than the wizards of smart. Defining objective good is a fool’s errand, and the comparative or superlative of that word would make you either more foolish or the most foolish. Quality (in the sense of goodness) is suitability for a given purpose — giving the purpose makes the whole exercise subjective. This does not mean that it is meaningless, but that using the word in isolation can convey only vague things, the same way that “fascist” does.
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.
— Saul Alinsky
Implied here is the real goal — pain. The reason he advises his co-minions to go after people is that they “hurt faster”. Thus the purpose behind all of this is to maximize pain in the short term. Expanding scope we see that everything the Democrats are up to is connected by this thread — to cause pain throughout society, for it is not Republicans that they wish to change, but society, and as Hitler observed, you cannot motivate a satisfied people.
What they want from Republicans is silence or entertainment. We can die quietly or die in their Colosseum. Most should die quietly, but enough should die loudly that the masses are placated. Inflation? Trannies grooming children in the library and teaching school? Stolen elections? Die. Die, fascist, die.
Triumphal Marx/Lenin/Gramsci/Alinsky-ism is not about to slow down and reflect upon the validity of accusations, or the burden of proof. Its purpose is pain and if it cannot kill you yet, it must have your complicity. After all, it has the complicity of huge swathes of the population — why do you think they joined? Most of these people do not even know the master they serve, but will defend to their dying breath its right to deprive you of your rights. You are not a citizen, and you do not have rights to be weighed in balance with the rights of others. You are an obstacle, mere trash to be spotted, spiked, and binned. A fascist.
Perhaps we should each go about with our trousers about our ankles, hopping and holding on, struggling to preserve a little dignity and a little more life. Orwell said that he could not shoot a fascist in such a condition, as a man hopping about trying to hold his pants up is not a fascist but a man. For me, one of the pivotal scenes in the movie Doctor Zhivago was when a Bolshevik simply shot a Russian officer standing atop a barrel, exhorting the deserters to re-group. The thing was at a decision point, and once the man was shot, the rest was accomplished. As goes a scene, so goes the movie. Unfortunately, we are not up against Orwell who held his fire. We are provoked and confronted by the grim Bolshevik. We are not arguing a point — we are fighting for our lives and the life of the Republic.
With the ritual desecration of Trump (and by extension, the very real desecration of the Republic) now well underway, the officer has been shot. Laws? Standards of proof? Argument? Just so much standing on a barrel.
The war is upon us, and the epithet “fascist” is used by the left to freeze us in fear (who wants to be called a fascist?) and indecision (what can I do about this accusation?), to personalize resistance to the death of the Republic as a character flaw (racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe — deplorable!), to polarize our stance (you are either with the woke crowd, or you are beneath response, beneath contempt, beneath human). This is done even as the big-state machinery increasingly displays (unashamedly) the traits commonly or formally associated with fascism. Ask why we are “fascists”, and that just proves our fascism. Only a fascist would ask such a question, and dishonestly.
So get used to it. There is no arguing when you are accused of fascism. You must understand what the accusation really means: “I care neither for your words, nor your life. I will kill you and enslave your children, who will revile your memory first for your weakness, then for your fascism, and then when it is too late and they finally understand, once more for your weakness.” Currently, the death and enslavement are mostly metaphorical, but not always — increasingly not so.
When the power structure calls you a fascist, that’s not an argument. That’s a threat. So far, it works well. What do you do when you see something that you like, and then notice that the author of the remark is pilloried as a fascist? Do you jump up in defense? No, of course you do not. Neither do I. What good would it do? Why would you stand athwart the tracks yelling anything? There’s a train coming.
The best you can do is reject, revile, refuse those who accuse you. You will not change any minds save perhaps through your example, which at any rate will not be observed in the midst of an argument, least of all by the person who has accused you. In my own experience, make a stone of your heart, and a fortress of your mind. Ignore the derogatory claims that you are in a bubble, or have created a comfortable region of epistemological closure. That’s just the fury of ineffective losers who cannot conquer your mind. You need not (and can not anyway) justify your ideas, your thought processes, your conclusions, or your decisions to a post-logic hostile mob — not even to one of them. In this time of “division”, we have become people from very different, and hostile tribes. It is inertia and ignorance to try to remain somehow neutral. Make your choice, cast your vote, put on your armor, and be prepared to exercise your chosen metaphor.
You fascist.
Published in General
This is a good post, other than the 9th paragraph. It should be promoted to the Main Feed.
Democrats call us fascists, like they used to call us racists, (and like I have been called a Communist). Words lose their meanings.
I don’t like fascism… it’s so tribal.
I don’t understand how that could possibly be true.
For the inventor of the word, how could it have been hard to define? After all, the only reason he invented it was to express an idea that he already had in mind. He already knew the definition. He just had to write it down.
For others to assign new, different definitions, it would not have been any more difficult. They likewise each had an idea in mind they wished to use the pre-existing word to refer to.
Excellent conclusion and good advice too.
He built the word on a pre existing idea that makes it increasingly more difficult to define the more we use it to to create negative connotations for something that isn’t wrong nor necessarily bad.
The government using businesses to effect social change is bad.
But it isn’t necessarily bad to recognize that an individual’s strength lies, not in himself, but in being united in common cause with like minded individuals -> symbolized by the fasces that is used even in the US’s civic symbols.
What has happened is that fascism has been separated from the economic policy that had reasonable bad connotations and is being applied to social concept of the fasces in an attempt to demonize such behavior (which isn’t bad).
I won’t try to define fascism, but I think that it refers to a bundle of sticks, bound together and unified for strength. But this is just a public metaphor or description for single-minded national unity and the power that focused unity provides. The implementation, and the techniques, and most importantly the purpose of this bundling is not overtly stated. Fascism’s definition is deliberately propagandistic.
