Defined terms

When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson

The idols of the marketplace

Contra:

Nor do the definitions or explanations wherewith in some things learned men are wont to guard and defend themselves, by any means set the matter right. Francis Bacon

A snarkluffle

I commented on a post elsewhere asking, rhetorically, whether someone should accept a challenge to debate the something definitional about national socialism vs. social nationalism, or somesuch. I haven't been able to dig it out because when I responded to some snark complaining that I should have read some article somewhere referred to before saying anything I wasn't able to find my way back to the beginning. I guess the failure of Hansel's plan put me off it. I was like that with work e-mail when asked about my e-mail on such-and-such a date. It was quicker to bat the ball back asking for more detail about what they now wanted to know. Often that was enough but if they came back it was almost always quicker to start over from scratch than to sift through thousands of emails. That led to a more sanitary habits of zeroing out everything in folders at least once a week. After all, 98.5%+ of it was dreck anyway.

I wasn’t commenting on the article—I was responding to the underlying question. “Should I debate what is Nazi means.” I said no because the premise of the proposition is that specific words correspond solely to how they were originally used. Here’s an example. The psuedo-academic distinction that started the question was actually a stalking horse to prop up the respectability fascistic viewpoints.

It's hard to beat this take of whoever FDR's Toby Ziegler, Sam Seaborne and CJ Clegg figures were:

The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

Message to Congress on Curbing Monopolies by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 29, 1938 (I am indebted to Heather Cox Richardson for leading me to the quote in her recent book Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America.)

Meanings change over time

When the automobile began to take off in popularity during the 20s there was some public concern about mixing its traffic with horsedrawn conveyances. So, there was a lot of construction of new roads and highways. Some of them were financed through tolls. There had been turnpikes before then going wayback referring to the pole blocking the roadway that would only admit a wagon if the toll keeper took the fee and raised the pike. A couple of hundred years before that, pike had a specific meaning of a weapon of the type used successfully by the plebe foot soldiers in formation against the landed gentry cavalry on horseback expecting just to ride them down. On the new Pennsylvania Turnpike, no one likely said “I don’t see any pike” or “where are my tollhouse cookies?”.

Word's shed their origins

Hiltlervolk didn’t call themselves Nazis. In Bavaria it was a derogatory term for a bumpkin. Der Fürhrer, the term meaning the leader of something, whose title took on ultra-authoritarian, genocidal connotations later, grew up in nearby Bavaria and is highly likely to have been aware of the connotation. And, by all accounts he did not own it as a brand. Self-deprecation wasn’t his style. Nazi was originally a diminutive of the name Ignatz, a prototypical hick figure of fun.

Hitler’s joined Deutsche Arbeiterpartei 1919, then a small nationalist party where he quickly rose to leadership positions. DAP rebranded as an explicitly nationalist, anti-Semitic party Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterparte, NSDAP in early 1920. After that the nickname began to attach but then likely faded within Germany with the rise of the Brown Shirts and then the Gestapo.

Change can come in sudden breaks

In the US, name recognition of the party and Hitler slowly grew. The putdown “Nazi” label probably lagged because even among the large German population here, only some were from the region where it had its original, generic use. The US brand was somewhat more positive than not—”Hitler is a man you do business with” was heard among the remaining wealthy captains of industry in the Thirties.

Even in the runup to the Second War in Europe the NSDAP was not in such bad odor as to drive the American German Bund running for cover. The openly the German original and thought it would be dandy if we followed the example. In February 1939 they staged a rally at the Madison Square Garden featuring full-dress regalia and buckets of anti-Semitic vitriol.

According to Google ngram, the frequency in print of “Nazi” peaked around 1942, fell until 1956, before rising to another peak in 1967 and declining to a relative plateau since the turn of the century.

Meanings are hard to pin down

Language is as language does. Words and phrases are fluid over time and always context dependent. Getting into sophomoric debates for disputing what the word “Nazi” REALLY means accepting your opponent’s measure of success. It’s not only fruitless, it’s pointless.

The real question presented

The salience of the label of Nazi is not “is this the actual continuation of the party founded by Adolph Hitler under something like Apostolic Succession?” You can argue that it term has become simply a strong term of condemnation. Or you can frame the discussion as “_____ is engaging in speech using words, phrases and rhetoric similar to those used by the Nazi party in close correspondence beginning with ‘polluting the blood of America’.”

A debate on those grounds isn’t one who is seeking to move the opinion needle away from strong disapproval in the direction of neutral wants to have. Their objective is to be able to claim “See? I proved it. MAGA is not the same as Nazi.”

Mascot of the Day