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The British Journal of Politics _ International Relations Volume 11 Issue 3 2009 [Doi 10.1111_j.1467-856x.2009.00369.x] Richard Shorten -- The Failure of Political Argument- The Languages of Anti-Fascism and Anti-Totalitarianism in Post-Septe
The British Journal of Politics _ International Relations Volume 11 Issue 3 2009 [Doi 10.1111_j.1467-856x.2009.00369.x] Richard Shorten -- The Failure of Political Argument- The Languages of Anti-Fascism and Anti-Totalitarianism in Post-Septe
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Richard Shorten
Terms like Islamo-fascism, the anti-totalitarian case for war in Iraq and the description of
religiously motivated political extremism as a new totalitarianism were all remarkable features of
the political discourse organised around the response to the events of 11 September 2001. They share
in common the attempt to ground political commitments and allegiances in two morally charged
political languages: anti-fascism and anti-totalitarianism. But why did they fail to connect with the
public imagination? This article argues that they were not constructed for present purposes so much
as appropriated. Yet their projected consumption by a broader public turned on the feasibility of
effecting conceptual change to accommodate new meanings and applications. The failure, in this
case, to meet the standards thereby required suggests that an important dimension of the response
to September 11th is the failure of political argument. It is proposed that this has implications more
broadly for the relation between political theory and political rhetoric.
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located in its uptake (Austin 1975 [1962], 121).7 Moreover, that statements are
deliberately tailored to evoke certain responses in particular audiences is a rather
probable feature of political language when, as here, it is vying for public validation.
Second, there is a curious sense, relevant in the present context, in which political
language, both in its production and consumption, might be at once both sincere
and rather unintentional. In the case of the language called forth by September
11th, this process of competing for attention is in one important respect a contestation over memory. There is a general sense in which contemporary issues are
refracted through the lenses of the 1930s and the Second World War (Lebow et al.
2006, 3).8 But the recourse to a kind of stockpile of memories imparted by those
earlier experiences is a particular feature of post-September 11th discourse, with
particularly emotive registers of meaning. Once more, there is every possibility that
the appeal to this set of reference points is prompted by instrumental calculations
that they are invoked to sell or justify policy options reached on some other
rationale. Yet this ought not to preclude the prospect that sincere understandings of
the past provide an important frame of reference for judging the meaning of present
eventsor, more pertinently, that their presentation is treated as sincere by a public
to whom such language is directed.
This suggests a third property of the relevant kind of political language, which
relates to its audience and arises in view of the fact that it can only, after all, gain
political gravity when its finds a broader resonance. This is the demand that it
become articulated in a more general set of public discourses that support decisionmaking in foreign affairs. These public discourses might be pictured as bringing
together different discursive settings: the arenas of policy formation, certain kinds
of academic scholarship and more day-to-day forms of conversation expressing
ideas, attitudes and feelings. Hence in studying them the theorist is not dealing with
idiosyncratic, singular kinds of expression but rather accessing the product of a
shared resource, one that might be investigated across diverse locations (Finlayson
and Martin 2008, 449):9 general ideas, policy prescriptions, newspaper editorials
and the general effusions of the commentariat, as well as other forms of political
grandstanding.10
A final property concerns the more particular form and structure of political
language when, specifically, it is being appropriated in the shape of a normative
resource. The problematic that Lilla and Holmes set out calls for the development of
a conceptual vocabulary capable of making sense of a new constellation of political
phenomena. A vocabulary, in that sense, might be taken to be roughly synonymous
with what is ordinarily meant by an ideology, a cluster of ideas organised with
action-informing potential. It likewise implies a systematic arrangement of ideas
thatwhile compact and coherent enough to support specific political commitments and preferencesis sufficiently flexible to accommodate shifting meanings
and applications. But a vocabulary nevertheless denotes a thinner cluster of ideas
than does an ideology. (It is quite conceivable in principle, for instance, that either
liberalism or Marxism play host to anti-fascism or anti-totalitarianism as political
languages subsumed within them.) On closer inspection, what is even more recognisably a feature of the kinds of vocabularies under consideration here is that
they are organised around a single concept. More accurately still, they are
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trying to clarify in which ways that role is circumscribed, even while independent
and causal.
