By Brendan O'Neill Politics Last updated: June 4th, 2013
I feel like I have woken up in a world full of clones of Rick from The Young Ones. Rick, you will recall, was the spoilt, whining, middle-class, Thatcher-bashing student who referred to everyone he didn’t like as a “fascisssst”. The police were fascists. His lecturers were fascists. The bank manager was a “fascist bully boy”. People who didn’t like Cliff Richard were fascists. “Oh Cliff / Sometimes it must be difficult not to feel as if / You really are a cliff / When fascists keep trying to push you over it”, opined poetic Rick. Rick’s non-stop use of the f-word was meant to signal his political immaturity, his inability to view the world in anything other than violently dumbed-down black-and-white terms. Which suggests that today we live in seriously politically immature times, because everywhere one looks there is someone kicking up a Rick-style fuss about some fascist or other.
Post-Woolwich, the entire national debate has basically been: who are the real fascists, the English Defence League or Islamist hotheads? Leftists who love nothing more than to ape their granddads and pretend they are taking up the cudgels against Nazism have been going mad about the EDL. Apparently these gruff, rough, tattooed spouters of anti-immigrant nonsense are “violent fascists” and they must be stopped before they sweep up the entire dumb white working class in an orgy of foreigner-bashing craziness. More right-leaning folk have insisted that the real fascists are the Islamists and jihadists, with their democracy-hating, women-fearing, homophobic tendencies. They are “Islamofascists”, we’re told, who will impose a theocratic straitjacket upon us all if we take our eyes off them for five minutes.
Really? Now, being an open-borders type, I am no fan of the EDL, and being an atheistic massive fan of the Enlightenment I am also left cold by the Dark Ages claptrap that spills from the bearded mouths of Islamists. But I would like to venture the following – neither of these groups are fascists. Hateful, yes; misguided, undoubtedly; possessed of very backward views, certainly. But fascist? No. As a result of the historical experience of the 20th century, for most of us the word fascist means extreme, unforgiving power, the existence of a dictatorial government that totally suppresses dissent, terrorises its opponents, and extinguishes inferiors. I’m not remotely convinced that the EDL even wants to do all of the above, far less that it would ever be capable of doing so. A tiny handful of British-based Islamists might daydream about instituting a theocracy that would border on being a bit fascistic, but then I daydream about being a movie star: neither of these things is ever going to happen. It is the luxury of living in a society that has never experienced fascism that allows people to fantasise about facing up to a “fascist threat”, by which they mean small groups of noisy, stupid agitators.
“The word fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’”, said George Orwell in 1946. That’s even truer today. Like a bunch of Ricks, we’re always banging on about fascissssts. What’s really nasty about this overuse of the f-word is that it dilutes and relativises the experiences of those who really did live under the fascist yoke in Europe in the twentieth century, and who know that there was rather more to it than being bellowed at by a skinhead in a bomber jacket. It also distracts us from understanding the true nature of today’s cranky political movements, as instead we unthinkingly brand all of them “FASCISTS!”, as if that explains everything. Our promiscuous use of the fascist tag insults the past and muddies the present.
Dear Everyone, please stop using the word 'fascist' – Telegraph Blogs
