The corruption of political language

[Tooting Carmen]

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[Dragoon]

1) Most definitely there has become a corruption of political language.

2)There are regional (on a world scale) differences between how certain words are used (socialism, liberalism, capitalism, etc).

3)Some of those words have multiple meanings.

[Tooting Carmen]

1) Most definitely there has become a corruption of political language.

2)There are regional (on a world scale) differences between how certain words are used (socialism, liberalism, capitalism, etc).

3)Some of those words have multiple meanings.

Quite.

[Andullero]

Key examples:

(1) "Liberal" = socialist. This mostly came about in the US, but has spread to other parts of the world increasingly too. Nowadays, those who advocate for progressive income tax rates and substantial State ownership of the economy are often called "liberals". However, regardless of the individual merits and setbacks of such policies, at the end of the day those are socialist ideas, not liberal ones. For good and for ill, "liberalism" (at least as originally understood) has meant minimising government involvement in social and economic affairs.

(2) "Nationalist" = racist. Nationalism, at least in the purer and more noble sense, means pride and love for one's country, its people, its language and its culture. However, as can be seen not least in this very forum, there are self-styled "nationalists" from multiracial nations like the USA and Brazil, who worry about their children having Black lovers who come from those countries themselves, but at the same time actively support mass immigration of Europeans and possibly East Asians. This is not "nationalism" - this is racism, pure and simple. At the end of the day, Afro-Americans and Afro-Brazilians are far more integral to their respective nations than a Norwegian or Korean person who just arrived at New York or Sao Paulo yesterday. (While there is a case to be made that ethnic nationalism has some validity for European and Asian countries, it ought to have no place whatsoever in New World nations that have been multiracial from their very inception).

(3) "Democracy" = freedom. A lot of people use the two words almost interchangeably, when actually they mean things that are different and even potentially contradictory. Democracy just means majority rule. Freedom means living one's life as one wishes. Thus ultimately, which sort of society is really more free: a parliamentary democracy where the majority party (putatively with the people's consent) has outlawed all sorts of speech and consensual sexual activity, or a dictatorship that nevertheless for the most part allows people to say and write what they want and sleep with whomever they want?

You could add progressivism there as well. Today it is equated with cultural marxism and wokeism, when original progressives were anything but racial equality fans.

[Tooting Carmen]

You could add progressivism there as well. Today it is equated with cultural marxism and wokeism, when original progressives were anything but racial equality fans.

As I mentioned in the middle of this thread, the crucial one I forgot to list in the OP is "reform", which in its current ideological meaning refers to mass privatisations and spending cuts.

[Tooting Carmen]

You could add progressivism there as well. Today it is equated with cultural marxism and wokeism, when original progressives were anything but racial equality fans.

Indeed, HG Wells' New Republic was quite frankly more racist and genocidal than a lot of Nazi and Ustashe propaganda.