Necessarily, clarification here is an exercise fraught with uncertainty, because
relationships between beliefs and wider actions are, though appropriately acknowledged, difficult to measure. Nonetheless, a criticism is to be made of this latest
renewal of the linguistic turn in the social sciences. By and large, such approaches
have been resistant to looking at ideas close up; they have disregarded the internal
detail of ideas, construing them instead as monolithic. That they typically work with
the ideational as a unit of analysis belies an unclear sense of what ideas-in-politics
are (Finlayson 2004, 530). It is in this connection that, from within the methodologies of political thought, the form of analysis associated with conceptual history
is a more promising mode of inquiry, particularly so in the case of post-September
11th language (see Richter 1986; Koselleck 2002; Palonen 2006). In giving ideas
their own histories, conceptual history is committed to something akin to the
separation of ideas from material conditions enacted within interpretivism and
social constructivism; it treats ideas on their own terms, locating them as interacting
with wider processes and events but as irreducible to them. But it is also capable of
providing a clearer procedure through which the potential, causal role of particular
ideas-in-politics might be analysed, something often unspecified when the ideational is the unit of analysis. For in the form of conceptual change it identifies a
mechanism for the inheritance and transmission of ideas. Moreover, conceptual
change thereby provides a basis for their analysis at two crucial levels: the strategic
and the contextual. In this sense, from the viewpoint of political theory at large, its
study necessarily works at a second-order level, taking actual (rather than idealised)
political thought as its subject-matter (see Freeden 2005). Yet it is in doing so that
it forms a useful vantage point both for understanding the strategic moves of
political actors and, because it takes seriously the thought that concepts do not have
fixed essences, for specifying the contextual possibilities attaching to political
action. Its exercise is certainly distinct, therefore, from Habermasian discourse
ethics. Here, to treat ideas as normative resources is not to work cleanly through
the normative validity of political argumentation but instead to investigate the
availability of ideas to arrive at positions treated as normatively valid in politics itself.
Usually, the practitioners of conceptual history are concerned with illuminating
conceptual change over a long-term historical perspective. But they can also be
tracked over a shorter space of time, as a feature of the response to a particular,
perceived dilemma (see Bevir and Rhodes 2002, 149). Within the new linguistic
turn, one influential body of scholarship on the discourses of September 11th has
rightly located the importance in the matter of the depiction of that reality.
However, guided by the techniques of critical discourse analysis (see Beard 2000;
Fairclough 2001; Chilton 2004), such studies have unfortunately made the burden
of explanation of those discourses fall on hidden agendassupposing ideological
distortion to be at work in the relevant ideas that either enable or constrain
political action (usually, on such accounts, consisting in the manufacture of fear),
and taking the close, linguistic analysis of speech to be the means of unmasking
that distortion (see, e.g. Jackson 2005 and 2007; Burke 2008; Guelke 2008). That
burden is particularly unhelpful when, for example, the claims made by memory
play a part in structuring the possibilities of political languages as normative
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Islamo-Fascism
The conceptual innovation Islamo-fascism was initially brought into use, it seems,
in the immediate wake of September 11th, by Christopher Hitchens, a public figure
with a provenance on the left (Hitchens 2004 [2001b]; see also Schwartz 2001;
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Steyn 2002; Stille 2003). But it was on the back of repeated usage in neoconservative commentary that the term, some time later, gained currency in the
Bush administration rhetoric in such a way that the war on Islamic fascism for a
brief period became synonymous with the war on terror (Pollitt 2006). While
domestic support for continued troop commitment in Iraq waned, President Bush
used the occasion of a thwarted Britain-based aerial suicide attack in August 2006
to issue a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists.15 In a press
conference on the Israel/Lebanon conflict on 7 August 2006, he repeated the
identification: those to whom America is opposed, he said, try to spread their
jihadist message of Islamic fascism, a message that is also totalitarian in nature.16
Furthermore, speaking at the national convention of the American Legion in the
lead up to the fifth anniversary of September 11th that same year, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld urged resolve in the face of extremists waging a new type of
fascism, while depicting the Iraq war as the epicenter of the struggle against
terrorism.17 Islamo-fascism surfaced, therefore, principally as a marker for militant
Islamic fundamentalism (see also Daley 2006), but in practice it sought to serve to
bring Iraq into the same conceptual universe.
