The Pentagon shooting: what’s the definition of “right-wing” these days?
Yesterday John Patick Bedell walked up to the Pentagon and shot two officers there before being killed himself. Bedell hated George Bush and was a 9/11-truther. And yet Peter Grier of the Christian Science Monitor calls him he was a right-wing fanatic. Bedell hated the government and the armed forces, as well. Typical right-wing sentiments, of course!
Grier doesn’t even try to explain how it is that these things made Bedell a man of the right rather than the left (or even, perhaps, just a confused and demented man). Perhaps Grier thinks it’s self-explanatory, obvious to any thinking person: Bedell had a gun; he shot two people. Man of the right.
This sort of “reasoning” also was present in most coverage of the case of Joseph Stack, who killed himself and one other person when he flew his plane into an Austin IRS building and was widely described as a right-wing teabagger. Stack left a manifesto in which he “railed against the U.S. tax system, capitalist greed, his accountant, former President George W. Bush and others.” Most news outlets left out the fact that it also contained praise for communism and condemnation of the greed of capitalism. Typical right-wing stuff.
The media’s understanding of political philosophy is positively awe inspiring. What do these guys get paid?
It’s not the truth that counts. It’s the narrative.
The definition:
Right-Wing Extremist: Anybody who doesn’t think the State is God, and Our President is His Prophet.
The 9/11 “truth” aspect of the story is a nightmare for folks on the left. Sort of like what’s transpiring in New York State with crazy Gov. David Patterson.
The effort to tie the matter to the Tea Party or some Right Wing cause is all encompassing. How many different ways can you parse it to avoid calling it what it is.
labels mean nothing, and to people who think the do, labeling in a way that helps your cause is moral under socailism.
enemies of the state are always to the right
they are a cancer to the body politic
and its impossible for him to be on the left
being on the left is not defined by ideas and facts, its defined (as i explained with the purple horse story), by loyalty to the end cause.
so if your working towards teh end cause, your on the left… do something against that cause, BE AN INDIVIDUAL and act out on your own, without orders from the colelctive… and your on the right, despite what your beleifs are
its a narcisistic definition that only cares whose side your on, not anything else…
Ma’am, there is a very thin, potential connection to right wing extremism for Bedell. It’s hardly proven beyond doubt; as a matter of fact, I have to warn everyone that it’s nothing more than a 2-degrees of separation association, but:
John P. Bedell and Daniel Hopsicker (9/11 truther, conspiracy theory “journalist”) were Facebook friends. (Source)
Daniel Hopsicker was a featured speaker at a David Irving holocaust denial conference. This results in a mere two degrees of separation from a known Holocaust denier.
Now, is this proof that Bedell was right wing? Hardly. But it is a seed for further investigation along that line. Unfortunately, 9/11 “trutherism” has attracted elements from both the left (David Ray Griffin, Thierry Meyssan) and the right (Alex Jones), so it’s hard to tell whether truthers share political views outside of 9/11 or not. That makes it hard to be certain about political leanings based merely on association. So in the end, on the one hand, you’ll want to take this info with a grain of salt and not automatically presume guilt by association. On the other, you do want to note it as a detail to file away and use to evaluate further information as it develops. Bedell and Hopsicker did hold in common at least one delusion that everyone’s aware of. The possibility that they held more is not out of the question.
ElMondoHummus,
How is holocaust denial right wing? Or am I misunderstanding you?
One thing is for sure. These people are wackos. Is this due to economic factors rather than political factors? I don’t know. What does this say about the future when entitlement programs bankrupt our government? Riots in the streets perhaps?
Artfldgr is right. Just look at how lefties still portray Lee Harvey Oswald, a devout communist/socialist.
When the IRS offices were attacked the media jumped on the target in order to label Stack as a right winger. Now that the Pentagon has been attacked the target no longer provides any insight into the motivation for the attack. It’s almost as if they think their audience is stupid. Or at least a certain segment.
MikeLL: You’re quite right. Holocaust denial is not right-wing and these people are wackos.
When one gets that far into conspiracy theories, the terms right-wing and left-wing no longer matter much.
As an exercise, google “monarch mind control” and read from several of the websites. Try to determine whether the writers are right or left wing and whether it makes a difference.
@MikeLL:
David Irving is a known right wing extremist. And Holocaust denial is known as a far-right-wing form of delusional extremism, much like Bush Derangement Syndrome is a left wing form of delusion. I’d say that Holocaust denial is more insidious, but as far as mental midgetry, they’re equally moronic.
“EBJ Says:
When the IRS offices were attacked the media jumped on the target in order to label Stack as a right winger.”
Which was stupid in the extreme, and demonstrates the media’s shallowness in research. As Neo said: His own writings clearly demonstrate a clear leftist ideology. Mainstream news sources jumped on the fact that he was angry at his tax problems without digging deeper into the pathology that led him to that state of anger.
“huxley Says:
MikeLL: You’re quite right. Holocaust denial is not right-wing and these people are wackos.”
This is incorrect. Neo-Nazism and Holocaust denial has characteristically been a syndrome of right wing extremism, much as the SDS and Blank Panther movements from the ’60s were corresponding left wing extremist movements.
The mistake the news media and leftists make is trying to equate current Conservative politics with right wing extremism; in truth, they couldn’t be farther apart. Right wing extremism on the level of Holocaust Denial and NeoNazism is about absolute control and ends up actually coming back around in a full circle to run head-on into left-wing extremism in their belief of gaining and abusing governmental power to impose ideology. Whereas current Conservatism is about freedom from such. Conservatism is about liberty. Leftists characterizing it as being on the same side of the spectrum as Nazism are woefully uneducated and unsophisticated.
Whoops. Submitted too soon…
“When one gets that far into conspiracy theories, the terms right-wing and left-wing no longer matter much. “
This is unfortunately all too true. They both come around to believing that governmental power to force ideological compliance is the be-all, end-all of goals. Just because one day’s criminal is a right winger doesn’t mean tomorrows will be too. What conspiracy addicts truly share is a delusionary conception of the world, and a frightening desire to inflict damage on it. That, unfortunately, can come from either side of the spectrum.
Let’s not forget the Holocaust Museum shooter, James W. von Brunn, a confirmed hater of Bush, McCain and neoconservatives. He was a “right wing extremist” too, as far as the MSM was concerned.
About the only one that haven’t tried to stick the “right wing” label, lately, to is Major Hasan. And frankly I’m surprised, Major Hasan being such a religious man and all.
This is incorrect. Neo-Nazism and Holocaust denial has characteristically been a syndrome of right wing extremism, much as the SDS and Blank Panther movements from the ’60s were corresponding left wing extremist movements.
ElMondoHummus: To whatever extent that was true in the past, it is no longer. Today the major focus of holocaust denial by far is Islamic, while in the west, the polarity on antisemitism has flipped from the right to the left.
I say again that at this level of extremism, the terms right-wing and left-wing, don’t mean much.
