University of Missouri Football Strike

[MysticCat]

Originally Posted by DeltaBetaBaby

That's not at all what fascism means. You two both know better, as does the writer of this article.

Like it or not, calling for someone's resignation is ALSO an exercise of free speech.

Agree.

It will be seen that, as used, the word "Fascism" is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if "Fascist" means "in sympathy with Hitler", some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word "Fascist" in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By "Fascism" they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept "bully" as a synonym for "Fascist". That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

George Orwell, "What is Fascism?," Tribune, 24 March 1944.

While I think the word has more definitive meaning that Orwell gave it in 1944, I don't think the writer at Harvard has grasped that meaning. His protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, I think he is, as Orwell suggests, using the word "facist" to mean "bully."