Posted on 02/06/2008 12:08:18 PM PST by Between the Lines
Exactly! If I weren't so lazy (or felt better) I'd look up and link my old "First World vs. Third World leftism" thread.
This is why people who are clearly of the majority culture in the US all of a sudden develop a magical minority identity: they have visually undetectable native American ancestry, or they are now a Celt, or they are now a Melungeon, or a Huguenot.
Wideawake, I've known for some time that you are a polymath on the order of Aristotle, Sir Francis Bacon, or John Stewart Mill, an expert on everything from philosophy to theology to spittin' out rhymes on the street. But now you have me groveling in the dust at your feet. How many other people know who Melungeons are?
It's too bad the Cajuns of Louisiana are implicated in the Confederacy. There'd have been a Cajun National Liberation Army a long time ago!
This feel-sorry-for-me-my-noble-ancestors-were-victims-of-oppression is a signal feature of the white Southern nationalist movement too, though its members don't like to admit it.
This is very true. They also base their nationalism on Celtic identity--which means no sympathy for the one movement in the world most like theirs, the Orange Lodge of Northern Ireland, but they also play footsie with leftist movements like the Scottish National Party and Parti Quebecois. Plus their isolationism and protectionism proves they aren't real Confederates but, like "palaeolibertarianism," merely another modern creation of the "palaeo" right pretending to be something it's not.
The leftism of the Castilian separatist movement makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Spain is as much a Castilian creation as Great Britain is an English creation. Yet while English nationalism is "rightwing," Castilianism is "leftwing."
ZC: Would you mind, for the sake of clarity, defining what you mean by "Left-wing" and "Right-wing"?
W: the majority culture in the US all of a sudden develop a magical minority identity:
Self-hatred is unnatural. Generally (it seems to me) folks have to be heavily propagandized, or over-educated to do it. If pride in being the "majority" ethnicity becomes politically incorrect, the only sane ways out are to re-cast oneself as a minority, or to forcefully reject the political correctness.
I've spent a lifetime trying to figure it out and I have never succeeded. All I can tell you is that I reject the common American conservative assertion that National Socialism and Fascism must be leftwing because they are socialist or collectivist or promote big government. After all, patriotism and national identity are collectivist. I also reject the American conservative political spectrum which insists anarchists are on the right and totalitarians on the left because there are anarchists on the left (who prefer leftist totalitarians to rightist anarchists) and totalitarians on the right (who for some inexplicable reason are heroes to rightwing anarchists who hate leftwing anarchists). Furthermore, once one has dismissed Hitler (mach shemo!) and Mussolini one still has to deal with "big government" dictators like Francisco Franco, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, Getulio Vargas, George Papadopoulos, Rafael Trujillo, etc., from whom many American conservatives have either supported or have never felt it necessary to distance themselves from. Have many American conservatives have ever claimed that Franco was on the left?
Then there is the unhappy fact that "fascism is on the right" is not an invention of the left. Fascist and national socialist movements themselves not only consider themselves rightwingers but as basically the only true anti-Communists just as Communists consider themselves the only true anti-Fascists. Back during the heyday of European fascism, fascist movements were hailed by many anti-Communists, not only in the United States, but among Zionists in 'Eretz Yisra'el (eg, ultra-right Zionist 'Abba' 'Achime'ir insisted that Hitler's [mach shemo!] anti-Semitism was merely a false outer garment to be rejected but that the essential nature of Nazism was anti-Communism and was to be embraced). So even as a conservative myself I find it somewhat facetious and dishonest for contemporary American rightwingers to suddenly discover that Communism and Fascism are the same thing because they both practice "big government."
The closest I have been able to come in determining the real difference between left and right (at least in their collectivist forms) is that the collectivism of the left is atomistic, egalitarian, and horizontal while that of the right is "organic," hierarchical, and vertical. But then there's the fact that many leftist "national liberation movements" (such as Kwame Nkrumah's in Ghana) supported by the Communist bloc (and other such movements supported by the contemporary left) actually seem to fit the definition of rightwing, rather than leftwing, collectivism. For some reason the only "non-western" peoples whose extreme nationalism seems to have a "rightwing" reputation are Japan and Turkey. Go fig.