ElMondoHummus,
Not to be argumentative, but I ‘d like to hear why neo-nazi is has always been considered a right wing movement. Can you make a good argument for it? Other than that’s way Academia has classified it? Because, of course, since Academia typically leans a tad left, they don’t want to beassociated with neo-nazism.
I only say this because Academia likes to forget that neo-nazism comes from nazism which is, you know, National Socialism. And socialism is a leftist concept.
There are many of us out here speaking for myself, who lean neither right nor left, who have always wondered why neo-nazism and its parent get lumped into right-wing extremism.
@Jim Sullivan,
I think the easiest and fastest way to put it is this: Extremist leftism (Communism) was about enforced and entrenched social equality, and extremist rightism (Fascism) was about enforced and entrenched social stratification. The assignment of Nazism on the right and Communism on the left is rather arbitrary, but the point is that as far as class in society goes, they were indeed opposite of each other.
Economically, yes, it’s true that Nazism was indeed a socialist philosophy, and it and Communism did indeed both compete for the same economic philisophical niche (not to mention authoritarian one). They’re both about state dictation of the economy, even though they differed in specifics on how to control it (the whole notion of corporatism was supposed to be anathema to dediated Communists, although I would argue that they adopted bastardized versions of such themselves. But that’s a digression off topic…). Outside of that, though, in the societal spectrum, they couldn’t have been more different. The Communist/Socialist ideal tried to eliminate the whole notion of class, whereas the Fascist/Nazist ideal firmly entrenched it. Let’s remember the Nazi invocation of the concept of the “Herrenvolk”, as well as their clear demotion of various groups – not just the Jewish, but the Gypsies, the mentally retarded, etc. – to lower and lower classes of citizenship (the “Untermenschen”). You can see this in their heroic propagandistic art at the time: Nazi art deified the concept of the “Superman”, the “Ubermenschen”, whereas the communist propogandistic art lauded the faceless masses of the proletariat.
So why Communism on the left and Fascism on the right? I don’t know enough about how academics have dealt with political history to answer that one. You can switch them around and the fact that they’re opposed stays the same. Suffice to say that after the admittedly arbitrary assignment of Fascist social ideology to “the right” and Collectivist/Communist social ideology to “the left”, Nazi Fascism clearly demonstrates a polar opposition to Stalinistic Communism. And since Holocaust denial is a feature of NeoNazism, it, too, attaches to the right historically.
Huxley has a very accurate point about modern Islamic radicalism coming in and converging with Holocaust denial from a slightly different direction. But it can be argued that radical Islamicists do indeed accidentally replicate certain Fascist ideals, not the least of which is the assignment of non-Muslims to a second-class of citizenship, as well as the “Ubermenschen” hero (the Martyred Jihadist).
Furthermore, (to get back to Neo’s original post) if the admittedly tenuous link between Bedell, Hopsicker, and Irving is significant – recall, I admit that it’s far from definitive – then by virtue of being the David Irving class of Holocaust denial, it is indeed right wing, given that it springs from “classic” German Third Reich Nazi ideology. Irving isn’t coming at Holocaust denial from some left wing perspective by any stretch of the imagination; he’s clearly an admirer of Fascism as developed and practiced by Hitler.
Blah… I’m starting to ramble; from years ago, Neo probably recalls how long winded I could be. Anyway, does this answer your question? Fascism, therefore Nazism, and therefore NeoNazism was simply arbitrarily defined as right wing is the bottom line. It’s the class distinction that places it there. It’s true that economically, National Socialism and Bolshevik Collectivism were indeed both statist and socialist, but their respective notions of class placed them worlds apart.
I heard that the two security officers are already out of the hospital, this goober isn’t a right wing extremist. We’re generally more proficient with our firearms.
ElMondoHummus, I’m not buying. What kind of evidence do you have that Nazism in particular had either an ideology or goal of stasis in terms of something called “class?” I have never seen that described anywhere. By contrast, I have read about Red Nazis like Goebbels, when went to their end raving about the inequities of bourgeois society. It is hard to imagine people who have less in common with conservatives.
I would be inclined to argue that National Socialism was the Hegelian synthesis of Socialism and Nationalism that substituted ethnicity for economic class as the engine of historical progression. As such, it is properly understood as a socialist heresy. Once the communists adopted “socialism in one country,” they also began to move in the direction of national socialism, a development that was very clear to old socialists like Orwell and, I suppose, old Bolsheviks like Trotsky.
Neo-Nazism and Holocaust denial has characteristically been a syndrome of right wing extremism
really… you dont know what your talking about. and this isnt a pile of ignorant people here.
neo nazism is leftist… as was the original nazism
when Father Coughlin and Obama use the same terms for the same thing and they are promoting that thing, would you then say that obama is on the far right?
His chief topics were political and economic rather than religious, with his slogan being Social Justice
hitler and stalin competed for the same people one waqs international socialist, the other was national socialist… international socialist is the same thing, they go nationalist when they own the whole world..
anyway… these are all followers of the prophet marx and they each tried to make socialism real. hitler in his way, lenin and stalin in theirs.
with Social Justice being an idea that hitler and others also promoted. ergo father coughlin and obama fighting for the same thing.
both hitler and soviets hated jews…
you dont know your history sir.
by the way sir.. the first green parties is the nazi party… and go take a look… they use a swastika in a green field.. and other orgs just remove the swastika. the peace sign is an inverted rune of life the german nazi’s used…
I think the easiest and fastest way to put it is this: Extremist leftism (Communism) was about enforced and entrenched social equality, and extremist rightism (Fascism) was about enforced and entrenched social stratification.
WRONG…
if thats so, then your spectrum puts freedom between two totalitarianisms.
and BOTH totalitarianisms are marxist..
so that makes no sense.
FAscism was only to the right of communism which is as far left as you can go.
past fascism toward the right, is the whole rest of the political spectrum
they have cut that off to you so your only choice is totalitarian communism (which allows no personal property, and all means of production OWNED by the state), and totalitarian fascism, which allows some personal property, and CONTROLS the means of production through licensing, permits, taxes, and other means.
So why Communism on the left and Fascism on the right? I don’t know enough about how academics have dealt with political history to answer that one. You can switch them around and the fact that they’re opposed stays the same.
well yeah.. if your ignorant you might thing a tiger and a tabby were the same, if they leave out key details as size and only focus on stripes and color
the communist academics solved the problem by following Stalins missive that all politics is to the right of communism.
your a parrot with a good memory, but you memorized the false facts of the left.
It is true that liberty is precious; so precious that it must be carefully rationed.
Vladimir Lenin
Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism.
Vladimir Lenin
The goal of socialism is communism.