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European public intellectuals, like Adam Michnik, Vaclav Havel and George
Konrad, whose political identity was forged in the struggle against Soviet rule and
the revolutions of 1989, also found sufficient malleability in totalitarianism to
articulate meaningful political positions, especially in the run-up to the Iraq war
(Cushman 2005b). And in view of that, the idea of both an affinity and a
mutationa historical derivationof old into new totalitarian political designs also
gave the impression, at least, of echoing back into administration rhetoric.
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and actions in view, partly by feeding on a ready store of moral condemnation, and
partly by acting on the thought that conventional opinion is too neutral in the face
of them. Equally, imagining this to be the case entails little more than teasing out some
further implications of one of the four properties of the relevant kind of political
language. One salient feature of regime-type concepts that emerges in light of the
earlier discussion is that they are both basic and contestable. Treated accordingly,
moreover, a further feature sooner or later comes into the picture: that they resemble
what have been called evaluative-descriptive terms. That is, they belong to a class
of wordsidentified by Skinner and others through reference to speech act theory
(e.g. Searle 1969; Hare 1970; Austin 1975 [1962])that both describe an action or
state of affairs and, in a normative sense, evaluate those same things. It is by using such
terms in the latter sense, furthermore, that the success of any agent becomes a matter
of exercising perlocutionary effects through the meaningful reception of particular
statements. Characteristically, this will entail inciting or persuading [ones] hearers
or readers to adopt a particular point of view and, in the process, getting an audience
to revise its ideas, attitudes and feelings (Skinner 1974, 294).
We noted before that it is specifically in virtue of the fact that regime-type terms
perform an evaluative as well as descriptive function that they create the space for
a particular form of political action. But the vantage point suggested by Skinners
scenario now brings these possibilities more clearly into focus. Skinners own
discussion principally concerns terms relating to individual moral conduct and the
redescription of actions and states of affairs in a favourablenot unfavourable
light. He shows, for instance, how in 17th-century England shrewdness went from
denoting the disparaging quality of being self-serving to indicating the commendable quality of sound commercial judgement.22 Yet something very similar applies to
the innovating ideologists in the post-September 11th case. Theirs is the case of
trying to do things with regime-type conceptsboth of legitimating a change in
the feasible meanings, applications and associations of concepts, and of shifting the
terms of moral appraisal of the kinds of political practices and agendas brought into
view on the basis of those concepts. Moreover, Skinners treatment of the representative scenario here potentially illuminates the failure of political argument by
signalling some more particular conditions that might be taken to determine success
or failure, respectively; he notes that there are two semantic strategies that may be
called into use, in the act of which the legitimation of conceptual change might be
effected. The failure to implement those strategies authoritatively betokens the
failure of the broader task and, as such, stipulates two standard requirements that
conceptual innovations and adaptive patterns of argument must meet. Accordingly,
the suggestion is that this can be used helpfully to elucidate the reasons for the
failure of the appropriation of the languages of anti-fascism and anti-totalitarianism
in post-September 11th discourse, by drawing attention to two separate levels for its
analysis.
The first strategy is to effect a change in the moral complexion of a term. The second
strategy is to effect a change in the definitional criteria according to which cases are
admitted to a term with a given moral complexion. But both are instances of
rhetorical redescription that are capable of redescribing a given object in an unsympathetic and adverse light.23 The intention that underlies the first strategy especially
is to elicit a particular mode of response in ones audience; in our case, the projected
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neo- and crypto- fascism, in which each element grafts particular associations on
to the other. But when compared at the level of the emotive meanings of terms
what comes into view is its rhetorical pitch (Pollitt 2006)a dimension which some
critical treatments of Islamo-fascism have largely ignored (e.g. Judt 2008b). Within
that purview it is a construction that, when applied to the range of movements and
regimes pictured, seeks to manipulate a particular emotional reaction and a particular degree of intensity: in the rather laconic sound of that term itself, the fascist
element connotes coarseness and bellicosity, associations that are also called up in
more passionate register than are those implied by more rhetorically neutral alternatives like extremist or theocratic. In fact, analysis of its moral complexion
suggests that Islamo-fascism seeks to elicit the particular emotion of contempt.
