Fascism
Why is Patrick McKiernan (September 7) polluting the arenas of discussion with diatribes against, of all things, nee-fascism? Maybe your correspondent has been reading about Portugal and the Mozambique massacres, but why has he not also been reading about the activities of the police in Communist States?
The term fascism as used by political mudslingers since the thirties was an invention of Moscow, introduced for the purpose of leading on people to think of world, and national and local politics as being the field subject to the conflict of two necessarily antagonistic forces; in other words we simpletons belonging to the general public were being conditioned to think out our activities in terms of class-struggle terms only.
Brutal policing activities — whether neo-marxist or marxist or maoist or fascist or neofascist or establishmental — are always bad both as such and as relative to those on the receiving end.
Let us not, in the columns of the Catholic Herald, forget the name of Topcliffe, who made life so miserable for Catholics under Elizabeth Tudor. I just wonder whether it would have made Topcliffe nastier to have been either a neo-fascist or a neo-marxist.
Brian Coffey 13 Elms Avenue,
London, NAO.