Posted on 03/29/2014 9:48:21 AM PDT by annalex
Excellent analysis. I agree 100%.
I use “right wing” to describe conservatism that also recognizes the need for a measure of autocracy in the face of runaway democracy managed by the media.
Why should that endear him to the European right?
Harder to sympathize when nations burn babies for fuel and euthanize 12 year olds.
Fascist is a better descriptor than Nazi. Putin is certainly more like Mussolini than like Hitler.
Perhaps Putin is setting up these parties to later create a reason for the Russians to later move in and “Liberate” them.
Sorry, but you’re wrong. Pretty much all of European political philosophy is what we in the US would call leftist, whether the Europeans call it right or left. For them, the difference is between international and national socialism; overweening, intrusive government is accepted as a given. Here, the difference is between the ascendency of the state over the individual (leftism) versus the ascendency of the individual over the state (rightism). There really isn’t an equivalent to our right in Europe.
I think you’re right. It’s overly simplistic, but we must remember that we face a very definable enemy. The people in control of these European countries are the same as the Obama regime. The same globalist ideology of progressivism. If the rise of other parties destabilizes and collapses the EU, its a plus for us.
In the western third of Ukraine, the majority are Russian speakers. It is the western part, around Lyov, that is truly European.
If the EU and UN go, I genuinely think we can turn the clock back and save civilization.
Correction: the Eastern part is Russified.
I think you’re right, but I don’t use the term ‘autocracy’. I see conservatism as a reactionary form of libertarianism. the right left spectrum runs from libertarianism on the right to statism on the left.
True conservatism states that libertarianism is the preferable position, but that civil society as it stands today is not suitable for libertarianism, and because of that, the civil society must be changed or ‘restored’ to its previous station for the most part.
And of course, within conservatism are several sub-ideological groups.
My pleasure.
Well, certainly the western elite have little respect for liberal democracy, except for the election rituals, which give them legitimacy. Of course, they are trying to undermine any vote that goes against them. It will be interesting to see if the UKIP does well this spring. If it can bring aboard some of the working class that has supported Labour, and whose leaders have same contempt for their values that Obama has for ours.
Some rational people in Europe might be attracted to policies that fought back at muslims in their midst, as Putin appears willing to do.
Mother of God repel Putin!
It be interested to hear you distinguish between Russian and Ukrainian “nationalism.”
True American Conservatives DO have something in common with Putin and it is not an ideological agreement and it has different principles and motivations - both are EU skeptics, and both do not accept the western political elite’s myth that (no matter what Putin is about) the EU is NOT about empire building - it is. The EU is NOT about Liberty, NOT about democracy, NOT about “tolerance” or “diversity”; it is about expanding CENTRAL authority over more and more daily life in Europe in Brussels, in unelected bureaucrats and supra-national courts given final and perpetual say-so by one-off “democratic” acts which close off local, “national” democratic decisions about many things after that.
The effort to confuse the radically Leftwing German National Socialist movement, with the "far Right," of course goes back to Stalin's propaganda, refocused on the subject after the German invasion in 1941. This mis-characterization was very much abetted by Leftist theorists in Roosevelt's New Deal--which had much in common with the Nazis in dealing with the Great Depression--but needed to differentiate itself, as part of the war effort.
The concept of the "Right Wing," of course goes back to the French Revolution, where the great landowners & State Church leaders sat on the Right in the National Assembly. While it is generally coextensive with Conservatism, in any nation, that is not inevitably so--depending on which institutions the conservatives in any particular nation, consider most important.
Thus we can say that the Monarchists & supporters of the continuity of established and vested positions are right wing, and almost always Conservative. But Conservatives in countries like the United States & Switzerland, with a long Republican tradition, tend to be Republicans, as well as more sympathetic to a greater degree of social mobility, than those in some of the other European nations.
Now, when one looks not at traditional values & interests, internal to any nation; but rather to relations between nations; there is some overlap between Right & Left, with respect to many issues--such as trade, immigration, imperialism & ethnicity. In my humble opinion, the doctrines of the great Swiss authority Vattel, from a quarter millennium ago, offer a clearer insight than anything likely to be offered by so called contemporary "pundits."
The Founding Fathers applied Vattel's principles in devising a foreign policy that once made us the most admired peoples on earth. The EU, like America post Wilson, has gone off on a tangent, and consequently those in Europe--whom the CFR lumps together as "right-wing," are reacting. Whatever any of those groups' policies on domestic issues; their reaction to the loss of control over their respective cultural heritages, certainly seems justified. A people's culture reflects their nature & generations of experience, for which their is no substitute.
But, of course, in my humble opinion, our fellow countrymen, generally, have over-looked the most significant lesson for us, clear in the Crimean events--and that goes to what the American Left's deliberate efforts to change American ethnicity is doing.
William Flax
The present corruption of the concept of "Liberty," by the ACLU, NAACP, SPLC, ADL, and the like; which prevents local communities from enforcing the cultural or religious wishes of the inhabitants, by allowing any dissenting litigant to enjoin what was once permitted; is actually anti-libertarian, and part of a totalitarian utilitarianism, which reduces all aspects of culture to the lowest level that everyone can be forced to accept.
William Flax
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