Draft:Kampfbegriff

A political catchphrase or Kampfbegriff (German: Kampf ["battle"] + Begriff ["concept"]. plural: Kampfbegriffe) develops when a political discourse is summarised in one memorable word or phrase. Moral panics are a common target for Kampfbegriffe, such as the Satanic Panic in the 1980s, or the debate about violence in video games in the 1990s and early 2000s. What distinguishes a typical buzzword from a Kampfbegriff is that classical buzzwords are typically used in business and advertising, often originating in jargon or neologisms (such as synergy or big data). A Kampfbegriff is not to be mistaken for fighting words.

A political catchphrase can become a signpost of a respective political ideology. They can find a large echo through news media, and become short- or long-term concepts for the discourse or symbol for the respective political situation. (For example, ) Whoever coins a concept and brings it into conversation initially possesses sovereignty of interpretation; though as the political discourse progresses this sovereignty can be lost and the public perception of the concept or phrase may transform. Targeted attempts to create Kampfbegriffe or political catchphrases can be part of the rhetoric of a political campaign.

Since the terms Kampfbegriff and buzzword are often connoted negatively, the question arises whether the given word or phrase is a value judgement or an accurate description. This, in itself, can become a topic of political debate, which serves to further spread the expression. Semiotically speaking, it is impossible to clearly distinguish between these semantics, because language comprehension already entails the interpretive layer of the linguistic sign.

A 1989 lexicon on German public parlance distinguishes between different forms of political catchphrases. The authors define Kampfbegriff as when political buzzwords are instrumentalised in particularism or in the creation of a Feindbild. If the phrase instead serves the identity of a group, they are designated as Fahnenwörter (so-called 'flag-words', such as the semiotic use of Democracy or Freedom).

Examples

Some political catchphrases are similar in character to euphemisms, such as ethnic cleansing or remigration. Names of state legislation often follow this pattern, such as Nazi Germany's Berufsbeamtengesetz (1933, 'Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service') and the United States' Fairness in Women's Sports Acts (2020-2026), both of which specifically targeted gourps of people for exclusion (Jews and socialists, and transgender and intersex people, respectively).

Other Kampfbegriffe are dysphemisms, for example Axis of Evil, the Great Satan, and Feminazi. In the rhetoric of far-right politics of the 21st century, the word 'ideology' has itself gained a negative connotation, and thus the act of attaching the word 'ideology' to a given term also creates a dysphemism. For instance, the terms gender ideology and DEI-ideology both serve as Kampfbegriffe to attack, respectively, feminism and inclusion intitiatives.

A further subset of political catchphrases are false technical terms or expressions from pseudoscience. This includes concepts such as Master race, white replacement, conversion therapy, and cultural Marxism.

Further examples of concise political buzzwords or Kampfbegriffe include:

• Progress (established in the 19th century during the industrial revolution, also an example of a Fahnenwort)
• Stop the Boats (Australian and British anti-immigration slogan, policy, )
• Make America Great Again / MAGA (slogan, ideology, political base, and pop culture phenomenon related to Donald Trump)
• Finlandization (the process by which one powerful country makes a smaller neighboring country refrain from opposing the former's foreign policy rules)
• Leitkultur ('Leading Culture'; a concept in German conservatism used in the late 1990s and early 2000s is the discourse around immigration)
• Agenda 2010 (a group of reforms done by the German government in 2010)
• Freiheit statt Sozialismus ('Freedom instead of Socialism', the 1976 election slogan of the CDU, coined by Alfred Dregger)
• Axis of Evil and Rogue State (both terms applied predominantly by the United States government after the end of the Cold War to adversarial states)
• Neoliberalism and Free Market

Sources

• Otto Ladendorf: Historisches Schlagwörterbuch. Ein Versuch. Trübner, Strassburg/Berlin 1906 (Reprint edited by Hans-Gerd Schumann. G. Olms, Hildesheim 1968).

• Gerhard Strauss, Ulrike Haß, Gisela Harms: Brisante Wörter von Agitation bis Zeitgeist. Ein Lexikon zum öffentlichen Sprachgebrauch. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1989, ISBN 3-11-012078-X (= Schriften des Instituts für Deutsche Sprache; in the foreword, pp. 32–38, 'Buzzwords in Politics: Flag-, Battle- and Enemy-words' are discussed, and in the text characterises several keywords accordingly).

Links

• Patrick Honecker: Vorreformatorische Schlagwörter. Spiegel politischer, religiöser und sozialer Konflikte in der frühen Neuzeit. Inaugural-Dissertation, Universität Trier 2002 (PDF; 928 kB; 209 pages).

References

This page will be placed in the following categories if it is moved to the article namespace.

Categories:

• Words
• Sociolinguistics
• Political catchphrases
• Discourse analysis