The F-Word, The S-Word and The C-Word

As long ago as 1946, Orwell point out that "fascist" no longer meant anything beyond "something not desirable". Did it ever? What have all "fascist" regimes or movements ever had in common with each other but with no one else?

But at least "fascist" always means "something not desirable". "Socialist" can mean "something not desirable" or "something desirable" depending on who is speaking, and it is by no means always clear which meaning is intended. It never means anything more than one or the other, though. Again, did it ever? Anyone who has been active in the Labour Movement is very familiar with its use to mean "whatever the person speaking happens to think", not least when the person speaking is oneself.

Is "conservative" going the same way?

Proponents of the "free" market can apparently now be "conservative", even though their system destroys each and all of national self-government (the only basis for international co-operation, and including the United Kingdom as greater than the sum of its parts), local variation, historical consciousness, family life (founded on the marital union of one man and one woman), the whole Biblical and Classical patrimony of the West, agriculture, manufacturing, small business, close-knit communities, law and order, civil liberties, academic standards, all forms of art, mass political participation within a constitutional framework, respect for the absolute sanctity of each individual human life from the point of fertilisation to the point of natural death, the constitutional and other ties among the Realms and Territories having the British monarch as Head of State, the status of the English language and the rights of its speakers both throughout the United Kingdom and elsewhere, and the rights of British-descended communities throughout the world.

And proponents of the neoconservative (i.e., paleo-Trotskyist) war agenda can apparently now be "conservative", even though those agenda are colossally expensive to taxpayers, massively disruptive of the moral and social order, and utterly calamitous to national defence both against the entrenchment of existing enemies and against the creation of new ones.