Vladimir Lenin
“the whole of national socialism is based on Marx.” Hitler
“we have everything necessary to construct the complete socialism” Stalin quoting lenin
same things… they are both different groups realizations of the return to feudalism designed by marx..
you make no sense to anyone that really knows the details… your completely contradictory… and the point that the deniers and the promoters are the same people is weird… but not if you think that everything bad gets blamed on the right… and that leaves communism as the saint.
but then where is capitalism.. well, you have to get out of the land of totalitarianisms and back on the whole political spectrum.
and thats what people dont get… they never asked if you wanted totalitarianism… they assumed that, and are asking whether you want fascism (which has nothing really to do with antisemitism other than carrying over marx hatred and finding it fundemental when it isnt), or whether you want communism (with the majority siding with a maoist version. mao topped stalin… so i guess he wins)
artfldgr, setting the terms of the debate is part of the debate. But the labels we use are the product of a particular ideological framework. National Socialists would not have been recognized as part of the original Right, which was anti-revolutionary in the sense that it valued legitimacy in legal structures and government. By contrast, Saint-Just would have fit in perfectly among the Nazis.
“Fascism” is a term that was originally coined by the Italian dictator Mussolini to describe his adaptation of Marxism to the conditions of Italy after World War I. Lenin in Russia made somewhat different adaptations of Marxism to the conditions in Russia during the same period and his adaptations came to be called Marxism/Leninism. Mussolini stayed closer to Marx in that he felt that Italy had to go through a capitalist stage before it could reach socialism whereas Lenin attempted to push Russia straight from semi-feudalism into socialism. Mussolini’s principal modification of Marxism was his rejection of the notion of class war, something that put him decisively at odds with Lenin’s “Reds”.
If the term “Fascism” means anything of itself it means “Groupism” — as the fasci of Italy at the time were simply groups of political activists. The fasces of ancient Roman times were of course the bundles of rods carried by the lictors to symbolize the great strength of the organized Roman people. The idea again was that people were stronger in groups than as individuals.
Mussolini’s ideas and system were very influential and he had many imitators — not the least of which was Adolf Hitler — and some even survived World War II — such as Peron and Chiang Kai Shek. I have set out at length elsewhere what Mussolini’s Italian Fascism was all about so I will simply summarize here by saying that Fascism was a nationalist form of extreme socialism whereas Trotskyism was/is a internationalist form of extreme socialism — with Leninism being somewhere in between. jon ray
where did he turn for up-to-date ideas? To America, of course! And the American ideas that influenced him were in fact hard to miss. They were the ideas of the American “Progressives”. And who was the best known Progressive in the world at that time? None other than the President of the United States — Woodrow Wilson — the man who was most responsible for the postwar order in Europe. So Mussolini had to do little more than read his newspapers to hear at least some things about the ideas of the very influential American Progressives.
“The Progressive Era is a period of one big lie after another, crafted upon the false belief that modern government somehow could replace a free market, private property order and create an economy marked both by prosperity and “fairness.” From “scientific” management to “enlightened” religion (called theological liberalism and, later, secularism) to Prohibition to “objective” journalism, the belief was that modern society had found the key to “onward and upward” progress.”
the progressives are the ones that cut off the rest of the spectrum… that way, there was only two totalitarians to choose from.
like mom offering you a false choice in peas and carrots when you dont want a vegetable.
and from david southerns book
The Progressive movement swept America from roughly the early 1890s through the early 1920s, producing a broad popular consensus that government should be the primary agent of social change. To that end, legions of idealistic young crusaders, operating at the local, state, and federal levels, seized and wielded sweeping new powers and enacted a mountain of new legislation, including minimum wage and maximum hour laws, antitrust statutes, restrictions on the sale and consumption of alcohol, appropriations for hundreds of miles of roads and highways, assistance to new immigrants and the poor, women’s suffrage, and electoral reform, among much else….
Yet the Progressive Era was also a time of vicious, state-sponsored racism. In fact, from the standpoint of African-American history, the Progressive Era qualifies as arguably the single worst period since Emancipation. The wholesale disfranchisement of Southern black voters occurred during these years, as did the rise and triumph of Jim Crow. Furthermore, as the Westminster College historian David W. Southern notes in his recent book, The Progressive Era and Race: Reform and Reaction, 1900-1917, the very worst of it-disfranchisement, segregation, race baiting, lynching-“went hand-in-hand with the most advanced forms of southern progressivism.” Racism was the norm, not the exception, among the very crusaders romanticized by today’s activist left.
At the heart of Southern’s flawed but useful study is a deceptively simple question: How did reformers infused with lofty ideals embrace such abominable bigotry? His answer begins with the race-based pseudoscience that dominated educated opinion at the turn of the 20th century. “At college,” Southern notes, “budding progressives not only read exposes of capitalistic barons and attacks on laissez-faire economics by muckraking journalists, they also read racist tracts that drew on the latest anthropology, biology, psychology, sociology, eugenics, and medical science.”
it got the moniker of being on the Right as the economic giants of the time sided with communism and fascism… so people confused capitalism, another word for freedom (and invented by marx to put his ideas on equal footing with what we do without any system, or teaching. all over the world we naturally trade and do capitalism… when the state doesnt kill us for it, and even when it does! you have to be taught socialism, you know capitalism naturally!!!!!!)
it also didnt help that the communists wanted the americans who really reacted when they found out what the progressives and others stood for… to come to their camp by running away from the alternative totalitarians.
i will say that if you have lived under both, you would like one of them a lot more than another…
the American “Progressives” of the late 19th and early 20th century were not only Leftists but they were also war-glorifying militarists. Hitler got not only his eugenic ideas from American Leftists but even his ideas about war being a purification of the national spirit etc. And who was it who said this?
“Conformity will be the only virtue and any man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty.”
did hitler say that?
did mao say that?
did stalin say that?
no, it was the american woodrow wilson!
who by the way, brought us income tax for the common man when it was only to be a flat tax apportioned and from landowners and business owners… (ie they out marxed marx and fairly).
he also brought our first socialist created depression, just before 1920… when his stuff was undone, we had the roaring 20s… when they redid his stuff and more, we had the depression… just as they are happy they ran the machine into the ground attempting to follow the soviet constitition (wihotu using the hooks that let the state out of eveyr article). and in doing collapse this system.
i bet you ALSO dont know that it was the democrats in the south that hunted and mutilated blacks so they wouldnt vote republican… (but search for hayes tilden and pinkerson… the reason behind the whole give it to hayes was the hienious things that would have become permanent in the minds of people if they argued.. interesting boosk from then.. )
Under Woodrow Wilson, the first American president to embrace the new cult of pragmatism and power that had overtaken “enlightened” thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic (and the first American president to openly disdain the U.S. Constitution), the progressives unleashed a crackdown on freedom that makes the supposed fascism of the McCarthy era and the Bush years seem like a teach-in at Smith College. Wilson established the American Protective League, a group of domestic fascisti charged with crushing dissent, beating “slackers,” and intimidating average Americans. Wilson’s Committee for Public Information was the first modern propaganda ministry. Indeed, according to the late sociologist and intellectual historian Robert Nisbet, the “West’s first real experience with totalitarianism – political absolutism extended into every possible area of culture and society, education, religion, industry, the arts, local community and family included, with a kind of terror always waiting in the wings – came with the American war state under Wilson.” jonah goldberg
At the risk of appearing to flog a dead horse, I might also point to Koenigsberg’s demonstration that Hitler saw Germany as a living organism that was severely threatened. And where did Hitler get the idea of Germany as a biological organism? He could have got it from various sources but one of the most prominent sources of such thinking was again the very anti-business Woodrow Wilson — who justified his wish to scrap the checks and balances of the American constitution on the grounds that the U.S. government was “not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life… No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live”. And American Leftists still often characterize the constitution as a “living” thing to this day. Like Wilson, they use such language as an excuse for escaping the constraint of law that does not suit them. Hitler would have seen that as perfectly proper!
