The Latest Obscenity Has Seven Letters
Saturday, September 13, 2003
By Alexander Stille
NYT Arts Writer
"Saddam Hussein's regime is an evil phenomenon, but fascism is the product of democracies that have gone wrong, that had working constitutional systems which they gave up voluntarily."
[ ... ]
"The fact that people are using the term fascist to refer to such extremely different phenomena tells you that it has lost most of its descriptive power. I think the problem is that we are dealing with all sorts of new, strange political phenomena -- Osama bin Laden, Hindu nationalism in India, the Le Pen phenomenon in France, Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive force -- and we don't have the right words to describe these things."
Benito Mussolini, the Italian Fascist dictator, in 1935 during a visit to a camp near Rome where youths were training for his Black Shirts Division.
Image Credit: The New York Times
NYT
few years after the end of World War II, George Orwell wrote that the "the word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies `something not desirable.'"
Since then the term fascist has gone in and out of fashion several times. In the late 1960's, the time of civil rights and Vietnam War protests, it was widely used to describe everything from police brutality to compulsory bedtime for children. With the waning of the cold war it seemed to go out of vogue: how could there be fascism without its historical adversary, communism?
But since Sept. 11, the term fascist appears to be making something of a comeback.
Not long after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Christopher Hitchens adopted the term "Islamic fascism" to describe Osama bin Laden, the Taliban and other forms of militant Islamic fundamentalism. More recently Paul Berman, in his book "Terror and Liberalism," uses the fascist analogy to defend the United States invasion of Iraq, applying the term to both the regime of Saddam Hussein and various manifestations of Islamic fundamentalism.
Meanwhile, in what many people see as a particularly far-fetched usage, some on the left are dusting off the political vocabulary of the 1920's and 30's to describe policies of the Bush administration that they find antidemocratic: aggressive unilateralism in foreign affairs, the doctrine of pre-emptive force and what they perceive as the abridgment of civil liberties in the war on terror. Just this week, protesters were flashing signs emblazoned with the word fascist during Attorney General John Ashcroft's speeches in favor of the antiterrorism laws.
"Whenever people start locking up enemies because of national security without much legal care, you are coming close," said Robert Paxton, an emeritus professor of history at Columbia University and the author of a forthcoming book called "Fascism in Action," a comparative study that tries to distill the essence of fascism.
Yet the sudden recourse to old, familiar terms may be less a result of inaccurate labeling than of the failure to find the proper language for problems and phenomena that are bafflingly novel in an age in which religion and politics, modern technology and seemingly archaic beliefs are mixed together, in which media control and money have sometimes replaced force as a means of maintaining consensus.
"We are facing forms of domination that exceed the old vocabulary and so we have to try to find language that corresponds to this condition," said Sheldon Wolin, a professor emeritus of political thought at Princeton University, who has compared Mr. Bush's military-minded foreign policy to the expansionism of fascist regimes in the 1930's.
Even Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy entered the debate this week by rejecting any comparison between Mr. Hussein and Mussolini. "That was a much more benign dictatorship," he said during an interview with the conservative British magazine "The Spectator." "Mussolini did not murder anyone. Mussolini sent people on holiday to internal exile."
His off-the-cuff remarks caused an uproar among his critics, who pointed to the killing of anti-Fascist opponents, the hundreds of thousands of Italians and non-Italians killed in Mussolini's aggressive wars and the Fascist government's complicity in the Nazi deportation and extermination of more than 7,000 Italian Jews.
If the term fascist is thrown around as an epithet, it is partly because fascism, unlike communism, did not develop a highly specific doctrine. The dean of Italian historians of Fascism, Renzo De Felice, always insisted that it was wrong to apply the term Fascist to anything but the movement founded in Italy by Mussolini in 1919, which collapsed at the end of World War II. Even movements that openly modeled themselves on Fascism — like Hitler's Brown Shirts and Franco's Falange, were, he felt, something different. But most scholars say that Fascism became the template for many right-wing, 20th-century movements, whose affinities are impossible to ignore.
(More: NYTimes.com)
2003 © The New York Times Company.
Or, as Broderick Crawford's Harry Brock character pronounced it, "Fatchest?! Why does she call me a fatchest? She knows I'm Methodist!" (or was it Protestant...?)
;^)
Anyway, cheers,
Dan
The Latest Obscenity Has Seven Letters . . .