Word of the Day: Fascism

George Bush, Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and other Republican blabbermouths have been tossing around the word "fascism" lately like so many cluster bombs. Yes, it’s a shameless attempt to get Americans to link today's "War Against Terror" to yesteryear's "War Against Fascism," a.k.a. World War II, "The Good War," "Daddy’s War," etc. They don’t care what the word means as long as it plants the "right" idea in constituents’ minds.

But words are important to us writers. I’ve take the liberty to google references to "fascism" and "fascists." There are no shortage of on-line references since the beginning of this public crusade against "Islamofascists." Here’s a sampler:

In 1944, writer George Orwell found that "fascist" and "fascism" had become convenient catch-all terms: "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....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."

"Bully?" Now that sounds like a definition I can get behind. But I would use it against Republican and neocon name-callers. If they can sling it, so can I.

Robert O. Paxton, a professor emeritus at Columbia University, defines fascism in his book "The Anatomy of Fascism" as: "A form of political behavior 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."

Let a real fascist, Benito Mussolini, have his say: "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power"

This may be what Woody Guthrie wanted to tell us with his slogan: "This Guitar Kills Fascists."

Failed novelist turned Socialist muckraker Upton Sinclair sums it up: "Fascism is capitalism plus murder."