23A050 Word Control = Game Control by Jim Davies, 12/12/2023

In the online forum I infest, and elsewhere, the enemy (by sheer numbers) is unfortunately winning the war of words. It may jam a monkey wrench into their works to post a correct definition.

A favorite slur at present is "NAZI!!" The term is used most often by people whose knowledge of the 12-year rulers of Germany was provided by far-Left teachers and who have not yet attained the age of 30. From the way they use it, I deduce that they think it means "Anyone I disagree with!" Hence, for pro-Russians, all Ukrainians are Nazis, everyone in a NATO country is a Nazi (all 700 million of us!) and, in an astonishing recent use of the term, everyone in Israel is a Nazi.

A definition that fits the facts of history is "one who likes government and hates Jews."

Other than its obsession with Jews, there was little or nothing about the National Socialist German Workers' Party that differed from very many other governments of 85 years ago. Its policies drew admiration from FDR, for example. It was highly authoritarian, expected obedience and discipline, etc. - so could very fairly be called "fascist"; not communist, because it did not generally take direct control of major industries, and was nationalist. Extreme fascist, if you like. But what marked them out from other authoritarians like the rulers in Spain and Italy was that they detested Jews; declared them unfit to be good Germans, expelled them enslaved them and eventually exterminated them.

Hence my definition. In theory I suppose some anarchist might hate Jews, but he wouldn't be a Nazi because he doesn't like government; I've never met one and never expect to, but the first part of the definition excludes such possible people. It also serves well to throw ridicule on the use of a phrase like "Jewish Nazi." The Israeli government might arguably be called fascist, but not possibly Nazi. Nobody hates himself.

Another currently common smear is "RACIST!!" which is, again, used to describe "all who disagree with me." This helps the smearer by being hard to define, while sounding terrible. Yet it also has the virtue of being shaped like a boomerang; it can come back and hit the hurler, right in the gut.

True racism is something like "discrimination on the basis of race" but even that is weak, because "race" itself is quite a loose term. Sometimes racial features are obvious (eg skin color) but even that isn't clear because a century ago it was common to use the word in reference to the French race, or the German race, the Slavic race, etc. Hitler used the word that way in Mein Kampf, and it was not unusual. The practice probably came from the popularity of eugenics around the year 1900.

Discrimination can be positive as well as negative; Rosa Parks was famously told to sit at the back of the bus, but affirmative action most decidedly favors "minorities" on the basis of ethnicity - even as the "white majority" becomes a minority itself. So "racism" is a particularly silly slur, losing substance by the decade. It's an insult of last resort, for use by malcontents of limited vocabulary.

A third example is surprising: - "COLONIALIST!!" - because I thought these went quite out of fashion in about 1960. But in some nests of discontent, if you're white you're probably a colonialist, or descended from one, and therefore deserve to be plundered for reparations. Although always intended as an insult, actually a lot of colonialists did a bunch of good. Recently Thanksgiving Day was celebrated, to mark the establishment of a group of colonisers in Plymouth, MA; without those and others like them, there would be no America!

Nor would there have been the huge improvement in living standards in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa; they are still way below what they could have been but for the propensity of post-colonial rulers to behave like savages, but it was European colonisers who pulled the population out of the Stone Age and brought them, if not to the 21st, at least to the 19th Century.

Did they do it from the goodness of their hearts? - of course not. They went in search of adventure and treasure, but did so for the most part peacefully, giving as well as taking, in fair exchange. And some did indeed go just as missionaries, like my friend Marion who ministered for decades to the despised pygmies in Burundi. She, too, was a kind of colonialist.

What place will silly, ill-used words like these have in the coming ZGS? - a bleak one. It will, as we saw in this recent ZGBlog, be a wholly market based, contractual society, so everyone's motive will be to please his or her customers, present or potential. And insulting clients simply doesn't pay.