In fact, the more one reads about the American “Progressives” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the more parallels one finds between them and the Fascists. For instance, particularly prominent on the American Left were the Bellamys. Edward and Francis Bellamy actively promoted what they called “military socialism” and, largely under their influence, loyalty oaths, flag ceremonies, racist preaching and even the straight-armed salute were all common in America long before they were adopted by Mussolini and the Nazis
I just signed on through Road Runner and a “headline” was his parents tried to warn the authorities. So much for the authorities stopping crime?
This makes us fell better about putting our fate in government hands. How?
I also read on PJM that the guy was registered democrat?
Whatever.
The disconnect with reality is becoming a chasm.
Some points to consider regarding whether Nazism is a phenomenon of the radical right.
1. One of the points Eric Hoffer makes in “The True Believer” is that a true radical is a person who deeply believes in a cause — any cause. Radicals often move seemlessly from one form of radicalism to another, some of which appear to be mutually exclusive, without any apparent thought of the contradictions inherent in their positions. This suggests to me that radicals have more in common with each other than with those who are not radical but supposedly on the same side of the political spectrum. Historically, Nazism considered the conservative elements of German society to be as much their enemies as leftist groups. I believe Nazism has more in common with Communism than with Liberal Democracy.
2. Seymour Martin Lipset in “Political Man” characterizes political philosophy as a six-fold framework rather than as a four-fold framework, based upon class. Lipset divides the political spectrum into Right, Center and Left, and then says there is a moderate and a extreme version of each. The Right draws support from the upper classes, church, nobility, etc.; moderate Rightists are Constitutional Monarchists (e.g., England at various times), and extreme Rightists are Absolute Monarchists (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Franco’s Spain). The Center draws support from the middle classes; moderate Centrists are Liberal Democrats (in the classic sense) (e.g., USA), and extreme centrists are National Socialists (e.g., Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy). The Left draws support from the lower classes; moderate Leftists are Statists (e.g., Sweden), and extreme Leftists are Communists (e.g., Soviet Russia).
3. Jean Kirkpatrick drew a distinction between authoritarianism and totalitarianism. An authoritarianism government, such as an absolute monarchy, demands absolute power but does not demand obedience to a set of central tenets. An absolute monarch does not demand ideological conformity, but it does demand that you stay out of its way. A totalitarian government, such as Nazi Germany of Soviet Russia, demands that its citizens not only obey but also accept the governing ideology. Thus, an authoritarian government would not demand that its citizens study a particular ideology or attempt to control their views on particular issues.
4. Personally, I think Hoffer, Lipset and Kirkpatrick all made valid points. I do not believe that Nazis are in any sense Rightists. There is simply no comparison between the central tenets of Nazism and those of Conservatism. The views of Nazis are polar opposites of those of Conservatives on issues such as personal and economic liberty, religion and the relationship between the individual and the state. In practice, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were two sides of the same coin. Both created one elite group that was favored by the state and demanded that citizens follow their particular ideology. Both emphasized central planning and wanted to remake the state in their own image. Both emphasized the state over the individual. These are all anathema to modern conservatives.
Is ElMondoHummus a troll?
It certainly has hijacked the thread with leftist truthiness.
The terms right-wing and left-wing go back to parliamentary seating arrangements during the French Revolution.
Those who supported the monarchy, the aristocracy and the church sat on the right. Those who supported the revolution, egalitarianism, and secular values sat on the left.
They are general terms that still have some rough utility two hundred years out from the French Revolution but they aren’t scientific classifications that can be applied to any political phenomenon and argued rigorously.
For instance, I see no reason to suppose that Holocaust Denial would be either right or left other than a history of association.
Arguing that Neo-Nazism is right or left is also fraught with difficulties.
ElMundo is correct that Neo-Nazism emerged from the Right in America, from people who value tradition and religion and oppose left-wing agenda. OTOH one can argue that Neo-Nazism (and Nazism) is structurally left-wing in its intention to radically reorder society.
Is ElMondoHummus a troll?
He’s polite and he makes substantive points.
Furthermore the topic question here is “What’s the definition of right-wing these days?”
ElMondo is on that point even if he isn’t part of the blog consensus on what is right and what is left.
I once knew a Neo-Nazi.
He was a Green Beret and a fervent Christian who read the Bible literally and bizarrely (the White Race = the Chosen People). He took the Protocols of the Elders of Zion seriously. He despised Democrats, liberals, progressives, leftists, socialists and communists. He believed that Armageddon was around the corner and he was preparing for it.
I don’t think the terms right or left do justice to my friend.
I don’t think the terms right or left do justice to my friend.
Correct. The term insane seems more than appropriate as it does for John Bedell.
This is not a left, right issue – it’s a right or wrong one.
The media in it’s infinite lack of wisdom continues to churn out psycho babble by linking any and all nutcases away from themselves.
the antics of the media become more clear if you do this mental exercise. Think back to your high school class. Now think of the kids in it who majored in journalism. Explains a lot, doesn’t it.
oh, one other thing. i had a friend once who was a journalism major and for his college internship he worked at nbc. he said that, while it is the goal of every journalism major to become a famous news anchor and they have to work hard to get there, the fact is that the copy writing of the scripts that the news anchors read off of is an entry level job. explains even more…
The term insane seems more than appropriate as it does for John Bedell.
sadie: Well, insane strikes me as a bit strong. I’ve known insane people too and they were noticeably impaired when it came to tracking immediate reality and functioning in it.
But my friend was quite functional and he was quite a decent person too. He just had strong convictions that were odd and dangerous. One might call him delusional.
I agree that when it comes to political extremists there is usually a delusional component that is more important to understand than their proper seating assignments in a French parliament that no longer exists.
I haven’t read all the comments yet, so I apologize if I’m making points that have already been made by others.
My understanding is that the notion of Nazism and Fascism as “right-wing” was started by Stalin, and promulgated by his supporters in the various Communist parties in the West.
I, too, learned to think of the political spectrum that way. America was in the moderate middle, and both the extreme left and the extreme right tended towards totalitarianism.
But I think that a much more useful way to look at it is to see any kind of totalitarian society (Communism, Nazism, Islam) as the extreme left, while the extreme right would be anarchy–the complete absence of government.
Looking at it that way, the Founding Fathers would certainly be pretty far to the right since they advocated limited, strictly circumscribed government. But they weren’t right-wing extremists, since they didn’t advocate anarchy.
