CB: >A lot of people don't even see the current regime as bad.<
Does telling people that Bush is a fascist convince them that it's bad? or does it convince them that we're wackos?
> One thing left activists do is try to persuade a lot of people to think differently about the political situation, to change their way of thinking , not change our way of thinking to the way a lot of people are thinking wrong.<
Right. But I don't see Bush as fascist. He's definitely bad.
(I think the specifics of that badness are quite useful in propaganda. People can connect the dots for themselves. Then we can have an abstract discussion with such terms as "fascism.")
>> here are the top definitions that a web-search produces for the
word "fascism" (from
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=lang_en&oi=defmore&q=define:Fascism):<<
> CB: None of these definitions seems to make classes central to the definition. A definition of fascism that does not make class conflict central is not worth much to leftists.<
I specifically said that I didn't think that these definitions were correct.
(Strictly speaking, _no_ definition is correct. That's a Platonic conception, i.e., that there's some Ideal Form out there and that our conceptions (definitions) are reflections of it. Rather, definitions are human-made conventions. Some are better than others because they give a more coherent understanding of the real, empirical, world.)
If we want to convice people of the veracity of our perspective, it's important to treat them as thinking human beings. Among other things, that implies that bombarding them with rhetoric and slogans won't impress them (unless they already agree). We have to know how others think, not because we should agree with them but because it's a step toward convincing them.
Again, I think the sweep of events (actual class struggle) will be more convincing than anything we could say, especially if it affects people personally. In the process, we don't want to convince people that we're crazy.
-- Jim Devine "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.