You have to know what they did, and how they did it, and for what ultimate purpose in order to really liken something else to fascism.
Fascism is a word that was invented, and given a single written definition by the inventor. His intention was not propagandistic. His intention was to assign a token to be used to refer to a specific idea for which no linguistic symbol existed.
When I use a word, it is always in an honest attempt to convey an idea, never as “propaganda”, in the sense of lies used to persuade readers to support the writer’s religious or political cause.
Neither ideas, nor words, nor humans are imbued with the precision this mindset entails.
Like communisty organizing.
Fascism is an economic model. It is tied to the fasces, but it is not the fasces.
The fasces is a symbol of national unity that inspires national socialism (of which fascism is closely tied to), but the fasces stands separate from fascism.
Your understanding of fascism is what I am trying to get at in my previous comment. You took the word used to define a centrally planned economic system and associated it with a cultural concept of like-minded unity.
The negative connotations that rightly belong to the economic system are then imputed on a cultural concept that is neither wrong nor bad.
I think Mark is being obtuse with his insistence that there should be no confusion, but there is confusion by design.
In spite my criticism of Mark here, I know we both agree that words have meanings and generally we agree in rejecting the reckless way in which words are re-defined by an increasingly illiterate, yet verbose, populace.
Fascism is a political model, not an economic one. It’s a collectivist philosophy similar to marxism/communism. Jonah Goldberg described it in his book Liberal Fascism as a Heresy of Marxism, which seems about right to me.
I accept that definition. I’ve been trying to categorize communism, capitalism, and fascism. I thought economic system suited. I can accept political system.
I think fascism has two definitions. One being outward, for public consumption and both calling for and justifying social mobilization, symbolized by the fasces, and one more inward, economic, and more specific and technical, for those who will draw and wield the power that outward Fascism is intended to build and justify.
Regarding your third assertion, “humans being imbued with precision”, I can’t imagine what you might be thinking of.
But certainly [EDIT: major typing error] your first statement is true. Outside of math and logic, an idea is rarely perfectly well-defined even in the mind of the inventor of a new word who uses that word to refer to it. I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. My mindset is not what you assume it is.
As to the second point, that words are not generally imbued with precision by their written definitions, that is equally true, and I never meant to suggest otherwise.
This one?
I don’t agree. I think the current culture is trying to redefine fascism that way, but I disagree that that was a definition before the post modern era.
The current culture has redefined many words to not match the original in order to sew confusion.
Yes, this one.
I was called a fascist in college long ago. Just for being indifferent to multiculturalism. Not against it. Indifferent.
The ninth paragraph seems about right to me.
The empty above is one big why bother.
You’ll configure out why.
Also.
I got to ride in Hercules today.
Who coined the term, Mark? If you don’t know, then how can you know his intent?
Do you think that people never come up with a word or phrase for purposes of propaganda or rhetoric?
Indeed. Major thought underpinning the article. It s not as though Gramsci et al designed this confusion in. They felt that they were being clear. But time passes, and meanings drift. Individuals and whole societies experience different changes in meaning. Some things can (perhaps) be defined precisely, but even then you will not gain agreement, not even on definitions, from those who disagree with you at a deeper level. They will defend any contrary definition which is useful in obstructing your argument, because *they are not arguing*. They appear to be arguing, because this makes you shut up and then try harder. You are now dying in their Colosseum.
Which is the beginning of this comment. Neither Mark Camp nor Antonio Gramsci are being obtuse on purpose (unlike Marx, see Sowell). Instead, the modern leftists take advantage of existing confusion, and some of our own people even get caught up in it. Bait taken.
AMEN!
They are preying on people who are trapped in the fallacy of confusing facts with definitions.
I agree with you both!
What did I write that is obtuse, in your view?
But of course. Trump derangement syndrome.
Wikipedia’s article on fascism might be expected to give the history of definitions of the word.
Prepare to be disappointed.
In fact, the entire article comprises nothing but instances of the common thinking disorder of confusing facts with definitions, repeated over and over again by different “authorities”.
I don’t know what logicians call this false method of reasoning, if it has ever been given a name.
In the absence of an accepted academic term for this error, I call it the fallacy of “reifying language”. Reifying means “concretizing”: mistaking something abstract for something concrete. Another synonym of “reification” is “hypostatization”.
By “reifying language”, I mean a thinking disorder that involves the inability to correctly perceive the relationship between words and ideas. Instead of recognizing the fact that a word is merely an ultimately arbitrary symbolic reference to an idea, invented and socially accepted for convenience in communicating ideas, the person working under the fallacy thinks that a definition is a fact about the world (something that can be true or false), and is inclined to engage in debates about the “correct” definition of a given word.
Although it is properly called a thinking disorder in an an adult, it is in fact a normal part of human development. When an infant progresses to early childhood and learns to use language, he always begins with this implicit belief that the language of the culture that he happened to be born into has ultimate reality. He cannot distinguish between the words he is learning and the parts of real world that they merely point to. To a child, the meaning of the word is an inherent property of the word itself, just as to a person ignorant of scientific economics, “value” is an inherent property of a good.
Reification of language is thus a case of arrested intellectual development.
Apparently, fascism was used pretty much as a amorphous insult of choice since its inception. See wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascist_(insult)
This is an excellent point, and one which I had intended to follow up on *as the seed of the article*! Insert magnificent prose here about how those who cannot define a word cannot defend against it. And how the word is muddy, so that for 99.999% of people, the best response is a rap in the chops.
Metaphorically speaking, of course. Just don’t argue. That means you already lost.