Donald Rumsfeld has been muttering darkly about the “vicious extremists” who constitute, in a convenient echo of the second world war, “the rising threat of a new type of fascism”. The phrase “a new type of fascism” is cleverer than it looks, subtler than the boss’s recent adoption of “Islamic fascism”. The rider “a new type of” is designed to acknowledge the obvious fact that what is under consideration is not “fascism” as hitherto understood, while allowing oneself to say the scary word “fascism” anyway, because the opportunity it provides to paint opponents as “appeasers” is too good to pass up . . .

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My review in today’s Guardian, and a further discussion.

• Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War: Palestine, 9-11, Iraq, 7-7
by Ted Honderich (Continuum)

Suppose I intend to assassinate a man whose death, everyone agrees, would make the world a better place. Unfortunately, the only means I have to do so is a nuclear bomb. Knowing a little about nuclear bombs, I predict that its detonation will kill a million other people. Still, the villain needs to die. So I set off the bomb. Is it reasonable for me to claim afterwards that I didn’t intend to kill the million other people, that they were regrettable “collateral damage” in my noble undertaking? Or should I say that, yes, I killed a million, but 20 million previously oppressed people will now live in liberty and comfort? Can I even say that I had a “moral right” to go nuclear?

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After my talk at the Edinburgh Book Festival yesterday a man in the signing queue claimed that mir, the Russian for “peace” (also “world” or “village commune”) was used by hardline Soviets as code for “the eventual triumph of global socialism”. Thus for a Soviet to say “I come in peace” or to set up a “Peace Committee” did not quite mean what it implied to Western ears. Interesting if true. Mir was also, of course, the name of the USSR’s space station, and one NASA director thought in hindsight that the name had been an Unspeak trick:

I almost wish the former Soviet Union had named the Mir something more combative back in ‘86. Knowing our politicians and public, that red flag waving would probably have resulted in a big station, a lunar outpost, and a mission enroute to Mars by now. So once again, we were outwitted by Communist propaganda that lulled us into staying with the short-flight shuttle.

What are your favourite contemporary abuses of the word “peace”, readers?

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A nation is like a house. It needs a sturdy roof to keep the rain off, maybe some decking in the garden, and a set of impregnable locks on the front door. David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, understands this. That is why his new “mini-manifesto” [pdf] is called “Built to last”. In an earlier, draft version of the document (still available here [pdf]), a logo capped the phrase with a roof, so:

Notice how the roof is not too pointy. It’s a friendly, reassuring roof. In concert with the slogan, reminiscent as it is of a no-nonsense Ronseal advert, the image is one of dependability. Indeed, it is probably meant to remind voters of many happy weekend hours spent in home-improvement megastores. Let’s go to Built to Last! Alternatively, it may even gesture towards the Great Pyramid of Cheops, which famously has lasted quite a long time.

I rue the passing of this evocative graphic in the final version of the document, which is in serious Tory blue and contains no visual frippery. And it uses the phrase “built to last” only once, in the leader’s foreword: “Our aims and values are built to last” - which is resoundingly vague, if not actually self-defeating. If you say your “aims” will last indefinitely, might you not be confessing that you will never actually achieve them? At any rate, the image of the country as a well-secured house subliminally persists: in the promises, for instance, to erect “proper border controls” (where, the false implication runs, none currently exist), or to defend our laws from pesky European interference by binning the Human Rights Act . . .

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The spokesman for the UK’s Association of Chief Police Officers is recommending that police be given new “summary powers”, including banning individuals from certain areas and imposing instant fines, to tackle “antisocial behaviour”. Most news sources are reporting the idea as one of “instant justice”, as though that were somehow a bad thing.

Of course, soppy due-process fetishists, in league as they are with the terrorists, might complain that “instant justice” is actually an oxymoron. What is instant is simply not justice, the argument would go, in the same way that, for example, what is instant is simply not coffee. The analogy is revealing, since people who care about the taste of their coffee are generally fey liberals. In the modern world we have a human right to instantaneity in all things. We can only hope that Parliament will not produce an equivalent of the smug killjoy from the Grolsch beer adverts: “Shtop! This justice is not ready!”

Such whinging is anyway easily refuted by the inspirational example in literature of the policeman as dispenser of “instant justice”. He is firm and incorruptible, and his puissant firearm is even called a Lawgiver. It is, of course, Judge Dredd, hero of the postapocalyptic megalopolis in the long-running comic serial published in 2000AD. (Dredd was impersonated, with artistically unimpugnable lack of affect, by Sylvester Stallone in the 1995 film.) If Tony Blair secretly fantasizes about wearing Dredd’s shoulder-pads, chains and helmet, and shouting “I am the law!” to all the antisocial perps who threaten our very way of life, I salute him.

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While I was away, I noticed with some admiration that the US and UK governments had invented a new term of war unspeak: “sustainable ceasefire”. In vetoing international calls for an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon during the Rome peace conference on July 26, Condoleeza Rice said:

We have to have a plan that will actually create conditions in which we can have a ceasefire that will be sustainable.

The rhetorical purpose here is plainly to reverse the world’s understanding of what “ceasefire” actually means, in order to allow the war to continue. As Maureen Dowd put it pithily in her NYT column channelling George W Bush’s inner thoughts:

We talked about our plan to keep using fancy phrases like ‘lasting peace’ and ’sustainable ceasefire,’ so we don’t actually have to cease the fire.

The meaning of “ceasefire”, however, is not obscure . . .

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