However, the failure of that term to gain uptake, and thereby to impart that
contempt effectively, can be understood to derive from a miscalculation regarding
its deployment; not a mistaken assumption about the appropriateness of the rhetorical pitch in itself, but rather a short-sightedness about the tendency of the
meanings triggered by the stem parts of compound words to reflect back on to the
originary terms themselves, a tendency confirmed to such a degree in the reception
of Islamo-fascism that it was, by broad public consensus, deemed to be off-limits. (It
would certainly seem to have failed as a move to bolster the association of the
struggle against terrorism with the war in Iraq, for world opinion surveys note a
reverse over time in confidence that the latter was helping the former (Goot 2004,
256257).)25 Yet if the rhetorical pitch was unsuited for general consumption, this
is in part because there was a more specific audience intended for whom the terms
of those same calculations were different. The coining of that expression is also to
take a term with an established left-wing pedigree and, in view of those credentials,
to ask a particular constituency to think carefully about the location of its natural
allegiances and sympathies (see Walzer 2002; Burleigh 2006b). Accordingly, called
into work were not only short-term, emotive triggers, but also more long-term
investments of political commitment. But the trade-off thereby entailed meant, at
best, securing only modest returns on those investments in virtue of the relative size
of that constituencya body of opinion, as practice proved, below the level sufficient meaningfully to reconfigure a political language.
The effort to manipulate fascisms definitional criteria, in order to accommodate a
meaningful extension to radical Islam, has once more to do both with the ordinary
understandings attached to that concept as well as those understandings particular
to certain milieus.26 Together, and potentially at least, they furnish the contemporary political imagination with fertileif quite clearly demarcatedgrounds for
teasing out new meanings. Since the post-Second World War era, when the term
initially came to entertain uncertain boundaries (Gemie and Schrafstetter 2002,
413),27 fascism has, at an everyday level, yielded a continuity only in the core set of
political values incorporated within those boundaries: most prominently, militarism, racism and authoritarian nationalism. At the more reified level of general
theory, scholars have for several decades now contested the finer detail of a
definitive fascist minimum, in that a broad consensus has gravitated towards the
idea that it refers to the cultural and social rebirth of a national or ethic
community deemed to be in crisis (Griffin 2004, 228; see also Payne 1995; Eatwell
1996; Mann 2004; Paxton 2004; Griffin 2007a, 179180). But between those
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imaginationit lent hubris to the project in hand.32 Certainly, public opinion poll
data indicate the pronounced failure of the humanitarian case relative to the other
justifications (Eichenberg 2005, 176; Gershkoff and Kushner 2005, 531). Even if a
projected audience were to buy into the totalitarian label, it could only be by fixing
that continuum as denoting degrees of social control rather than those increasing
degrees of ideological conviction on which, in the inherited model, atrocities in
prospect were premised.33 That the picture sketched of Saddams Iraq better
approximated the model instead of a Stasi-style surveillance society is rather
belied by the account of Iraq upon which this part of the pro-war camp rested its
case: its overarching theme was a state whose fragile legitimacy derived from
impossibly intertwined circles of complicity and victimhood in which large parts of
the population were implicated in its modes of operation (Makiya 1998 [1989],
xxxii). The consequence, in short, was a serious disjuncture between the range of
the rhetorical pitch and the actual content of the message being conveyed.
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Notes
1. Following established precedent, I take this to denote an event that impacts on all aspects of the larger
human experience and in a broader historical perspective. A good example of the occasional hyperbole one finds in this type of claim is Martin Amis (2008, 206), who resists the view that our
experience of that event, that development, [can] be frictionlessly absorbed and filed away ...
September 11 continues, it goes on, with all its mystery, its instability, and its terrible dynamism.
2. From an opposing political direction, we might note also the attempt, in the immediate aftermath of
September 11th, to interpret events through the paradigm of anti-imperialism and the language of
anti-imperialist struggle. See Jameson (2001); Sontag (2001).
3. A central plank of Lillas argument is that the language of anti-totalitarianismbound up with
distinctively 20th-century experienceno longer has any traction on contemporary realities, hence
the need to revisit prior languages. This article is sympathetic to one aspect of that claim; perceptively,
Lilla (2005, 247) notes that the paradox of Western political discourse ever since the Second World
War is the more sensitive we became to the horrors brought on by the totalitarian tyrannies, the less
sensitive we became to tyranny in its more moderate forms. But to seek to reconnect with the theme
of tyranny in classical thought is a curious move, not least of all the lack of an available, public
understanding of that theme. It is also ahistorical in a specific sense; as Richter (2005, 224) notes, one
problem with Lillas analysis is that it finds an unchanging core meaning in tyranny.
