If I had my way, every preacher of every denomination would have to dress in full clown outfit complete with big red noss, face paint and Claude-Hopper shoes…and be shown as the trie clowns they are…in no way should the word “teacher” be used for the lying clerical bastards…
Here, in America, we have some brave new voices speaking to the essence of being a democracy. I don’t expect our Muslims to want Sharia law to be established here. Just tolerance, for Christ’s sake. We will be rid of tRump as soon as his duped followers realize how badly he has screwed them. https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/24/politics/video/mamdani-cuomo-laugh-terror-attack-911-vrtc
Postdog, just completed a contract to assist in AI tools for use in monitoring school performance in the UK. I was able to access all kinds of interesting and politically explosive data sets. For instance there are at least 1500 illegally run religious schools operating in the UK (mostly madrassas but not exclusively). That is in effect 1500+ religious training grounds for future terrorists. The UK will definately see far more terrorist attacks in the future because the government are too frightened to tackle the death cult at its source…
And Postdog, how do you know his emotional response isn’t just an act? If you are a muslim (a proper, card carrying, believe every word in the Quran muslim) then you have to kill non believers because your invisible friend wants you to…no ifs nor buts…
M27, Mamdani is called, kindly, a Marxist by the right wing. But if his ideas were adopted it would be communism. Subtle. Brutal. Dead on arrival. A sin greater than pedophilia.
I like the Muslims we have elected to congress, such as Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. They are opposed to the current fascist trend.
I know our methods of making law are messy, if not absurd, but what did you expect? The Solvay Conference?
There was an old bastard named Lenin
Who did two or three million men in.
That’s a lot to have done in
But where he did one in
That old bastard Stalin did ten in
— Robert Conquest
In what ways was Russia under Stalin Communist? The Revolution was hijacked by a Georgian gangster and turned into a Fascist dictatorship. North Korea calls itself a Communist country. Orwell’s warnings have now become a ‘How To Guide’, not least by the Mango Mussolini. Animal Farm showed the process perfectly.
Comparing the brutality of mass murderers by numbers of millions of victims doesn’t seem too sound.
Stalin trained as a cleric did he not? Anyway the hunting ape killing reputation is well earned as apex preditor on planet earth. And no of killings is one metric that direct or indirect same species killing can be measured by is it not?
Yes, there are gangsters everywhere, not least currently in the Whitehouse.
I’m just not sure that Hitler can be found ‘less brutal’ based on numbers. ‘After the first death there is no other’.
Well the Democrats can only have themselves to blame. Selecting a candidate to beat t’rump needed to avoid a diversity selection and instead use meritocracy and put into play a person who was more suitable to garner the undecided votes that would have beaten agent orange…
Meritocracy should also apply to voting suitability, the no-brain rednecks who voted for Trump should have been made to do a simple geography test and also geology aging test. I.e how old is planet Earth to the nearest billion years…🤣
M27Holts — I wouldn’t say that Stalin was more brutal than Hitler. True, he may have killed more people, but for the most part he did it the old fashioned way, by starving them to death, whereas Hitler’s industrialized death camps were something new and uniquely ugly.
But your main point is well taken — Communism can certainly be as dangerous as fascism. That isn’t as well understood as it should be though because our schools and media are controlled by liberals — i.e., moderate leftists — who have more than a smidgen of sympathy for Stalin and his Bolsheviks. Didn’t they do it all in the name of the Universal Brotherhood of Man? Yes, things may have gone wrong for them, but their hearts were in the right place, weren’t they?
I actually used to know someone, an almost stereotypical liberal Jewish red diaper baby psychology professor, who was a very decent person, but who was more than a little depressed when Communism fell in Eastern Europe in 1989. She understood that it had failed, but it had such noble aspirations! And did Communism really fail, or was it humanity that failed Communism, by just not being good enough to live together in a truly just society? Yes, she actually said something to that effect!
Good grief, I hope you guys are really old geezers and this stuff isn’t just living on like the flu.