I suppose ultimately it simply comes down to convention, and what one and one's enemies choose to label one.
The terms are a mess ... largely because they have been ripped out of context. They originally referred to the seating arrangements in a French parliament ... the revolutionary socialists on the left and the aristocratic traditionalists on the right. Any other use of the terms is metaphoric at best and obfuscatory at worst.
You bring up, for example, German National Socialism. And make no mistake, they truly were socialists ... Hitler read and was inspired by Marx. But they were also anticommunist. (IMO, that's because bloody totalitarian dictators don't like competition.) So: Does their socialism make them leftwing, or their anticommunism make them rightwing? Or are the terms nonsense?
If you haven't read any of Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihin's books, I strongly recommend them. Leftism is a great introductory history of socialist totalitarianism.
Incidentally, I more or less came to the point of rejecting the use of the terms generally, by way of rejecting them in the context of the Catholic Church after Vatican II. They're utterly inadequate to describe the polarization in that religious context, but they're also inadequate to describe American (or any other) politics.
Is the pro abortionist who also hates gun control Left, or Right? How about the welfare state advocate, who also supports a strong national defense?
Left and Right don't adequately describe either of them. But everybody has his own vague idea of what sort of political position the terms denote ... and those ideas aren't necessarily coherent from person to another.
contemporary American rightwingers to suddenly discover that Communism and Fascism are the same thing
I didn't "suddenly" discover that ... I realized it right away, 'way back in middle-school, when I learned what Communism and National Socialism were.
Have many American conservatives have ever claimed that Franco was on the left?
More of the problem: Do Left and Right describe economic freedom, personal freedom, religious freedom, something else? The original meaning (back to the French parliament) was economic.
Thank you! And noted.
The whole business of describing the political spectrum as running from "individualism" on the right to "collectivism" on the left strikes me as false and counterproductive. As I pointed out earlier, patriotism is itself "collectivistic" (this observation is actually not mine, but of a national socialist former John Bircher attacking the individualism of the American right). But this is far from the only example of conservative "collectivism."
Roman Catholic social teaching, as based on Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, opposed to Marxist class struggle the idea of a society as a body in which each member has its own particular function. A war among classes is thus no different than a war between organs of a single body. This philosophy is traditionally referred to as "corporatism" or "corporativism," but one can hardly call it individualist. Is the notion of all members of society as organs of a single body working together not collectivist?
One of the most egregious examples of dishonesty about the individualist/collectivist issue was perpetrated by none other than Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, in that organization's Blue Book. A whole chapter is devoted to the philosophy of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West. Welch interprets Spengler as suggesting that civilizations are indeed organic entities, like the bodies of individual human beings--they are born, grow old, and eventually die by succumbing to the "cancer" of "collectivism." There are two problems with this: 1)as I understand it, Spengler actually said that eventually civilizations die from individualism (the exact opposite of Welch's interpretation), and 2)the notion that countries/societies/civilizations are organic bodies made up of individual "cells" (ie, the people who make them up) is itself collectivist! The American Right does indeed to be very confused on this issue, but no more so than those on the Left who think state socialism is the ultimate form of individualist rebellion.
Before closing, I'd like to return to the issue of Francoism. Many American conservatives, while condemning Mussolini's Italian Fascism as "identical to Communism" will nevertheless defend Franco, whose official ideology was national syndicalism (syndicalism being a form of radical socialism). In fact, the full official name of the only legal political party under Franco was Falange Espanola Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de la Ofensive Nacional Sindicalista (which translates literally and clumsily as "Traditionalist Spanish Phalanx and of the Juntas of the National Syndicalist Offensive"). Again, I note that few conservatives make the claim that Franco's Spain was essentially the same as a Communist state. Shoot, Trujillo's Dominican Republic could perhaps be defined as socialist because Trujillo and his family owned everything (there was also a cult of personality in which each home was "encouraged" to display Trujillo's portrait), but many conservatives who loudly denounce Nazism and Fascism as being on the left regard Trujillo as a valiant anti-Communist ally. (At least the Birchers did.)
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