Source: The Laundry Files, The Annihilation Score (2015), Chapter 14, “Infected” (p. 266)
“The word "communist" (as well as "Marxist") has been so overused and so abused by American leaders and the media as to render it virtually meaningless.”
The Left has done the same to the word "fascist".
Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Introduction
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Do you have more details about the quote "The word "communist" (as well as "Marxist") has been so overused and so abused by American leaders and the media as to …" by William Blum?
William Blum 17
American author and historian 1933–2018Related quotes
“Alas, irreverence has been subsumed by mere grossness, at least in the so-called mass media.”
Tom Lehrer
(1928) American singer-songwriter and mathematician
On the current state of satire, in Rhino Records online chat (17 June 1997)
Context: Alas, irreverence has been subsumed by mere grossness, at least in the so-called mass media. What we have now — to quote myself at my most pretentious — is a nimiety of scurrility with a concomitant exiguity of taste. For example, the freedom (hooray!) to say almost anything you want on television about society's problems has been co-opted (alas!) by the freedom to talk instead about flatulence, orgasms, genitalia, masturbation, etc., etc., and to replace real comment with pop-culture references and so-called "adult" language. Irreverence is easy — what's hard is wit.
Rush Limbaugh
(1951) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, author, and television personality
Speaking about Iraq War protests (February 2003), quoted in — [Hunt, Jim, They Said What?: Astonishing Quotes on American Democracy, Power, and Dissent, Polipoint Press, 2009, 22, 23398015M, 9780981709161, 0981709168, 2009023037, 313653904, [JK31.H88 2009]]
Norodom Sihanouk
(1922–2012) Cambodian King
Said during his exile in Peking, as quoted by Oriana Fallaci (June 1973), Intervista con la Storia (sixth edition, 2011).
Interviews
Ernst, Baron von Feuchtersleben
(1806–1849) Austrian psychiatrist, poet and philosopher
The Dietetics of the Soul; Or, True Mental Discipline (1838)
John Adams
(1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States
Letter to J.H. Tiffany (31 March 1819)
1810s
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
Essays
Context: I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.
“We Marxist communists are profoundly opposed to the anarchist doctrine. This doctrine is erroneous”
Leon Trotsky
(1879–1940) Marxist revolutionary from Russia
Order by the commissar for military affairs - on the murder of count Mirbach
How the Revolution Armed (1923)