Abstract
Brutal, tyrannical, fascist. When the Communist press refers to ‘that other jack-booted idol of the Tory Party Conference, Michael Heseltine’ (Morning Star, 5 Nov 1981), it does not really expect its readers to believe that Mr Heseltine dresses and behaves like a member of Hitler’s S.S. The political Left, however, has its own special brand of insults inherited from the grand days of the 1930s, when Fascism and Nazism represented all that was evil and when virtue was in Russian keeping. Its logic since then has been interesting, if a little over-simplified. In Mr Heseltine’s case, it runs roughly as follows. Hitler was supported by the political Right, Mr Heseltine belongs to the political Right, therefore Mr Heseltine is a Fascist and indistinguishable from Hitler and Mussolini, even to the extent of wearing jackboots secretly under his trousers. Observations suggests, however, that ‘jack-booted’ does not form part of the daily vocabulary of the average British worker and that only in very rare instances would he have the faintest idea of the meaning of the word. This, however, is probably beside the point. By employing such words issue after issue, the Morning Star is carrying out a series of religious exercises which amount to bowing in the direction of Moscow at least once a day.
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© 1983 Kenneth Hudson
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Hudson, K. (1983). J. In: The Dictionary of Even More Diseased English. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06516-5_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06516-5_10
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