--- Carrol Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Let's leave aside what was an aberration even > for "fascism," the > Holocaust. Let's also get rid of that word > "totalitarianism," the > primary reason for its use being to equate > Stalin with Hitler. (I'm > neither defending nor attacking Stalin, I'm > just assuming that the > equation is useless for purposes of > understanding either regime.) > > So Fascism was just one of the many forms that > capitalist repression of > the working class has taken, and it was a form > which, I think, was > specific to the inter-war period.
This is almost like self-enforced 'political correctness' from concerned parties of the left. Don't use that word 'fascist', they'll just make us eat our words. Perhaps, instead, we could say there is the historic Fascism to which you refer (though again we could argue til the next world war occurs if Fascism, Nazism, Francoism, or even military rule of Japan, among other things, were more or less the same). So there is 'historic fascism' and there is 'semantic fascism'. Lexico-semantically speaking, the term has usefulness--such as when someone calls their tyrant of a boss a fascist. As for the current situation with the US national security-corporatist state (will 2001-? be seen as an aberration, the end of something, the beginning of something quite different, etc.?), I think we need to start coming historically to terms with it in and of itself. CJ __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo! http://sbc.yahoo.com
