http://www.cursor.org/stories/fascismintroduction.php
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Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An exegesis by David Neiwert POSTED AUGUST 30, 2003 --
Introduction
Is fascism an obsolete term? Even if it resurrects itself as a significant political threat, can we use the term with any effectiveness?
My friend John McKay, discussing the matter at his Weblog archy, wonders if the degraded state of the term has rendered it useless. After all, it has in many respects become a catchall for any kind of totalitarianism, rather than the special and certainly cause-specific phenomenon it was. Anyone using the word nowadays is most often merely participating in this degradation.
Nonetheless, I think Robert O. Paxton has it right in his essay "The Five Stages of Fascism": We cannot give up in the face of these difficulties. A real phenomenon exists. Indeed, fascism is the most original political novelty of the twentieth century, no less. ... If we cannot examine fascism synthetically, we risk being unable to understand this century, or the next. We must have a word, and for lack of a better one, we must employ the word that Mussolini borrowed from the vocabulary of the Italian Left in 1919, before his movement had assumed its mature form. Obliged to use the term fascism, we ought to use it well.
The following essay is devoted to that idea. Its purpose is, if nothing else, to give the reader a clear understanding of fascism not merely as a historical force but a living one.
[snip]
David Neiwert Seattle June 2003
*. David Neiwert is a freelance journalist based in Seattle. His reportage for MSNBC.com on domestic terrorism won the National Press Club Award for Distinguished Online Journalism in 2000. He is the author of In God's Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest (1999, WSU Press), as well as the forthcoming Death on the Fourth of July: Hate Crimes and the American Landscape (Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, 2004) and Strawberry Days: The Rise and Fall of the Bellevue Japanese-American Community (publisher pending, 2004). His freelance work can be found at Salon.com, the Washington Post, MSNBC and various other publications. He can be contacted at Orcinus.
Introduction I. Projecting Fascism II. Understanding Fascism III. The Core of Fascism IV. Tracking Fascism V. Proto-Fascism in America VI. Crossing the Lines VII. The Transmission Belt VIII. Official Transmitters IX. Media Transmitters X. Reaching the Receivers XI. Dualist Receivers XII. Divine Transmissions XIII. Fascism and Fundamentalism XIV. The War on Liberals XV. Waiting for Godwin Bibliography
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Quis custodiet istos custodes?
"Who will watch the watchers?" ~ "Who is to guard the guards themselves?"
-- Juvenal's Satires, VI. 347, circa 110 AD