However, ever since Woody started carrying around that guitar with "This Guitar Kills Fascists" painted on it a new American definition arose. It's almost a syllogism...
This guitar kills Fascists This guitar kills anything it is pointed at Anything this guitar is pointed at is a Fascist.
It is not the correct definition, but in trying to explicate the correct definition one finds oneself fighting a deeply-embedded cultural myth!
- Bill
Chris Doss wrote:
> In this conversation, the term "fascist" is being used in an extremely vague
> sense, a sense that no Fascist in the 1920s and 30s would have recognized.
> "Fascist" does not mean "member of right-wing movement," and I seriously
> doubt that most members of Mussolini's party would have recognized the
> tea-baggers as confreres. Have you guys ever read any actual Fascist writings
> -- Gentille, Mussolini, Junger? I did, because Chapter 2 of my
> never-completed dissertation (on the influence of Heidegger on Arendt) was on
> the Origins of Totalitarianism, in which Arendt spends much time
> distinguishing between different forms of Fascism, and I had to know this
> stuff. It is ideologically very very different from right-wing American
> populism, which is anti-statist, whereas Fascism preached the Total State.
>