That also means that “moderates” are those people who support a certain amount of authoritarian, coercive government when it suits their purposes and when they feel that their desired ends must be imposed by force.
Ayn Rand said that when good compromises with evil, only evil benefits.
if the spectrum spans from -5 to 0 to +5
with -5 being complete total government and +5 being complete disordered anarchy…
-5 communism / totalitarian
-4 fascism / totalitarian
-3 progressive / totalitarian
-2 progressive / authoritarian / FDR – Obama (?)
-1 progressive / authoritative / FDR – Obama (?)
0 Democrat / Republican / Clinton Carter / progressive
1 Democrat / Republican / Wilson Regan (?) / progressive
2 Democrat / Republican / Traditional / free market
3 Founding Fathers / free market
4 the first failed American government / free market
5 anarchy [no market]
while it probably might have been better if i had used more numbers… its imperfect as all of them are, but pretty much gives a flavor
the early time in American history and way up almost to modern times was quite traditional, and there were not many limits.
with Wilson comes the real big first power grab and our biggest shift towards state control over the citizens and ignoring and re-conceptualizing the constitution while also despising.
you can argue who goes where, but for the most part of the modern era with the progressives after Wilson, quite to the left of the original planners, and we went back and forth sometimes more, sometimes less.
the hard place is where FDR and how much of the same stuff (and ignoring of constitution) that was in the soviet constitution of the era. he ultimately didn’t get all he wanted (and after him they put limits on terms real fast – and progressive as a word went into hiding).
we have slid very far left compared to our roots. but as you can see, i cant tell how far… will it be bouncy like FDR? will the next group take the ball and try to run with it? which way?
there are not very many more steps to the point were we have lost a whole lot of our freedoms. even if that is accomplished by other means, not necessarily by decree. like jacking power costs till its way too expensive to eat and travel long distances. social engineering type manipulation vs overt codification of some rule. both do the same thing.
where do they change from constantly telling us new ways to live and manipulating outcomes to create certain other outcomes… and manipulative social engineering, overly cooperative media… and end up ordering us and having some kind of bite behind it?
It seems much of the right-wing/left-wing game is to define terms and find historical examples so one can argue that Hitler and Stalin end up on the side of one’s opponents.
As another perhaps pertinent observation:
The Horst Wessel Leid – the official anthem of the NSDAP (Nazi) party had the lines – I believe in the second verse – “We are marching against Red Fronts and Reaction (gegen Rot Front und Reaktion).
One could argue they were distancing themselves from both the Communist/Socialist Left (Rot Front) and the traditional Middle Class/Conservative Right (Reaktion).
Very interesting scale for ranking, Artfldgr. Thanks.
@Oblio
I was not referring to economic class, I was referring to social class. And yes, that reduction was in many cases – most notably the Jews – due to their ethnicity. Again, the notion of Herrenvolk and the concept of lower races is clear in their writings. They condemned the Jewish people, the Gypsies, and many others to a lower class of citizenship based on their race. They condemned many others – those with congenital defects, for example – for genetic impurities. The Nazi’s relegated all of them to ghettos, and eventually moved to exterminate them. To do this, the Nazi’s reduced those classes of citizen to being “Untermenschen” – “Subhuman”, “inferior” – in all this. They were all “undesireable” classes due to ethnicity, genetic defect, or whatever the Nazi’s wanted to pin on them in order to maintain their own superiority.
By the way, when did I imply that Nazis has anything “in common” with modern US conservatives? Nobody can apply the historical concept of leftist/rightist to US politics; the modern conservative has ZERO in common with the statist, race obsessed Fascist. On top of that, given the current left’s obsession on race and expanding powers of the state, they end up being the ones who have far more in common with the historical Nazi than conservatives do. The last comparison I’m making is the historical extremist far right with the modern US conservative. They couldn’t be more different.
If I may, and for the purposes of enlightenment and not argument, I’d like to ask for evidence in return of why you say communists began to move in the direction of national socialism. I myself don’t see that. As one difference: The whole notion of corporativism was supposed to be an abhorrent idea to the Communist, since they preferred direct state control instead of delegation of powers to state-approved organs. The distinction may be sort of minor to us in the US – it’s all government control, whether it’s direct or delegated to governmental organizations – but it loomed large to Fascists and Communists back then.
huxley:
“One might call him delusional”
Insane or delusional – we can discuss the semantics, but they both qualify as disturbed. If one’s delusions or level of sanity does not impinge beyond their front door – then fine and dandy.The problem is …they do open their front doors and insist on sharing their delusions.
“OTOH one can argue that Neo-Nazism (and Nazism) is structurally left-wing in its intention to radically reorder society”
Or..totally destroy it.
My goodness, people. Has no one read Jonah Goldberg’s
Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning? Highly recommended.
Have you not noticed that the Left is very much inclined towards name-calling? Because they aren’t very interested in evidence or history, and usually pretty angry than anyone would disagree with them, they are reduced to calling names. See Daily Kos, Puffington Host, Olberman etc. etc.
@ElMondoHummus
I don’t think we can’t quite stretch the concept of ethnicity to equal “social class.” Or if we are going to try, we need a working definition of “social class” and a taxonomy of “social class” in pre-war Europe. I suspect that if you try, you will not be able to keep the concept of social class clearly separate from “economic class.”
huxley and I are going back the the earliest definitions of Right/Left during the French Revolution. I suspect that very few self-described conservatives wouldn’t be pleased to take instruction from Burke, who has to be considered a major voice of the Right in 1790’s terms, notwithstanding having been against Britain’s American war policy in the 1770’s and 1780’s. Saint-Just and Robespierre, the men of the Left, adopted terror policies and political philosophy that wouldn’t have bothered any national socialist movement.
With respect to my view that the Soviet Union (and North Korea, Yugoslavia, and East Germany, among others) migrated to a policy that was de facto national socialist, what would be an adequate demonstration? We have already remarked on the similarities of totalitarian practice. We could add the cultivation of ethnic-based patriotism, anti-semitism, ethnic cleansing, and mass killing. We have the contemporary observations of Orwell and Koestler. We are probably lacking much in the way of theoretical affirmation of the role of ethnicity in state policy, which is not surprising, given the heretical nature of the concept for orthodox Marxists and the extreme discipline of the Party-line theoreticians.
But to conclude, we would first need to agree on definitions.
sorry about the italics.
The Elephant’s Child: Sure I’ve read Liberal Fascism. It’s a great book. I believe several other participants here have read it too.
What’s frightening to me is that the liberal media (and your average leftist ‘man on the street’) sees someone violent/ dangerous / nuts and TRULY believes that such traits characterize the Right.
I won’t go as far to say it’s a way of dehumanizing one’s ‘enemies’, but it comes pretty darn close.
This is not a new discussion nor a simple one.