There isn’t any significant genuine interest in communism anywhere in our world, nor if you call it socialism – in the dictionary sense, state control of production etc. Social policy in most of the 1st world uses the latter term rather freely – here in Portugal the Partido Socialista has headed the government off and on for years, and our António Costa is President of the European Council. Socialism? Not really. It isn’t even an -ism. There isn’t a Communist under your bed.
Fascism is a current concern, but you kind of have to disregard the -ism aspect. Arguments over whether this or that may qualify, revolve around 3 or 4 short lived governments in a period in Europe whose real relevance faded long ago. What we really mean, as best I can make out, is the process by which a brutal authoritarian regime can be formed with some degree of public consent, the relevance whereof is more timeless.
Socialism and communism are not the same thing, the predominant ignorant assumption in the States. Fox ‘News’ and others on the extreme right manipulate this to convince people that, for example, universal healthcare would be opening the door to ‘reds under the bed’ and the collapse of western civilisation. It’s always fascinating to see the responses on YouTube of Americans when the scales fall from their eyes having moved to Europe where the health system isn’t set up purely to fleece them of their hard-earned.
Also, normally the socialized medicine model isn’t, really. I mean, the state doesn’t take over medical practice, it just enters as a provider, and private practice continues to be quite healthy. At least it’s the case here. Overall cost to society far less, life expectancy greater, etc.
Americans have very weird fantasies on their position vs. the rest of the world.
Socialism is a terrible word, though. Does it really refer to Robert Owen’s utopian socialists with their cooperatives etc.? Is it Marx’s socialism? Is it random European party’s “socialism” that isn’t any -ism at all? People in the US are less used to it and tend to wig out when someone shows up in the political circus wearing a hat with “socialist” on it, but what are they thinking? Son of Lenin? Who knows. Serious use of this term suggests that people are weak in the head.
My own politics lean mostly right, but it does bother me when conservatives throw words like “Communist” at any leftist they don’t like. It’s no worse though than liberals seeing fascists under every bed. Both of those things are pretty common here in the US! I don’t think Zohran Mamdani is the second coming of Stalin, but I also don’t think that the so called “extreme right” in Europe — parties like Reform UK and AfD — is the second coming of the Nazis. In contrasting Hitler/Nazism with Stalin/Communism I wasn’t trying to get into the weeds on the events of the first half of the 20th century, I was simply making the point that, historically, the left can be just as destructive as the right. If cornered I think most liberals would (grudgingly) acknowledge this, but the minute they escaped that corner it would slip from their minds, and they would return to their fixation on 1933, as if history had only one thing to teach us.
BTW, if you think I am overplaying the Hitler fixation thing, after posting my comment I read a (paywalled) story in the New York Times about how a conservative Harvard student magazine, the Harvard Salient, was forced to suspend operations because someone wrote an article that included the line “Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans”.
Agree or disagree, this is an entirely natural thing for a right-leaning nationalist say, and many people have said similar things over the years. Unfortunately it turned out that one of those people was Hitler, and when this was pointed out the magazine’s board went into full panic/self preservation mode and shut the whole thing down, because apparently if Hitler said something then no respectable person can ever say that thing again. (Golly, I hope Hitler isn’t on record anywhere as saying that water is wet!)
I’m sure there are many such stories about Harvard, many of them entirely true. It’s a thing; it isn’t a very consequential thing.
Here in Portugal, we have our own right wing populist party, but Portugal has lived it – 40 years under Salazar’s Estado Novo, from 1933 to 1974, when a bloodless coup brought it down. (The “Carnation” revolution should be required reading for US military, ha ha.) So it’s a little too real, still. The only thing that’s keeping AfD from being a national tragedy is, hopefully, the same thing — inadequate popular support.
What’s going on in the US, I can’t really guess, but looks like it’s going to take generations to put it back together. And it’s largely driven by the Christian church, as it has been since the ’70s with the Moral Majority.
People are certainly ‘weak in the head’ if they labour under the misapprehension that the miilions of murders under Stalin were the responsibility of the ‘left’. The Soviet Union was a fascist dictatorship as was Germany. Japan had a God/Emporer with absolute power. North Korea and China can call themselves anything which implies left-leaning but are also anything but. ‘Nazi’ derives from ‘National Socialst’.
