Posted on 10/24/2013 6:01:20 AM PDT by marshmallow
Moscow, October 24, Interfax - Head of the Patriarchal Commission for Family and Maternity Archpriest Dimitry Smirnov, believes that democracy is based on lies.
"It's just a lie. Communism is also a lie, but Communism has religious features. Communism seems to take a lot from true religions. The Communists have their own teaching, their own "Holy Scripture." They have their own rituals. They have their martyrs, their have their prophets. They have their heroes. I would say they have their messianic promises," the priest told the radio station Radonezh.
As for democracy, "people have never had real power anywhere," the priest said. "Democracy is simply deceit. Because all people are different and it cannot be that one person equals one vote," the priest said.
The priest believes that all issues are resolved with money in a democratic state and "the transition from monarchy to capitalism was carried out by moneybags for their own benefit." "In the olden days, if you were a duke you were a duke, regardless of whether you had money or not. Now I decide if you are a duke or not. And if I need to, I buy your daughter, marry her and become a duke too, I take that title. And if you want to become a president? No problem. You want to work in politics? That will cost this much," he said.
Sparta was a totalitarian nightmare--children reared collectively by the State, being left out to die if they weren't physically perfect, and being brutalized into becoming fighting machines. How any conservative (of the American variety) can claim to admire Sparta is absolutely beyond me.
they've watched 300 too many times...
I had a debate with somebody on an earlier thread who said that Fascism was left wing movements because they were anti-individualist. I pointed out to this person that by this absurd reasoning, the military (and especially the Marine Corps) are the most "left wing" institutions in America because they are profoundly anti-individualist.
As you point out, laissez-faire capitalism and US/British style constitutional republicanism was perceived as a liberal (even radical) ideology by the aristocracy, the Church, the military, and the civil servant classes in continental Europe during the 19th and early 20th centuries. There were numerous reactions to both classical liberalism and to Marxist socialism from the traditional right, which American conservatives naively consider "leftist" because of their opposition to US style capitalism and Democracy.
In my last post, I didn’t mean to imply that Britain was a republic, but that it had a constitution that created a balance of powers and limited the power of the monarchy over state and property.
A most astute, and correct, observation! It was not a Communist, but a French right winger, who once said that "the individual is nothing; society is everything."
I know.
Ironically, the Persians come off pretty good in the Bible. Of course, the ancient Jews liked Alexander too.
With Nazis, the crux of the matter is this...even by American standards, conservatives must believe that there are certain qualities to human life which are transcendent and unchangeable whereas the Left believes that everything is ‘perfectible’ (changeable)...while the Nazis believed in strong centralized control (Left wing by American standards but Right wing by pre WW2 European standards) they also believed in certain unchangeable qualities (racial identity being primary among them) just different qualities from what the American conservatives believe...in this sense they were ‘Right wing’. Does that make sense?
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner.
The fundamental divide between Left and Right is their views of human nature. Leftists believe that human nature is a blank slate, that if you engineer the perfect society, you will also engineer away human nature. Maoism is probably the most extreme example of this, they even tried to socially engineer away differences between the sexes by forcing men and women to act, dress, and work identically.
The Right believes that certain aspects of human nature are innate and immutable, and that no amount of social engineering will change the fact that people, as individuals and as groups, are different and unequal. Nazism took this to the extreme of saying some ethnic and racial differences trumped all else. It's certainly a perversion of rightwing ideology, but nevertheless grounded in rightist thinking.
For Marxists, your social circumstances determined your identity. For fascists, your identity determined your social circumstances. This is why these ideologies were mortal, irreconcilable enemies. The fact that they both used a strong centralized government to implement their ideologies is peripheral - it's a means to an end, not the end.
Most people will acknowledge that anarchists are/were Leftists, so even in the US, the notion that "small government = conservatism / big government = liberalism" is nonsense.
There are both leftists (anarchists) and rightists (libertarians) who want minimal government, just as there are leftists (Communists, socialists) and rightists (fascists, monarchists, theocrats, military juntas in Latin America) who want strong central government.
The reason for this is that what matters isn't the size of government that you want, but what aims you want that government to achieve or not to achieve.
The Nazis were socialists to the core. Like the Communists, they advocated a classless society.
True the Nazis allowed private ownership of industries, but that was merely because Hitler needed the industrialists to build up his war machine. ...And speculation is that once the war was won, and the Industrialists were no longer needed for the war machine, that they were to be dealt with in the same manner as the Jews.
Not at all. In their vision, there would be a new aristocracy created from the SS elite that would rule over other Germans.
The regime promoted the concept of Volksgemeinschaft, a national German ethnic community. The goal was to build a classless society based on racial purity and the perceived need to prepare for warfare, conquest, and a struggle against Marxism.
No difference from Lenin advocating a group of professional revolutionaries who would rule over the masses, in order to implement the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Being a Judaic Theocrat, I've figured a few things out over the years of struggling with these issues, ie, why Judaism is considered anathema by the traditional "right," why so many Jews are liberals, etc. Here is my understanding as of now:
In its ultimate form "right" advocates the supremacy of local custom over universal truth. The implication is that because they worship the G-d of Heaven instead of a local "gxd" rooted in the landscape that Jews are subversive and corrosive.
Taken to its ultimate form (at least the one it would have had before it went nationalist) the "left" advocates the plowing under of all local customs and beliefs in the name of a universal truth, but a "truth" that is reduced to the purely physical. From the traditional Judaism perspective both are wrong.
Jews are indeed "programmed" in a sense to destroy local "gxds"--because local "gxds" are false. They are supposed to spread the knowledge of the True G-d, the G-d of Heaven, who is infinite and ultimately outside the universe itself, unlike so many "gxds" worshiped by non-Jews. Jewish liberalism is indeed a perversion of this genuine Jewish mission, but HaShem nevertheless providentially uses it as He uses everything.
Of course "right" and "left" within the American context or simply as easy reference points are something else again, and quite valid.
Not so ironical. Khorush the great was an exceptional man, one would have to consider God’s hand over his actions. Unlike others, he didn’t rule by crushing and killing, rather by making his subjects like him
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