Here’s a pattern you’ve probably seen:
- Racists/nazi shows up and says racist/nazi things
- Get called out for it and/or banned
- They claim they are unfairly banned “for disagreeing.” They completely leave out the part about them being a racist nazi.
You know, that move. I’ve seen it more times than I can count and I bet you have too. They call disagreement with nazism “opinions you don’t like”, leaving out the nazism part. Any way of framing disagreements with them while subtracting out the actual content of what they say.
It’s so common that I think it deserves a word. I know there are generic descriptions: e.g. “being a troll”, but I think something specific to this particular behavior deserves its own word. That way it can just be identified and dismissed for what it is and not argued with.
Sounds like we don’t disagree about the fact that this behavior is out there. The question is just whether we call it out with a short word or phrase, or whether we should continue to describe it in a way that takes a couple of sentences. Like how in English have no one word for “As one gets older, the fear that time is running out and important opportunities are slipping away”. But in German, all of that has one word: Torschlusspanik.
As for the choice between long-word and short-word, I guess I disagree with the long-word approach because I don’t think subjective differences in word usage go away once you add more words. If a person’s use of a word is subjective and subject to variation across people, then a person’s word cloud is exponentially more so because it leads to more possible combinations of words. We have to deal with that subjectivity no matter what.
It’s just a question of whether a new phenomena is important enough or frequent enough that we should put it into a new word in our subjectively understood language that we already work with on a day to day basis. And if there’s room in the English language for himbo and smize, surely there’s room for something that catalogues some of the strategies used to defend nazism.
That’s true, though I don’t think this kind of behavior is something that only nazis or racists show. That’s why I don’t really think it would be a benefit to anyone to find a word for the situation when somebody is doing this AND is a racist.