>I have yet to see one single appropriate use of the term "fascist" in
>discussion of contemporary politics. There are a number of reasons for
>its non-utility, but the major ones are:
>
>1. It utterly obscures the repressive power of bourgeois democracy.
foriegn policy is not democratic...at all. and if i am not mistaken whatever amount of democracy there is in america prevents it from succumbing to full on fascist ideologies. a bourgeois democracy can have a fascistic foriegn agenda and saying so doesn't obsure anything. at least not to me. perhaps there should be some kind of left vote to determine what obscures what.....otherwise i have no idea
>2. It blurs the actual ways in which that repressive power is usually
>exercised.
it blurs the lack of democratic decision making in foriegn affairs?
>3. It confuses the task of seeing in what ways bourgeois democracy can
>become an authoritarian state.
i don't see how it confuses that. bourgeouis democracy becomes an authoritarian state by subverting the principles of democracy. that = fascism or at least all the principles inherrant to basic fascism.
It blinds us as surely as it would blind
>us to keep shrieking that the royalists were coming back to reestablish
>a divine-right monarchy.
>Fascism is past history. _Real_ tyranny of the future will be as
>different from fascism as fascism was different from the Czarist
>autocracy. And using the word so often can only generate contempt for
>leftists.
the only time i ever use it is in describing the lack of democracy in foriegn affairs. what do you call it? bourgeouis democratic foriegn agenda sans the democratic decision making? the principles i'm sorry to say are still with us if you can come up a better term with no "obscuring" historical context i'd be glad to use it. bourgeouis authoritarian militaristic interventionist foriegn agenda? normaly i would be arguing what you are arguing but i just don't know what to call it ......post fascism? it's not "neo" because that would imply that it is new. it's the same as "colonialism", is there a term for colonialism sans the cumbersome colonial regimes in favor of an indigenious facade regime? is that what "post colonialism" implies? i always thought "post colonialism" implied something different.
~M.E.