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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27938 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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If no one else is going to link to Scott's latest CW-related post, I guess I'll try to meet the mods' wishes for a top level comment... (Though I didn't re-read it, so...)

Fascism Can't Mean Both A Specific Ideology And A Legitimate Target

I agree, inasmuch we stipulate "Political violence in America is morally unacceptable" means "literally, categorically unacceptable, due to our assessment of the threat of fascism" and "(at the current time)" ignores the possibility of near-future change in the threat-assessment. Though I emphatically oppose political violence, I don't think it would be logically incongruent to leave open the possibility that fascism is bad enough that we're near the point of political violence being acceptable. But I don't think Scott's doing a motte-and-bailey, by using a narrow denotation; just stating a motte, with the expectation his readers take it at face value.

Characteristic of Scott, the post is a neat exercise in logical tidiness. However, it only gestures at the bigger, scarier question: How do societies classify danger and determine when violence becomes permissible? The classification of threats is important, because names carry significant policy weight (e.g., Trump labeling Antifa a domestic terrorist organization...). Label something "fascism" as a distinct ideology, and you direct attention towards connotations and lineage. However, use the same term as a moral epithet (i.e., a catch-all for political enemies) and you alter the rhetorical perception.

Nobody even seems that interested in what fascism actually is.

Is Miller really a fascist because he wants to enforce immigration laws? Surely not, otherwise we would have to define Eisenhower of Operation Wetback fame as a fascist.

IMO, fascism is a combination of militarism, imperialism and racism within a social darwinist worldview. Not merely 'I don't like these backwater savages' but 'it's our job to subjugate them in the short term and maybe get rid of them outright, we need to tile the world with us and ours'. Nazism is fascism + anti-semitism.

Also, all violence is political to some extent. If a thief (poor) robs someone (rich) then there's a political angle to it. Some leftists would say it's justified, especially if its a big corporation. The whole point of the police is administering violence to baddies, how much violence and who is a baddy, that's a political question. Politics is about power and violence is the most important kind of power. Challenging the sovereignty and values of the state is very political violence.

In 1944, before the actual, everyone-can-agree-they're-fascist fascist states of Italy and Germany had been defeated, George Orwell wrote an article highlighting how the term had devolved into an insult and lost any useful, shared, descriptive meaning of any actual political system: https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc

It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

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