...with some concern over a cup of coffee, “Hey, Tom. What made you go all Nazi? You have a PhD in political science, come from a respectable family, your father was a lawyer—and you... you turned out racist. What happened?”
Tom Sunić responds:
The usage of this type of negative epithet is pretty current in Western media and to some extent in the Western judiciary. The advantage of living in post-communist countries is that words such as “Nazis,” “fascists,” “racists,” no longer have such a bad resonance, despite the fact the new political class all over Eastern Europe is trying again legally to resurrect them with its original criminogenic meaning. Of course, this all happens under pressure from the West, where these qualifiers are in constant usage today. Where communism left off, modern liberalism continued.
I need to remind you that the usage of these value-loaded qualifiers was standard practice in the communist vernacular and the media against any dissident, aired on all wavelengths 24 hours a day. Towards the end of the communist rule there was an enormous amount of psycholinguistic saturation amidst the populace, so that everybody got sick of that language—even the communist scribes who had made these words “fashionable” in the first place.
Distorted political verbiage was the main cause of the collapse of communism. Hence, the paradox is that these words—used today as shut-up words in the West—no longer have such an oppressive weight in Eastern Europe. In fact, they often serve as a badge of honor for some people!
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Excerpted from a longer interview of Tom Sunić from Counter-Currents Publishing.