All you have to do for the millions of uninformed Fox watches in the States is tell them that anything ‘left’ is Communist Stalinism and they’re getting out their AR15s to murder any suspected red peril down the road.
It’s a good job those well known selfless Christians, Murdoch, Musk and assorted billionaires under the leadership of the Orange one (The Second Coming for some!) are there to give them the truth, and protect them from the evils of universal healthcare.
While the US of A struggles to resist a fascist (yes) takeover a reunited country in Asia where it sent thousands of its own children to die to destroy it has a thriving economy and a healthy tourist industry; under a communist government which has not (yet!) been hijacked by a fascist dictatorship.
I know of no ‘liberals’ who, grudgingly or otherwise, concede the nonsense that the left has been ‘as destructive’ as the right.
I’d go farther, to say that the left/right business itself has little validity – at best it’s a slippery slope towards stupidity. This may be the most evident among those who want to renounce the extremes and promote “centrism”, as though there’s really anything there in the middle.
Issues generally have pro/con alternatives, and the right one is the one that’s supported by facts, wisdom and character. The idea that people would naturally divide into two groups where all see eye to eye on every issue, but disagree with the other group on many issues, is an obvious absurdity that must owe a lot to religious dualism.
The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ are well-established terms for an indication of a political standing. These would generally imply some form of socialism/democracy to the left and some form of dictatorship to the right.
Obviously the line between is a continuum and one’s position could be anywhere on it and, by definition, in the centre. These are not new ideas and the terms are in common use in political discourse.
It would be nice to think that ‘facts, wisdom and character’ were a sound way of selecting the position to hold on the continuum but it would be foolish to believe that my view that the Mango Mussolini was sent by God as the Bible tells me and therefore what he says goes regardless of the views of millions disagreeing is well to the right.
Mr Sanders is described as being to the left because of his views on the community’s sharing the responsibility for everyone’s healthcare. These terms exist and it seems pretty bootless to deny them.
Let’s ask Mr. Sanders what he thinks about oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Classic leftists – e.g., Soviet – surely would have easy to guess opinions about that, but maybe we’d better check just to make sure.
In fact, it’s pretty easy to guess that “the left” will be most generally disposed to protect fragile wild areas from mineral exploitation, and “the right” will ironically be less concerned about conserving anything. On the other hand, if we were to talk about deregulating industries, we’d find the left resistant – unless it’s the real estate development industry, which has essentially burrowed in to create a deregulatory supply sider safe space in their house.
Does any of this make sense, without just assigning “the right” to irresponsibility, exploitation, denial and deceit, and dictatorship? Not that there wouldn’t be a great deal of truth to this, but as our current way of parsing things out, I think it’s fair to say that it has dug a deep divide with too many people on the wrong side.
I will say that there seem to be traits … To be frank, the people I consider to be conservative in nature, have seemed to me more trustworthy. They’re more likely to be deluded, but that’s perhaps inevitable when your personal makeup is strong on loyalty and faith. Liberals will have a much clearer view of reality and a sense of overall responsibility to the big picture, but more ambivalent and disconnected, and when it’s time to take sides they may fall the wrong way.
Neither of these is really the one you want at the wheel, they have to counterbalance each other. The current left/right dialectic has poisoned this potential by making the right into a dysfunctional caricature of themselves, granted that it’s their doing.
Of course the left/right description is not a precise measurement; we hear all the time of ‘hard right’, centre left’, etc and it’s possible to be, as many are, on the right fiscally and the left socially or whatever. The descriptions of what people on either side are likely to believe are pretty accurate and confirm that the terms still have meaning currently usable and understood.
Anecdotally my experience of trustworthiness would be the exact opposite, with loyalty and faith certainly present on the right so long as it is not towards those choosing ‘the wrong way’ ( pretty question-begging, that one!)
Not much doubt to me where ‘pull up the ladder, Jack – I’m all right’ belongs.
I’ve known no shortage of fervent individualists when things were fine who suddenly decided that we’re all in it together when things went wrong.
‘A plague on both your houses’ is all very well but I don’t see how the continuance of the historical recognition of the left/right descriptors of political positions becomes a ‘current dialectic’ responsible for the harm that is claimed.
