``...I agree with most of what you said, but the misuse of terminology is hardly unique to fascism or for that matter totalitarianism. So I don't think I see the current abuse of terms as an example of fascism...'' Chip Berlet
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Okay. I am not particular about which term to use either in the case of the above quote or in the previous one on totalitarianism v. fascism.
But it would be nice (or perhaps even more dangerous) to have a name for the intentional, fabricated, and systematic distortion of public discourse. Kirkpatrick, Bork, Buchannan, Bennett, Gingrich, and other rightwing ideologues (outright fascists in my lexicon) are masters at subverting terminology, and thereby inverting the public discourse. The neoliberal apologists for our current virilent Kapitualism uber alles are also geniuses at this inversion, where their economic manipulations and destructions are equated with traditional democratic freedom of expression---while cynically pursuing central planning and calling it free market economics, etc.
Perhaps it has become so ubiquitous that it is merely the means to political argument, and has completely taken the place of how discourse is (or I always thought was) supposed to be conducted----that is how, the democratic forum is supposed to function. (Oh, naive, romantic that I am).
Who knows. I have become so used to there being no sense at all to what is discussed, printed, or trumpeted from any media or government source that it probably doesn't need a name anymore----maybe politics as usual?
I should explain why I consider the intentional misconstrual of once clear terms and ideas as part of a fascist or totalitarian process that destroys a democratic political forum. My background sources are: Thomas Mann, Ernst Cassirer, George Orwell, Hanna Arendt, and more recently Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. They all dealt primarily with the developments of nazism in Germany and later with some aspects of the USSR.
In any event, whatever this technique of discursive inversion is called, it seems to be a required concomitant that amounts to a precondition for the establishment of a tyranny. It lays the textural ground work, and gives linguistic expression to presentiments of more concrete developments to come.
George W. Bush, Colin Powell, and Condolessa Rice are engaged in that same process right now. The clearest example I can think of at the moment is, psychological warfare is called humanitarian aid.
Cassirer (Myth of State) quotes from Shakespeare's King Henry the Sixth in his essay on Machiavelli (Richard, Duke of Gloucester):
``Why, I can smile and murder whiles I smile, And cry Content to that which grieves my heart, And wet my cheeks with artificial tears, And frame my face to all occasions. I'll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall; I'll play the orator as well as Nestor, Deceive more slily than Ulysses could; And like a Sinon, take another Troy. I can add colours to the chameleon, Change shapes with Proteus for advantages, And set the murderous Machiavel to school.''
So, perhaps these inversions are merely the very business of state (Machiavelli's point?). That obvious conclusion would certainly be a depressing one.
Chuck Grimes