4. By the same measure, key figures in the Bush administration are also reported, when having given
consideration to the naming of the response to September 11th, to have urged that it be viewed as an
opportunity (see Woodward 2002, 32; Draper 2007, 166).
5. Note that this is to draw a distinction between political argument and philosophical argument. At the
level of philosophy, an argument may fail tests that are either ethical or logical, if not bothtests that
concern the normative rightness of its prescriptions or its coherence, respectively. But at the level of
political argument, the tests that pertain in this contextand that dictate success or failureare
different; unless, that is, philosophy is to eclipse politics. See Freeden (2005).
6. One feature of post-September 11th discourse is the tendency, from all sorts of political positions,
rather keenly to ascribe motives to proposed and actual courses of action outside their designated
frame of reference. Thus, where public officials and liberal hawks profess commitments to antitotalitarianism and anti-fascism, others ascribe decidedly more prosaic motives like securing oil
contracts. Where Islamists profess grievances with western cultural practices or secular values,
others ascribe anti-imperialist or anti-capitalist motives to what are described (if not celebrated) as
post-colonial political movements.
7. Intentionality, that is, is a question of only second-order importance in relation to receptivity,
particularly given that an agent can never be assumed to be in complete control of the messages he
or she conveys. In the terms expressed by Freeden, it is the action-orientation of certain kinds of
political languageits recommendation of particular forms of conductthat brings the issue of its
consumption, as much as its production, into view (see Freeden 1996, 104105).
8. The politics of memory in this context have even run in different directions in different places. Most
curiously, the movement against the Iraq war in Germany coincided with a renewed interest in the
memory of the Allied air war and the bombings of German cities. For this reason where, in the
United States and elsewhere, the association of Saddam Hussein with Adolf Hitler was a stock feature
of the case for war, anti-war protests in Germany premised an empathetic identification with the
envisaged suffering of Iraqi civilians upon a timely remembrance of the victims of Dresden. See
especially Zehfuss (2007, 116121).
9. This is a form of study more developed in the United States than in British political studies, where the
concept of the rhetorical presidency, for example, has been advanced as a way of investigating the
presidential role in shaping political realities (see Tulis 1988; Zarefsky 2004; Maggio 2007).
10. Obviously, these different discursive settings bespeak audiences different in social composition, and the
varying positions from which the discourses are enunciated imply a different relation even within any
single audience. Notably, they extend to those more reflective sites of public opinion where, through
a procedure more familiar to political theory, carefully constructed arguments are liable to be given
weight. In that regard, the relevant audience may bear some relation to John Rawls idea of the
background culture of civil society, comprising the educated common sense of citizens, acquired and
sustained variously by education, conversation and reading (see Rawls 1996, 1314 and 2007, 57).
11. It is important to note that this regime-type vocabulary was deployed to cover not only the states that
Lilla primarily had in mind but also those movements brought into view by September 11th
movements associated with terrorism and religiously motivated political extremism.
12. In this sense, the meanings of regime-type concepts are shaped by historical experience: they are both
reworked in that connection, and sometimes supplanted by neologisms coined in connection with
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political innovations deemed to stretch the existing terms to an unworkable extreme. Despotism, for
instance, was invested with new meaning by Montesquieu in the 18th century, in connection with
the absolutist tendencies of the French monarchy. Bonapartism, in the following century, added the
connotation of militarism to despotic rule (see Boesche 1996; Baehr and Richter 2004).
13. It should be registered that both languages, in a directly inverted usage, have figured equally in the
attempt to delegitimate that same broad thrust of the response to September 11thusually with
reference to the purported imperial designs of American foreign policy and its secondary effects
upon the internal arrangements of the American political system. See especially Wolin (2003 and
2008) and Falk (2004, ch. 12, Will the empire be fascist?).
14. George Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, 20 September 2001,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html (accessed 1 May 2008).
15. President Bush discusses terror plot upon arrival in Wisconsin, 10 August 2006, http://
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/08/20060810-3.html (accessed 19 March 2008).
16. President Bush and Secretary of State Rice discuss the Middle East Crisis, 7 August 2006, http://
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/08/20060807.html (accessed 1 May 2008).
17. Reported in Washington Post, 30 August 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2006/08/29/AR2006082900585.html (accessed 10 March 2008).
18. National Security Strategy of the United States of America, March 2006, http://www.whitehouse.gov/
nsc/nss/2006/nss2006.pdf (accessed 10 March 2008).