One person’s ’ counterbalance’ is another’s capitulation. I’m not sure Mr Putin’s fascism will be eliminated by stopping describing it as such.
The current fashion for fascism, including Putin if you like, should be called out at every opportunity. The problem there is a different one – historians live to chew over the definitions of this term, as I mentioned earlier, and apologists for present day would-be Mussolinis will try to tie you up in quibbles over that. Portugal lived through 40 years of Estado Novo, was that fascism? Well, Salazar didn’t have any use for militarism, so apparently not, but who cares? Surveillance, informers, prison, torture … but no militarism!
What I’m after, here, is some way to rescue reasonably good people from the MAGA swamp, and use them to help with the woke swamp for lack of a better term. My analysis based on very little knowledge: slavery and civil war left America with a festering wound; Eisenhower got tired of it after a century and put troops to set things right in the south. That put America out in front of public consensus, and the following decade ironed that in. This was all necessary, but not sufficient.
Following decades found the forces of righteousness continuing to follow their own dictates and imposing them as government policy, with a degree of contempt for public consensus. Whether what has been done during that time is really progress is arguable. Are black people really better off today, than 1970? In some areas, the contrary, because economic conditions were what really mattered. But every new attempt to combat racism etc. with government rules, is new fuel on the fire for people who already resented the implication of racism and resent being made to play a new government game. I’m circling back to racism, but of course it fans out in all directions, environmental protections etc.
What I’m saying is that the left/right cultivate stupidity, and it’s destroying the nation. That the right is far worse, means that they will be extra hard to rescue, but their deprogrammed cult members are needed as a vital part of the governing consensus.
Quibbling about what facism is seems pretty pointless. I simply take the original meaning based on the ‘fascio’ or bundle of sheafs carried by those in authority in Ancient Rome. Fascism is simply authoritarianism – sovereignty from the top down. Militarism is not an essential element but fascists are historically more than happy to use it if the turkeys refuse to vote for Christmas.
The ‘festering wound’ is certainly very much the case, obviously especially in the South where the Confederate flag proliferates but the typical fascist encouraging hatred of ‘the other’ is everywhere, not least with the appalling Farage here in England.
I’m all for rescuing the misguided from the ‘MAGA swamp’ but the forces of authoritarianism and its resources in the right wing media are formidable.
It just worries me that the implication of ‘a plague on both your houses’ plays to the glib ‘they’re all the same’, which I don’t believe they are or that there is equal ‘stupidity’ in both camps.
Farage is just plugging into a culture war that is fuelled by religiious knob-headery…he is a xtian knob-head. If (like Lennon) you can imagine a world without organised knob-headery you might get a better world. Unfortunately the lunatics have taken over the asylum and unfortunately homo sapiens is doomed to extinction…
Jesus & Mo (the characters) are absurd, blinkered, and oddly very sweet. J&M (the cartoon) is brilliant: sharp, delicious, irresistible. Salman Rushdie
Jesus and Mo cartoons are wonderfully funny and true. Richard Dawkins
Jesus and Mo make the world a better place, bless their little hearts. Ophelia Benson
In a world defined by outrage and offence and liberal spinelessness, Jesus and Mo is a treasure, whose value we should never fail to recognize. Read them. Laugh. And think. Kenan Malik
The brilliant, celebrated, freaking hilarious atheist comic strip ... Greta Christina
...rays of sanity in a befuddled world. Keri Hulme
The liveliest depictions of Muhammad currently available... Malise Ruthven
J & Mo is the funniest and most consistently thought-provoking cartoon strip on the Net. In a saner world, it would run in a major newspaper. Nelson Jones, Heresy Corner
Consistently amusing, frequently thought-provoking and often heart-warming. New Humanist
Jesus & Mo is one of the most wonderful things on the internet.. JT Eberhard
Wittily captures much of the absurdity of religious apologetics. Mano Singham
I love jesusandmo.net cartoons - witty and sharp! Katha Pollitt
Often hilarious, frequently wry, these cartoons do what all the best cartoons do: they tell the truth through humour. Terry Sanderson, NSS President
...a wonderfully acid British cartoonist... Nick Cohen
I love the scrappy mockery of Jesus and Mo. Freedom of speech
includes the freedom to mock any person, any thing, any activity, and
any belief -- and J&M stands up for this unflinchingly Richard Stallman
...empowering, important and deeply progressive, not to mention hilarious... Council of Ex-Muslims
July 22, 2020
But it is, Mo! Just look at you and Jesus.
