Buzzwords have sometimes important functions; they can focus a crowd on a common topic.
"Communist" for example; maybe some would dispute that it's a buzzword, but in fact it was used for decades to describe socialists, not communists. Among others. After a while it was used on everyone who was disliked - social democrats in developing countries, for example.
The Western nations simplified the Cold War into a struggle "against communists" to make it easier to rally their people for this struggle. Simplification means loss of complexity, of information. Sometimes you're simply wrong with a simplified approach.
Quite the same happened in the last years. Suddenly the term "terrorist" became applicable on movements that were called "guerrillas" before 2001. Third world dictators just needed to pledge they'd fight communists to ensure Western support during the Cold War - today they seem to be required to pledge to fight terrorists.
But the people learned from their experience, so the term "terrorist" isn't nearly as loosely in use as during the Cold War (the Rhodesian Apartheid regime called their fight against the black population a part of the west's struggle against communism - I don't know about a modern anti-terrorism counterpart yet).
An accepted definition for terrorism would help, though. So far the United Nations weren't able to agree on one despite intense efforts. Some (Non-western and Western, democratic and dictatorial) nations feared that their actions fell under proposed definitions of terrorism.
Much less reserved is the use of another degrading buzzword; islamo-fascism/islamo-fascist. Somehow "we" never agreed on all Arabs or all Muslims as our enemies, so "we" obviously needed to identify an ideology as our enemy and the power behind those terrorists that attacked us. The result was "islamo-fascist". I believe I read that the first time around 2002, and it has become quite widespread in the meantime. It's in fact almost thirty years old. To date, it's still highly unusual in Germany. Very good online translation programs don't even know it.
So let's have a look at this word "islamo-fascism"...
"islamo-..." - OK, nobody would deny that AQ is an Islamic terror group/movement/network/ideology/whatever.
"...-fascist" - I never understood that. There's nothing fascistic in the modern Islamic terrorism.
Reminder; fascism is not particularly anti-semitic, that was nazism, a variant of fascism. Fascism was not much more anti-semitic as was common in Europe during the 1920's (Mussolini, for example, didn't do much about the few Jews in Italy for the first 15 years of his rule).
So why this constructed relation to fascism? I guess because almost nobody denies that fascism is bad, so connecting Islamic extremists to fascism serves the purpose to clarify they're bad, without further explanation.
Anyway - "islamo-fascist" is simply misleading. It might help to mobilize simple-minded people to sacrifice in average some hundred dollars wealth per year for a global fight, but it does not help in that fight in any other way. It distracts.
Buzzwords in use to sell new gadgets to forces contribute to waste of financial resources - buzzwords in use to degrade opposing people manipulate our stance to foreign politics (sometimes even internal politics) and can lead to much worse effects.
We should keep our languages accurate and correct - and resist stupid buzzwords that were designed to manipulate the weak-minded. The truth is either motivating enough or any further motivation through manipulation does only harm us.
"Communist" for example; maybe some would dispute that it's a buzzword, but in fact it was used for decades to describe socialists, not communists. Among others. After a while it was used on everyone who was disliked - social democrats in developing countries, for example.
The Western nations simplified the Cold War into a struggle "against communists" to make it easier to rally their people for this struggle. Simplification means loss of complexity, of information. Sometimes you're simply wrong with a simplified approach.
Quite the same happened in the last years. Suddenly the term "terrorist" became applicable on movements that were called "guerrillas" before 2001. Third world dictators just needed to pledge they'd fight communists to ensure Western support during the Cold War - today they seem to be required to pledge to fight terrorists.
But the people learned from their experience, so the term "terrorist" isn't nearly as loosely in use as during the Cold War (the Rhodesian Apartheid regime called their fight against the black population a part of the west's struggle against communism - I don't know about a modern anti-terrorism counterpart yet).
An accepted definition for terrorism would help, though. So far the United Nations weren't able to agree on one despite intense efforts. Some (Non-western and Western, democratic and dictatorial) nations feared that their actions fell under proposed definitions of terrorism.
Much less reserved is the use of another degrading buzzword; islamo-fascism/islamo-fascist. Somehow "we" never agreed on all Arabs or all Muslims as our enemies, so "we" obviously needed to identify an ideology as our enemy and the power behind those terrorists that attacked us. The result was "islamo-fascist". I believe I read that the first time around 2002, and it has become quite widespread in the meantime. It's in fact almost thirty years old. To date, it's still highly unusual in Germany. Very good online translation programs don't even know it.
So let's have a look at this word "islamo-fascism"...
"islamo-..." - OK, nobody would deny that AQ is an Islamic terror group/movement/network/ideology/whatever.
"...-fascist" - I never understood that. There's nothing fascistic in the modern Islamic terrorism.
Reminder; fascism is not particularly anti-semitic, that was nazism, a variant of fascism. Fascism was not much more anti-semitic as was common in Europe during the 1920's (Mussolini, for example, didn't do much about the few Jews in Italy for the first 15 years of his rule).
So why this constructed relation to fascism? I guess because almost nobody denies that fascism is bad, so connecting Islamic extremists to fascism serves the purpose to clarify they're bad, without further explanation.
Anyway - "islamo-fascist" is simply misleading. It might help to mobilize simple-minded people to sacrifice in average some hundred dollars wealth per year for a global fight, but it does not help in that fight in any other way. It distracts.
Buzzwords in use to sell new gadgets to forces contribute to waste of financial resources - buzzwords in use to degrade opposing people manipulate our stance to foreign politics (sometimes even internal politics) and can lead to much worse effects.
We should keep our languages accurate and correct - and resist stupid buzzwords that were designed to manipulate the weak-minded. The truth is either motivating enough or any further motivation through manipulation does only harm us.
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