Without a doubt Orwell became an anti-Stalinist after his experiences in the Spanish Civil War. However, he never gave up his allegiance to what he called democratic socialism:
“@ElMondoHummus
I don’t think we can’t quite stretch the concept of ethnicity to equal “social class.” Or if we are going to try, we need a working definition of “social class” and a taxonomy of “social class” in pre-war Europe. I suspect that if you try, you will not be able to keep the concept of social class clearly separate from “economic class.””
I’m sorry, but I’m not sure how else to categorize it. Ethnicity was not the only criteria used to declare someone as untermenschen. Ethnicity was definitely the most prevalent characteristic invoked, as seen by the extreme antisemetic propoganda from that period, and it does explain the targeting of the Romani and the Slavs in addition to the Jews, but that doesn’t cover all of it. Again, there were the others categorized as “unfit” due to congenital genetic disorders. There were those declared so because they were communists. There were those declared so because they were Jehovah’s Witnesses, or some other religion (while this isn’t Germany, recall the murder of the Polish Catholic priests). There were those declared so because they were criminals like prostitutes and alcoholics. But they were all seen as a lower type of human and citizen. That’s why I classify them all in one “class”, or “group”. How else can I encompass that variety of targets for Nazi hate? “Class” is the best word I’m coming up with.
And I know that social and economic classes generally are hard to separate – how much of Nazi racism was based on the stereotype of the “Rich Jew”, thus denigrating otherwise hardworking professionals who happened to be Jewish – but again: I really don’t know how else to characterize the classes of citizen that the Nazi’s considered beneath them. Note that the classifications I give above hardly emphasizes economic standings; the closest it comes is with that “Rich Jew” denigration I just mentioned, but so much of that is still racial denigration rather than economic.
If you’ve got a better term, please share it. I don’t want to limit Nazi depredations to merely being racially/ethnically based, because as bad as that is, it doesn’t encompass the entirety of what they considered themselves superior to. They truly thought of themselves as better than everyone, and that extended beyond race.
“I suspect that very few self-described conservatives wouldn’t be pleased to take instruction from Burke, who has to be considered a major voice of the Right in 1790’s terms, notwithstanding having been against Britain’s American war policy in the 1770’s and 1780’s. Saint-Just and Robespierre, the men of the Left, adopted terror policies and political philosophy that wouldn’t have bothered any national socialist movement…”
No offense, but I really wish you and all the other folks here would stop presuming that I’m conflating the spectrum of socialists with the spectrum of free nations’ politics. The spectrum between free nations and either the Nazi or the Communist ideal is actually between liberty plus individualism vs government authoritarianism plus enforced collectivism. The US conservative being on the right of the spectrum in US politics is in no way comparable with Nazi’s being on the right of the spectrum in statist politics. They are not the same spectrum! The right in US politics is towards libertarian ideals – freedom from government, importance of individual liberty. The left in US politics is towards state involvement in enforcement individual rights, but there is a basic agreement on the importance of liberty and freedom. Neither correspond in any way to either wing of the socialist spectrum, which is all about the difference in whether power is held by a small group sanctioned by the government (the “Corporate”; this obviously corresponds to Fascism), or is held directly by the government for the collective whole (Communism). There is also the enforced facelessness of Communism vs. the social stratification between the “Supermen” and the unfit/undesireable/subhuman in Fascism, but that’s starting to get down in the weeds. Again, my point is that everyone needs to stop thinking I’m conflating spectrums here. Right wing US politicians are NOT Nazis. David Irving is very clearly a classic NeoNazi symptathetic right winger on the socialist spectrum, as far from Communism as his idol Hitler was, but that is absolutely, positively has zero correspondence with being any kind of US Conservative; his views are total anathema to liberty, which is the core value of US Conservatives.
Whatever Bedell was in the 20 years of his prior life, he became a Right Wing Extremest when he picked up that gun and fired it.
Liberals use poison.
(smile)
Well, it is a ways into the arguments but I’ll throw in mine.
The CSM is one of the better ones out there, but the problem is that the so called “talent pool” is so skewed one way it’s hard to counter.
In that sense there is often the idea of “left-wing==cares for people” and “right-wing==everything bad”. From this point of view people like the Unabomber and this individual can be “right-wing”. Right-wing isn’t a political statement as much as “right-wing” means “people I do not like”. As often as not said individuals have many right leaning ideas but because right-wing==Evil then their ideas of a smaller govt, lower taxes, anti-abortion (or whatever) must be left wing politics and therefore what the democratic party thinks.
As to where this thread has been moving we get into the idea of Fascists Nazi’s – which the fact that this argument exists at all is an example of the sad state of our educational system.
Fascists are a version of extreme right-wing. It is an idea born that people are no equal, never will be, and therefore there is a ruling class that governs all.
Nazis and Communist are an extreme version of left-wing politics (recall that 1940 Nazi’s are, in fact of the matter, socialists). We will ignore communism for now and note the Nazi’s believe perfection can be attained both socially and genetically. They believe that those people are the true humans and are all equal – any others aren’t human and simply do not count.
Both sides come to the conclusion of a master race but from entirely different angles. The Nazi’s were *not* facists, but sadly facism has degenerated into simply meaning “totalitarian” and has kept the “right-wing” tag (and it has done so even though academia that *should* know better. The idea that the Nazi’s are Facists is something born of the 1980’s).
It would be like talking about the Protestant Catholics – it makes no sense whatsoever even though in the end they have similar beliefs.
It’s now even normal to call regimes like Pol Pot a right wing facist govt even though it was almost a pure hardcore communist govt. There was and is *nothing* about Pol Pot that was Facists *or* Right-Wing yet the drive has been to make “totalitarian==right-wing” and there has been a great deal of success there.
But, in the end, labels are only somewhat important. By default Democrats are left-wing for the people and Republicans are right-wing totalitarian yet Obama, Pelosi, Reid and their contemporants can’t get what they want. Turns out that while the above logic is true in the abstract (still, but that is changing) when it comes down to actual individual policy those labels means squat. Bush was handily defeated by any unnamed Democrat in 06 elections yet Kerry got thrashed for this very reason. Another way of putting is that all politics are local (though I disagree with the “all” part).
However Obama got elected in large part because of said labels and so did the Democratic majority. They may have very well totally undermined that idea, for the first time I know of lifelong hardcore labor unions that do not know what to think – turns out the dems are not out for them yet Right-wing still equals *really* bad even though they mostly agree with what those right wing fascists have to say.
Don’t confuse me with facts, I’ve already made up my mind.
from newsbusters.org
John Patrick Bedell was a registered Democrat who believed George W. Bush was behind 9-11. So how does Good Morning America portray him? As a right-wing extremist, part of a pattern of anti-government violence that flares during Dem presidential administrations . .
ElMondoHummus: If we end up talking about different Left/Right spectrums for free nations versus socialist nations, I question the utility of Left and Right.
But then I question it anyway. I see Left/Right as a convenient, though often simplistic, shorthand, which is somewhat useful in well-defined contexts, and that’s about it.
Obviously politics, like any other human activity, has more than one dimension, but to talk we simplify.