If I had my way, every preacher of every denomination would have to dress in full clown outfit complete with big red noss, face paint and Claude-Hopper shoes…and be shown as the trie clowns they are…in no way should the word “teacher” be used for the lying clerical bastards…
Not to mention “Reverend”. And to be fair, some clerics do have parents who were married….
Akbar? More like ugh, brrr.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/22/world/middleeast/syria-massacre-druse.html?unlocked_article_code=1.vk8.0F2d.xwcw0heiOLtG&smid=url-share
Aye, Muslims turn every country they rule into religious shit-holes…is it a suprise that anybody with a brain has islamophobia?
Here, in America, we have some brave new voices speaking to the essence of being a democracy. I don’t expect our Muslims to want Sharia law to be established here. Just tolerance, for Christ’s sake. We will be rid of tRump as soon as his duped followers realize how badly he has screwed them. https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/24/politics/video/mamdani-cuomo-laugh-terror-attack-911-vrtc
Postdog, just completed a contract to assist in AI tools for use in monitoring school performance in the UK. I was able to access all kinds of interesting and politically explosive data sets. For instance there are at least 1500 illegally run religious schools operating in the UK (mostly madrassas but not exclusively). That is in effect 1500+ religious training grounds for future terrorists. The UK will definately see far more terrorist attacks in the future because the government are too frightened to tackle the death cult at its source…
And Postdog, how do you know his emotional response isn’t just an act? If you are a muslim (a proper, card carrying, believe every word in the Quran muslim) then you have to kill non believers because your invisible friend wants you to…no ifs nor buts…
M27, Mamdani is called, kindly, a Marxist by the right wing. But if his ideas were adopted it would be communism. Subtle. Brutal. Dead on arrival. A sin greater than pedophilia.
I like the Muslims we have elected to congress, such as Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. They are opposed to the current fascist trend.
I know our methods of making law are messy, if not absurd, but what did you expect? The Solvay Conference?
History shows us that Communism is just as brutal as fascism if not even more dangerous to mankind? Stalin was more brutal than Hitler? Definately…
There was an old bastard named Lenin
Who did two or three million men in.
That’s a lot to have done in
But where he did one in
That old bastard Stalin did ten in
— Robert Conquest
In what ways was Russia under Stalin Communist? The Revolution was hijacked by a Georgian gangster and turned into a Fascist dictatorship. North Korea calls itself a Communist country. Orwell’s warnings have now become a ‘How To Guide’, not least by the Mango Mussolini. Animal Farm showed the process perfectly.
Comparing the brutality of mass murderers by numbers of millions of victims doesn’t seem too sound.
Stalin trained as a cleric did he not? Anyway the hunting ape killing reputation is well earned as apex preditor on planet earth. And no of killings is one metric that direct or indirect same species killing can be measured by is it not?
Because….if you replace the word Gangster with Apex Preditor is a very simple way of explaining the prevalence of gangsters in every society on Earth
Yes, there are gangsters everywhere, not least currently in the Whitehouse.
I’m just not sure that Hitler can be found ‘less brutal’ based on numbers. ‘After the first death there is no other’.
Well the Democrats can only have themselves to blame. Selecting a candidate to beat t’rump needed to avoid a diversity selection and instead use meritocracy and put into play a person who was more suitable to garner the undecided votes that would have beaten agent orange…
Meritocracy should also apply to voting suitability, the no-brain rednecks who voted for Trump should have been made to do a simple geography test and also geology aging test. I.e how old is planet Earth to the nearest billion years…🤣
M27Holts — I wouldn’t say that Stalin was more brutal than Hitler. True, he may have killed more people, but for the most part he did it the old fashioned way, by starving them to death, whereas Hitler’s industrialized death camps were something new and uniquely ugly.