19. See also Cohens (2007, ch. 1) depiction of Makiya as the Iraqi Solzhenitsyn. On Makiyas (1998
[1989], 115, 284 and 2006/7) (classical) model of totalitarianism, it is notable that he acknowledges
an explicit debt to Hannah Arendts conception.
20. On the idea of a moment of totalitarianism as performing a well-established political function that
sharpen[s] oppositions at the expense of obscuring moral and political ambiguities, see Rabinbach
(2006, 8788); see also Brooks (2006).
21. For related perspectives on conceptual change see Connolly (1983); Ball et al. (1989); Ball (1997).
22. Skinners (1974, 296297) argument is that, at one historical moment in time, shrewdnessalong
with related terms like ambition and frugalitychanged their meanings as Puritan ideologists
teased out different conceptions from an existing normative vocabulary. In a related discussion
Skinner does, at one time, consider one regime-type (democracy) in the same contexttracing its
metaphorical extension into a term of nigh-on universal commendation. Yet it is notable that he
judges the need to re-describe something, conversely, in condemnatory terms to be a conceptual
possibility that is empirically less usual (Skinner 1973, 298). Accordingly, our analysis here takes up
a possibility conceded by Skinner but dismissed as being without much consequence in political and
social reality.
23. Note that this is to draw on a distinction explicit in Skinners original discussion, but that the specific
rendering of it here may depart from Skinners own account. There is no claim, in short, to get
Skinner exactly right here; some features of the distinction are rather teased out with a view to how
they might inform the analysis that is to follow.
24. The concept of democracy, for instance, might be imagined to be made up of various component
partsparticipation, equality, self-determination and libertyeach in differing proportions, the
overall allocation of which is open to redistributive contestation (see Freeden 2004, 4).
25. Goot (2004, 256257), in an overview of world opinion surveys, notes a patternthe United States
excepted, but common to Britain, France, and Germanywhereby majority support, in May 2003,
for American policy on terrorism in the broadest sense had, by early 2004, given way to majorities
agreeing that the war in Iraq had hurt that policy.
26. As a political language, anti-fascism can well be imagined to vary from place to place, in depth as well
as content. Certainly, throughout the post-war period, it has borne a different valence in the political
and cultural life of different western nations, where variation turns upon historical issues like
guilt/victimhood, complicity/opposition and its relative allocation of space in respective political
cultures (Eley 1996, 73).
27. That uncertainty began from the inability of the two regimes which fascism was originally introduced in connection with to develop a recognisably specific doctrine between them. In George
Orwells (1968 [1946]) perhaps too austere verdict, the word emerged as a prime candidate for the
abuse of political words in virtue of signifying simply something not desirable.
28. The detachment, in the public imagination, of fascism from the Nazi period is also something which,
it must be said, has been facilitated by both historiographical and public debates about the appropriateness of assimilating that experience within any broader category.
29. On the political emotions see, for instance, Hall (2002); Marcus (2002); Clarke et al. (2006).
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30. Where the Marxian narrative plots the massesexploited by the bourgeoisieengaged in revolutionary struggle to achieve the communist future, the Islamist narrative (on this view) plots a
community of Muslim believersoppressed by the infidels and the weststruggling in jihad for a
restored caliphate.
31. To a lesser extent, the same discourse suggests the extended meaning is also being made to turn on
a model of (totalitarian) organisational design: a vanguardist conception of a select elite acting in the
name of a broader community and on the authority of privileged access to knowledge (see Hitchens
2001b; Berman 2004, 93; Amis 2008, 191; see also Burleigh 2006b, 2; Gray 2007, 69). Yet that too
was an idea that was without adequate weight, on the ordinary denotations of the term, to gain
traction.
32. Typically, in both forms of usage, authoritarianism is that category of the two which is used to cover
the greater number of cases, to the point of often being used as a straightforward synonym for
non-democratic government (see Brooker 2000; Linz 2000). From a polemical direction see also
Kirkpatrick (1982).
33. See Sigrid Meuschels (2000) apt distinction between two often conflated approaches, one denoting
totalitarianism as extermination and the other totalitarianism as total control. As critics of the case
for intervention in Iraq were quick to point out, the Baathist regimes acts of mass killing, even while
including genocide against parts of its own population, were in the past rather than immediate
prospect.
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