Really interesting discussion. This comment strikes me as the truth:
huxley:It seems much of the right-wing/left-wing game is to define terms and find historical examples so one can argue that Hitler and Stalin end up on the side of one’s opponents.
I still wonder about the economics of this stuff. I’m thinking economics drives more of this behavior than any political affiliation. Look at the student violence in protesting tuition hikes at Berkeley. I would argue that those students are left wing, but it is not their politics that is driving their violence.
ElMondoHummus, I now understand what you are talking about. You are most interested in how the National Socialists in Germany created a hierarchy of value assigned to different identifiable groups in society, sometimes based on ethnicity and sometimes not. You threw me off by talking about “class.”
Now it becomes clear that you consider National Socialism to be “right-wing” and an opposite to Communism along some spectrum that doesn’t really apply to our normal operating definitions of Right and Left. This is interesting, but not on point. The CSM writer couldn’t have meant it that way, because it wouldn’t be understood by his readers. He clearly meant the label to have some negative political baggage for the meaningful opponents of the Left, i.e. the conservatives.
So it looks to me like the Left would like to exploit a semantic and theoretical confusion of their own creation. Par for the course.
MikeLL: Thanks!
The problem with Left and Right is that people speak as though these terms have fixed meanings, even Platonic existences like circle and square.
But they don’t. They are just human words that slip-slide around from age to age, from country to country and even from person to person.
Originally being right-wing meant being a monarchist and supporting the established church. Not any more.
Originally the word “lurid” referred to the cheap yellowish paper that tabloids were printed on. Later “lurid” came to mean shocking, sensationalist as in the contents of a tabloid publication.
As Oblio notes, the term right-wing has similarly picked up negative baggage over the years, and yes the journalist who refered to Bedell was exploiting that baggage.
Wonderful discussions going on.
Bur after they are fizzled out, what are we going to do about healthcare, the immediate debt, the mounting debt, cap and trade, and what Limbaugh stated brilliantly yesterday about the Obama administration “managing the decline of the United States”?
At this time, all we can do without – basically – drawing blood, is vote. That’s not enough anymore, is it?
ElMondoHummus: the book I’ve recommended before, They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer, a study of German society during WWII and immediately after, mentions quite prominently that before the war Germany was a very rigidly stratified society in terms of economic class and profession (particularly education), and that the Nazis broke down those barriers to a large extent. According to many of his interviewees, the “little men” of Germany felt that for the first time they had a voice. So according to his book Nazism de-stratified Germany in economic terms, to a certain extent, rather than stratifying it.
Sorry no time just now to read the entire thread, but left/right and liberal/conservative labels are pretty much broken reeds at this time.
As huxley points out, “right” was used to characterize monarchists and clerical types in the French National Assembly. The term doesn’t really carry over well now.
Similarly, “conservative” doesn’t either. Does it mean someone with particular views, or someone who doesn’t want to change from whatever views are regnant now? Answer: yes.
A more operational – and therefore better – characterization is in terms of the relative positions of individual and state.
Collectivists advocate the primacy of the state over the individual. They end up coercing individuals to do the state’s bidding. If they’re sufficiently serious, they end up with secret police, concentration camps/gulags, and killing fields.
Individualists stress the primacy of the individual over the state, which is meant to serve people as individuals. Individualists basically want to be left alone by the state.
And yet the words still exist, OB, and we need to take the effort to put meaning into them, or allow the opposition to control the frame of the debate. Humpty-Dumptyism is a critical page in their playbook. Let’s shut it down.
“Artfldgr Says:
really… you dont know what your talking about. and this isnt a pile of ignorant people here.”
Okay, I’m not going to address the rest of your post because I think you’re suffering under some sort of misapprehension that I’m trying to smear the modern US conservative by associating them with historical Nazis. Nothing can be further from the truth; as I just said above: There is ZERO comminality between the Fascist Nazi and the modern Conservative. The US spectrum is completely different and separate from the one between Leftist Communism and Rightist Fascism.
Furthermore, please review my history at Neo’s blog from back when I was posting regularly, first under this handle and prior to that under E.M.H.. I am no leftist. With that, I’ll presume your initial hostility and judgement that I “don’t know what (I’m) talking about” is based on a misapprehension that I’m some sort of liberal, anticonservative troll. Again, please read my history. I’m not asking nor will I ever ask for some sort of apology, since I’ve jumped people pretty hard in the past here and elsewhere as well, but I do ask that you evaluate what I say with a clear head and an acknowledgement that I’m not pulling thoughts from a vacuum, nor trying to link current US conservatism with German Fascist Nazism. I’m pointing out the potential danger of someone associating with a Neo-Nazi taking the discredited philosophy seriously; I can’t help it that some idiot in the Christian Science Monitor is attempting to use the congruence of the term “right” to smear US conservatives with. A rightist in the US is the diametric opposite of a rightist socialist; one is about liberty, the other about supporting the dictatorial and antidemocratic.
“Geoffrey de Bouillon Says:
Is ElMondoHummus a troll?
It certainly has hijacked the thread with leftist truthiness”
You tell me; am I a troll?.
I know I’ve posted what, 4 times since 2007? And I realize a lot of you don’t recognize me. But for the love of God, please look my history on this blog up before making the mistake of thinking I’m coming in from the left.
—————–
“huxley Says:
I agree that when it comes to political extremists there is usually a delusional component that is more important to understand than their proper seating assignments in a French parliament that no longer exists.”
I can agree with that; from what I’ve seen out of conspiracy mythologists for the past 4 years, the delusion is the primary driving force. Holocaust deniers, for example, are simply driven by a need to denigrate the Jewish, and they construct mighty absurdities to link them to either the communist left or the fascist right. And too often, it’s the same denier linking in the mutually opposed directions. And 9/11 fantasy peddlers do the same. Bedell is confirmed to be the latter, and may potentially also be the former.
My original point in bringing up the potential link to Irving was to identify a potential link to Neonazi delusion. I didn’t think people were going to jump on the distinction between rightist fascists and leftist socialists and then conflate that measure with US conservative philosophy.
“huxley Says:
ElMondoHummus: If we end up talking about different Left/Right spectrums for free nations versus socialist nations, I question the utility of Left and Right”
But if we end up consigning philosophies differing to the extent that National Socialist and Communism do to the same side of a spectrum, we destroy the concept of measuring along spectrums to begin with. It cannot be helped that the differences exist. This is not some logarithmic scale where the very real diffferences between the systems are minute relative to their differences to us in free nations. This is a case where glossing over the very real differences destroys understanding.
Furthermore, I do not understand why the castigation of an extremist political philosophy by correctly identifying it by its applicable measure is somehow taken to be the same thing as being derogatory towards US conservatives. Yet, that is what damn near every response to me has presumed I was doing.
—————–
“Oblio Says:
March 6th, 2010 at 11:02 am
ElMondoHummus, I now understand what you are talking about. You are most interested in how the National Socialists in Germany created a hierarchy of value assigned to different identifiable groups in society, sometimes based on ethnicity and sometimes not. You threw me off by talking about “class.”