But your main point is well taken — Communism can certainly be as dangerous as fascism. That isn’t as well understood as it should be though because our schools and media are controlled by liberals — i.e., moderate leftists — who have more than a smidgen of sympathy for Stalin and his Bolsheviks. Didn’t they do it all in the name of the Universal Brotherhood of Man? Yes, things may have gone wrong for them, but their hearts were in the right place, weren’t they?
I actually used to know someone, an almost stereotypical liberal Jewish red diaper baby psychology professor, who was a very decent person, but who was more than a little depressed when Communism fell in Eastern Europe in 1989. She understood that it had failed, but it had such noble aspirations! And did Communism really fail, or was it humanity that failed Communism, by just not being good enough to live together in a truly just society? Yes, she actually said something to that effect!
Good grief, I hope you guys are really old geezers and this stuff isn’t just living on like the flu.
There isn’t any significant genuine interest in communism anywhere in our world, nor if you call it socialism – in the dictionary sense, state control of production etc. Social policy in most of the 1st world uses the latter term rather freely – here in Portugal the Partido Socialista has headed the government off and on for years, and our António Costa is President of the European Council. Socialism? Not really. It isn’t even an -ism. There isn’t a Communist under your bed.
Fascism is a current concern, but you kind of have to disregard the -ism aspect. Arguments over whether this or that may qualify, revolve around 3 or 4 short lived governments in a period in Europe whose real relevance faded long ago. What we really mean, as best I can make out, is the process by which a brutal authoritarian regime can be formed with some degree of public consent, the relevance whereof is more timeless.
JB and I are not like those two geezers out of the muppets you portugese poppet….
Yes, pretty old but I didn’t know that was a prerequisite for an interest in history and politics.
Socialism and communism are not the same thing, the predominant ignorant assumption in the States. Fox ‘News’ and others on the extreme right manipulate this to convince people that, for example, universal healthcare would be opening the door to ‘reds under the bed’ and the collapse of western civilisation. It’s always fascinating to see the responses on YouTube of Americans when the scales fall from their eyes having moved to Europe where the health system isn’t set up purely to fleece them of their hard-earned.
Also, normally the socialized medicine model isn’t, really. I mean, the state doesn’t take over medical practice, it just enters as a provider, and private practice continues to be quite healthy. At least it’s the case here. Overall cost to society far less, life expectancy greater, etc.
Americans have very weird fantasies on their position vs. the rest of the world.
Socialism is a terrible word, though. Does it really refer to Robert Owen’s utopian socialists with their cooperatives etc.? Is it Marx’s socialism? Is it random European party’s “socialism” that isn’t any -ism at all? People in the US are less used to it and tend to wig out when someone shows up in the political circus wearing a hat with “socialist” on it, but what are they thinking? Son of Lenin? Who knows. Serious use of this term suggests that people are weak in the head.
My own politics lean mostly right, but it does bother me when conservatives throw words like “Communist” at any leftist they don’t like. It’s no worse though than liberals seeing fascists under every bed. Both of those things are pretty common here in the US! I don’t think Zohran Mamdani is the second coming of Stalin, but I also don’t think that the so called “extreme right” in Europe — parties like Reform UK and AfD — is the second coming of the Nazis. In contrasting Hitler/Nazism with Stalin/Communism I wasn’t trying to get into the weeds on the events of the first half of the 20th century, I was simply making the point that, historically, the left can be just as destructive as the right. If cornered I think most liberals would (grudgingly) acknowledge this, but the minute they escaped that corner it would slip from their minds, and they would return to their fixation on 1933, as if history had only one thing to teach us.
BTW, if you think I am overplaying the Hitler fixation thing, after posting my comment I read a (paywalled) story in the New York Times about how a conservative Harvard student magazine, the Harvard Salient, was forced to suspend operations because someone wrote an article that included the line “Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans”.
