Posted on 01/03/2002 4:05:05 PM PST by Come And Take It
If you have the stomach for it, spending a lot of time on Marxists.org and actually reading the historical papers and essays there can be amazingly illuminating, although painfully boring.
The communists will grab anything they feel can be used as a tool to spur the mass to revolution. There are essays about how radical Islam can be used for this purpose- which is why you find men like Ramsey Clark (former US Attorney General under LBJ and radical leftist, member of the World Workers Party, and founder of the communist organization IAC and all of its umbrella groups) stating that "Islam may be the most important moral force in the world today".
Oh, and Clark? He and his organizations spend millions of dollars they raise as various charities on prison outreach programs, where they go in to the literally captive audiences and preach radical Islam and radical socialism.
But that is tangental to this thread.
"Great article!One could also argue that the whole left-wing/right-wing "political spectrum" idea, with "moderates" and compromisers in the supposedly desirable middle, is another socialist device to confuse our thinking, cramp it into a single dimension and label people with misleading labels like "liberal" and "progressive".
I wonder if anyone has information on the history of these concepts."
The Ayn Rand Lexicon will give you the history and origins (or etymology) of various terminologies. You do get it, the leftists gets very testy when people point this out.
I have been telling people this for most of my adult life (about 10 years).
Whenever I have pointed this out in the past in other places, the leftists immediately attack. This shows you are on the right line of attack. Grab on to it like a pit bull and don't let go...
/joh
That's why Nazi Germany outlasted the USSR and Red China by exactly how many years? I detect a logical fault.
/john
/john
TONIGHT...
...put the blasted Rose Bowl game on MUTE for a while and join AnnaZ and Mercuria for A Very Unspun New Year!!
Our guest line-up includes:
Heidi Maher - If you haven't been reading about her husband Ted, who has now been imprisoned in Monaco for two years under the most suspicious circumstances, click HERE and bone up before the show!
David Keene - Chairman of the American Conservative Union, who will be talking about the upcoming CPAC shindig!
Sean Finnegan - columnist for Mercurial Times and Sierra Times, who will be rapping with us about Klamath, issues of freedom, and what it's like to work in Mercuria's on-line scribbler sweat shop!
That's TONIGHT - JANUARY 3, 2002, from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. PST - on UNSPUN WITH AnnaZ!!
We will be taking calls (but don't even bother trying while we have a guest on the air)...
1-866-RADIOFR!!!
The left/right paradigm that developed from these competing theories had liberalism on the left of the line and conservatism on the right. Liberalism assumed the need for radical change whereas conservativism assumed the need to retain the established order.
As time has passed, the term liberalism has lost its' original meaning. In many ways, most of us at FreeRepublic are classical liberals.
In any event, under Nazism, the national symbols of a culture are raised to a religious status, the state is granted the position of the King, as if its position were ordained by God, and private property is left in the hands of individuals favored by the omnipotent State. So, in essence, Nazism is conservativism taken to the extreme. It takes the people's culture that has heretofore bound that people together and elevates that culture to a religious level while establishing a favored aristocracy served by faceless serfs and slaves. There is no check on the power of the King at all. Hence, Nazism falls to the far right on the traditional paradigm.
On the other hand, communism is considered the complete overthrow of traditional institutions--the parliament, the church, the executive--and their replacement by a completely new system whereby the state owns all property but its' power is held in check by the communist party, representing the working class. As the society passes through the stage of socialism, and into a stage where manufacturing can meet the needs of all persons within the society, the society enters into the stage of communism, where the state whithers away, because the only decisions to be made are decisions of production and distribution. With the existence of only one class, and there being no need to redistribute limited resources, there remains no need for a state, which is only organized force used to keep a ruling class in power. Hence, with no state at all, communism falls at the far left of the traditional paradigm.
This said, I find the traditional paradigm somewhat useless in the modern world. A more useful paradigm would be one that measures the real social and economic freedom of the peoples that live under various political and economic systems. Under such a paradigm, Nazism, Communism, and Islamicism, would all fall at one end of the line, let us say the right since historically in the social sciences the right has meant a powerful state or king, meaning little freedom, and libertarianism would fall at the far end of the left.
I hope this sheds some light on the topic, and the terms, as they are thrown around quite a bit without definition. One thing is certain though. The Nazis did not nationalize any industries except those owned by Jews, and these were soon passed, even given, to favored capitalists in the fatherland. The extent to which a Fascist state is involved in the economy is that it will typically break unions and/or supply slave labor for factory owners. In exchange, it expects to receive the manufactured goods that the state requires, and it expects to receive them timely.
People on the Left share these traits: belief in some world order or future world order... anti-capitalist, anti-wealth (unless it belongs to the rulers directly), obsessed with egalitarianism, moral equivalency, feminism, environmentalism
Nazis were big-time Earth-worshippers and pagans
industrial policy, command economy, government control, anti-private property,... supports welfare, poor people's self interests, tolerant of diversity/foreign beliefs
LOL! Leftists don't tolerate MY beliefs!
The contradiction in your post is clear. I recommend any work on the history of Hitler's regime, for example William Shirer.
After the failed Easter Rebellion in Ireland in 1916, Lenin took the idea even further, realizing that nationalism, which fools like this auto-newbie here reflexively label "right wing", can be used as a tool for inspiring the passions to move the mass to revolution, and was not contradictory to the overall agenda of Social Democracy if national equality was reached.
The mistake many people make is to think of Marxism as a staid, unchanging theory. It has continued to develop, long since the death of Marx and Engels. There are various flavors and versions of it.
And it tends to hide. After all, everyone knows communists are atheists. Except now they are realizing that radical Islam can be quite useful...
Far from being silly and unecessary as Gimlet suggests, this is a very important point. This points out that the true danger to freedom and liberty comes, not from the right, but from the left. The blood of millions is all over their leftist hands, and they would very much like for all of us to forget that this is so.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.