I have a friend who studied the history of fascism. She gets angry when people call Trump (or some other villain du jour) fascist. "Words have meanings! Fascism isn't just any right-winger you dislike!" She says Narendra Modi, the current prime minister of India, is absolutely, literally, a fascist.

submitted by Chipit from astralcodexten.substack.com

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[–]Chipit[S] 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Tagging left-wing socialist movements of pre-WWII as "right-wing" was just a desperate rear-guard aktion by the left to avoid being stained with the blood and misery they caused. It was always iffy, but now that they got the dictionaries to change their meaning, explicitly tagging "right-wing" as the definition of fascism, it appears it has worked.

That's what Ingsoc, the villain of George Orwell's 1984, was doing - redefining words to suit their purposes.