Agree or disagree, this is an entirely natural thing for a right-leaning nationalist say, and many people have said similar things over the years. Unfortunately it turned out that one of those people was Hitler, and when this was pointed out the magazine’s board went into full panic/self preservation mode and shut the whole thing down, because apparently if Hitler said something then no respectable person can ever say that thing again. (Golly, I hope Hitler isn’t on record anywhere as saying that water is wet!)
I’m sure there are many such stories about Harvard, many of them entirely true. It’s a thing; it isn’t a very consequential thing.
Here in Portugal, we have our own right wing populist party, but Portugal has lived it – 40 years under Salazar’s Estado Novo, from 1933 to 1974, when a bloodless coup brought it down. (The “Carnation” revolution should be required reading for US military, ha ha.) So it’s a little too real, still. The only thing that’s keeping AfD from being a national tragedy is, hopefully, the same thing — inadequate popular support.
What’s going on in the US, I can’t really guess, but looks like it’s going to take generations to put it back together. And it’s largely driven by the Christian church, as it has been since the ’70s with the Moral Majority.
People are certainly ‘weak in the head’ if they labour under the misapprehension that the miilions of murders under Stalin were the responsibility of the ‘left’. The Soviet Union was a fascist dictatorship as was Germany. Japan had a God/Emporer with absolute power. North Korea and China can call themselves anything which implies left-leaning but are also anything but. ‘Nazi’ derives from ‘National Socialst’.
All you have to do for the millions of uninformed Fox watches in the States is tell them that anything ‘left’ is Communist Stalinism and they’re getting out their AR15s to murder any suspected red peril down the road.
It’s a good job those well known selfless Christians, Murdoch, Musk and assorted billionaires under the leadership of the Orange one (The Second Coming for some!) are there to give them the truth, and protect them from the evils of universal healthcare.
While the US of A struggles to resist a fascist (yes) takeover a reunited country in Asia where it sent thousands of its own children to die to destroy it has a thriving economy and a healthy tourist industry; under a communist government which has not (yet!) been hijacked by a fascist dictatorship.
I know of no ‘liberals’ who, grudgingly or otherwise, concede the nonsense that the left has been ‘as destructive’ as the right.
I’d go farther, to say that the left/right business itself has little validity – at best it’s a slippery slope towards stupidity. This may be the most evident among those who want to renounce the extremes and promote “centrism”, as though there’s really anything there in the middle.
Issues generally have pro/con alternatives, and the right one is the one that’s supported by facts, wisdom and character. The idea that people would naturally divide into two groups where all see eye to eye on every issue, but disagree with the other group on many issues, is an obvious absurdity that must owe a lot to religious dualism.
The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ are well-established terms for an indication of a political standing. These would generally imply some form of socialism/democracy to the left and some form of dictatorship to the right.
Obviously the line between is a continuum and one’s position could be anywhere on it and, by definition, in the centre. These are not new ideas and the terms are in common use in political discourse.
It would be nice to think that ‘facts, wisdom and character’ were a sound way of selecting the position to hold on the continuum but it would be foolish to believe that my view that the Mango Mussolini was sent by God as the Bible tells me and therefore what he says goes regardless of the views of millions disagreeing is well to the right.
Mr Sanders is described as being to the left because of his views on the community’s sharing the responsibility for everyone’s healthcare. These terms exist and it seems pretty bootless to deny them.
Let’s ask Mr. Sanders what he thinks about oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Classic leftists – e.g., Soviet – surely would have easy to guess opinions about that, but maybe we’d better check just to make sure.
In fact, it’s pretty easy to guess that “the left” will be most generally disposed to protect fragile wild areas from mineral exploitation, and “the right” will ironically be less concerned about conserving anything. On the other hand, if we were to talk about deregulating industries, we’d find the left resistant – unless it’s the real estate development industry, which has essentially burrowed in to create a deregulatory supply sider safe space in their house.
Does any of this make sense, without just assigning “the right” to irresponsibility, exploitation, denial and deceit, and dictatorship? Not that there wouldn’t be a great deal of truth to this, but as our current way of parsing things out, I think it’s fair to say that it has dug a deep divide with too many people on the wrong side.
