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7. A politically ultraconservative or reactionary person.
rtwngAvngr said:Check out definition #7 of the word "white" at dictionary.com.(http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=white)
Has ANYONE ever heard of this definition for white before? Or are powers at play above the radar?
William Joyce said:If you announced that without providing the link, I would have thought you were joking. But the link appears to be real. Man.
rtwngAvngr said:Check out definition #7 of the word "white" at dictionary.com.(http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=white)
Has ANYONE ever heard of this definition for white before? Or are powers at play above the radar?
Isaac Brock said:No, the term is historical. In the 19th century revolutionaries such as during the French Revolution and Russian Revolution were considered Reds. Counter-revolutionaries were called Whites such as supporters of Tsar in the Russian Revolution. It was also used during the revolts in Prussia for supporters of the ultra-conservative Bismark governance against the reformers.
rtwngAvngr said:This is the common noun definition. There is no historical defintion cited. Your assertion is like saying that a packer is not one who packs, but someone on a sports team in Green Bay. I don't buy your feeble explanation.
rtwngAvngr said:This is the common noun definition. There is no historical defintion cited. Your assertion is like saying that a packer is not one who packs, but someone on a sports team in Green Bay. I don't buy your feeble explanation.
The designation White had two meanings. First, it stands in contradistinction to the Reds of the revolutionary Red Army of supporters of the Soviets and Bolshevism. Second, the word "white" had monarchist associations: historically each Russian Tsar was solemnly called the white tsar, and the monarchist ideal during the civil war was known as the white idea.
Gall's book Bismarck: the White Revolutionary appeared in German in 1980 and in English translation in 1986. It is probably the most searching biography we have. First of all we should note that Gall wrote a 'life'. Germans do not write many biographies - there are almost as many of Bismarck in English as in German. Gall wrote a biography to counter the school of social historians for whom the individual matters little. But in one way he was influenced by them. The book contains many long reflective passages and not much life or action. Crankshaw's dismissive biography (1981) is half as long but twice as lively! Gall's main theme in underlined in the subtitle: he sees Bismarck as a 'white revolutionary', that is as a conservative revolutionary as opposed to a radical or red one. This argument is a rapier thrust at Gall's opponents, who argued that Bismarck was a hide-bound defender of a moribund society and therefore responsible for his country's Jurassic backwardness and for the prolonged ascendancy of the military. Gall points out that the Prussian gentry saw him as subversive and so disowned him: they ought to have known a conservative by sight. He says also that Germany under Bismarck underwent more change than any other European country, and so if he was attempting to preserve a dinosaur in amber he was a colossal failure.