I will say that there seem to be traits … To be frank, the people I consider to be conservative in nature, have seemed to me more trustworthy. They’re more likely to be deluded, but that’s perhaps inevitable when your personal makeup is strong on loyalty and faith. Liberals will have a much clearer view of reality and a sense of overall responsibility to the big picture, but more ambivalent and disconnected, and when it’s time to take sides they may fall the wrong way.
Neither of these is really the one you want at the wheel, they have to counterbalance each other. The current left/right dialectic has poisoned this potential by making the right into a dysfunctional caricature of themselves, granted that it’s their doing.
Of course the left/right description is not a precise measurement; we hear all the time of ‘hard right’, centre left’, etc and it’s possible to be, as many are, on the right fiscally and the left socially or whatever. The descriptions of what people on either side are likely to believe are pretty accurate and confirm that the terms still have meaning currently usable and understood.
Anecdotally my experience of trustworthiness would be the exact opposite, with loyalty and faith certainly present on the right so long as it is not towards those choosing ‘the wrong way’ ( pretty question-begging, that one!)
Not much doubt to me where ‘pull up the ladder, Jack – I’m all right’ belongs.
I’ve known no shortage of fervent individualists when things were fine who suddenly decided that we’re all in it together when things went wrong.
‘A plague on both your houses’ is all very well but I don’t see how the continuance of the historical recognition of the left/right descriptors of political positions becomes a ‘current dialectic’ responsible for the harm that is claimed.
One person’s ’ counterbalance’ is another’s capitulation. I’m not sure Mr Putin’s fascism will be eliminated by stopping describing it as such.
The current fashion for fascism, including Putin if you like, should be called out at every opportunity. The problem there is a different one – historians live to chew over the definitions of this term, as I mentioned earlier, and apologists for present day would-be Mussolinis will try to tie you up in quibbles over that. Portugal lived through 40 years of Estado Novo, was that fascism? Well, Salazar didn’t have any use for militarism, so apparently not, but who cares? Surveillance, informers, prison, torture … but no militarism!
What I’m after, here, is some way to rescue reasonably good people from the MAGA swamp, and use them to help with the woke swamp for lack of a better term. My analysis based on very little knowledge: slavery and civil war left America with a festering wound; Eisenhower got tired of it after a century and put troops to set things right in the south. That put America out in front of public consensus, and the following decade ironed that in. This was all necessary, but not sufficient.
Following decades found the forces of righteousness continuing to follow their own dictates and imposing them as government policy, with a degree of contempt for public consensus. Whether what has been done during that time is really progress is arguable. Are black people really better off today, than 1970? In some areas, the contrary, because economic conditions were what really mattered. But every new attempt to combat racism etc. with government rules, is new fuel on the fire for people who already resented the implication of racism and resent being made to play a new government game. I’m circling back to racism, but of course it fans out in all directions, environmental protections etc.
What I’m saying is that the left/right cultivate stupidity, and it’s destroying the nation. That the right is far worse, means that they will be extra hard to rescue, but their deprogrammed cult members are needed as a vital part of the governing consensus.
Quibbling about what facism is seems pretty pointless. I simply take the original meaning based on the ‘fascio’ or bundle of sheafs carried by those in authority in Ancient Rome. Fascism is simply authoritarianism – sovereignty from the top down. Militarism is not an essential element but fascists are historically more than happy to use it if the turkeys refuse to vote for Christmas.
The ‘festering wound’ is certainly very much the case, obviously especially in the South where the Confederate flag proliferates but the typical fascist encouraging hatred of ‘the other’ is everywhere, not least with the appalling Farage here in England.
I’m all for rescuing the misguided from the ‘MAGA swamp’ but the forces of authoritarianism and its resources in the right wing media are formidable.
It just worries me that the implication of ‘a plague on both your houses’ plays to the glib ‘they’re all the same’, which I don’t believe they are or that there is equal ‘stupidity’ in both camps.
Farage is just plugging into a culture war that is fuelled by religiious knob-headery…he is a xtian knob-head. If (like Lennon) you can imagine a world without organised knob-headery you might get a better world. Unfortunately the lunatics have taken over the asylum and unfortunately homo sapiens is doomed to extinction…