Now it becomes clear that you consider National Socialism to be “right-wing” and an opposite to Communism along some spectrum that doesn’t really apply to our normal operating definitions of Right and Left. This is interesting, but not on point. The CSM writer couldn’t have meant it that way, because it wouldn’t be understood by his readers. He clearly meant the label to have some negative political baggage for the meaningful opponents of the Left, i.e. the conservatives.”
Yes, that was what I was trying to get across; not economic class, but a lower “class” based on criterial other than economic measures. Even here in the US, where classes are primarily taken as economic ones, there are aspects to classes that have little to nothing to do with economic status? How many times has the term “low class” been used as an epithet when someone does something gauche?
And I’m sorry if this comes off as argumentative – that’s not my intent – but I fully believe that this is on point. My point is that if the links from Bedell to Hopsicker to Irving end up being significant, then it’s an indication of a change in who’s simply talking big in the conspiracy peddling community, and who’s actually attempting to be dangerous. My point was never to condemn US conservatives via association with Nazi’s, it was to point out that among the paranoid delusionists, the ones who’ve latched onto historical authoritarian philosophies may be deciding to spurn talk for action. People who’ve been fans of David Irving, as reprehensible as they are, have generally not been violent, choosing instead to project a mein of scholarly studiousness instead of Brownshirt thuggery. The whole reason I brought up the potential association was that the possibilty of Bedell deviating from this mold is a concern for the police, and therefore worthy of news coverage and public commentary. I didn’t think that the clarifications I attempted to make would drag the thread in this direction.
Those conspiracy delusionists happen to be right wing along their proper social philosophies spectrum. And as I said before, I can’t help that some dumb reporter wanted to allege conservative guilt-by-association; I was coming at this as a student of conspiratory delusions and those who peddle them.
—————–
“neo-neocon Says:
ElMondoHummus: the book I’ve recommended before, They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer, a study of German society during WWII and immediately after, mentions quite prominently that before the war Germany was a very rigidly stratified society in terms of economic class and profession (particularly education), and that the Nazis broke down those barriers to a large extent. According to many of his interviewees, the “little men” of Germany felt that for the first time they had a voice. So according to his book Nazism de-stratified Germany in economic terms, to a certain extent, rather than stratifying it.”
That’s true; that’s why so many of the hoi-polloi in Germany at that time were glad to see Hitler. Thanks for that link; I’ll take a look at that book at some point. And to speak towards what I posted above: I was talking about something other than economic classes when I posted. That’s why I invoked “Herrenvolk”, Uber- and Untermenschen, etc. Social and economic classes have elements that are interrelated, but I never have considered them to be the same thing. When someone is derided as being “low class”, it’s often a commentary on their behavior or some other characteristic, not always their pocketbook.
——–
Neo, I know I haven’t been commenting here that much in the past few years, not like I used to, but since the topic of Bedell converged with something I’ve been studying – conspiracy delusionalists – I figured I’d come out of lurking. It doesn’t seem to have been well received; I didn’t account for the fact that outside of strcpy and yourself, no one else here has read me before, and a couple of the obviously jumped to the conclusion that I’m left wing and coming to troll. I didn’t mean for things to get out of hand. I’m sorry the thread digressed so badly.
ElMondoHummus: Welcome back! Please don’t take the troll accusation too much to heart; there have been quite a few trolls here lately, plus I think people are generally feeling jumpy and frustrated because of the political and economic stress of the past year.
But if we end up consigning philosophies differing to the extent that National Socialist and Communism do to the same side of a spectrum, we destroy the concept of measuring along spectrums to begin with.
ElMondoHummus: I figured out a couple postings in that you weren’t a leftist poking a finger at us.
I just don’t believe that a one-dimensional axis inherited from the French Revolution to graph all current political positions serves us well, especially when it comes to outliers like Nazism and Communism.
Like it or not, this debate of whether Nazism and Communism are on the same side or different has been going on since Orwell’s time and it’s not settled either way. I don’t see how it can be, since it depends on how one defines Right and Left and that’s arbitrary.
ElMondoHummus Says:
“David Irving is a known right wing extremist. And Holocaust denial is known as a far-right-wing form of delusional extremism”
By left wing standards. A few academics have tried to tie those loons, along with racist groups, to US conservatives but many of them profess to be socialists… because capitalism is Jewish and all…
There are no tangible connections to US conservatives… who tend to be very pro Israel… while the progressives have been absorbing the anti Israel memes of the old Euro right.
The anti racism of the left is relatively new (60s?). Since then they’ve rewritten the history books to portray it as ‘right wing’ and tried to connect all racist groups with conservatives. Its nonsense… like most of their narratives.
I’d add, you can go to left wing history sites to read the biographies of old famous leftists and Marxists from the 30’s or before… many / most seem to be racists. They haven’t papered over it all yet. They tend to just say they had ‘some conservative tendencies toward race’…
Once they notice that non inner party members are reading their stuff, they’ll probably memory hole it…
…from what I’ve seen out of conspiracy mythologists for the past 4 years, the delusion is the primary driving force.
ElMondoHummus: That interests me too and I would like to have seen more discussion of delusion in this topic since delusional is a far more apt adjective for Bedell than his wingedness.
Seems obvious to me: he’s the liberaltarian that some liberals have been seeking.
Wow, Huxley, that’s a book. All I can say about conspiratorial delusions without blowing a gig of text space is that their delusions tend to have some specific manifestations. One that I’ll mention here is the ability to project legitimacy and logic in otherwise inchoate points and arguments simply because they satisfy the central “irreducible delusion” that forms the core of their belief. For example, a holocaust denier and 9/11 truther I’ve read on another forum tried to negate the “common knowledge” about Nazi Germany by saying that “Hitler had little to say about Jews in his speeches. The speeches were mostly about German unity.”. I use this as an example of the delusion because it illustrates two classic elements of the pathology:
1. The acceptance of a refutable factoid as “fact”. The truth is that from 1921 to 1923, he talked about the Jews in 10 out of 11 of his speeches, and not in a kind manner. The central point itself is openly erroneous, nevermind that it’s designed to distract from the fact that there are plenty of other elements clearly illustrating Hitler’s and Nazi Germany’s regard for the Jews: The “Nuremberg Laws” as well as other “Aryanization” legislation, the Kristallnacht, the ghettos and the concentration camps, etc. Trying to undo the convergence of multiple pieces of evidence by citing a denialist myth is not sound debate, but the point here is that there’s uncritical acceptance of an unproven “factoid” simply because it’s congruent with the central, irreducible delusion that the Holocaust did not happen.
You also see these factoids manifest themselves in 9/11 trutherism: “Free fall”, “controlled demolition”, “expert airplane maneuvers that only a highly skilled pilot can do”, etc. All of them are wrong for various reasons, but again, what’s notable here is that any conspiratorial “fact” is almost certainly misrepresented from the get-go. That may sound obvious, but it’s surprising how often it catches even those who otherwise should be able to smell out the deception. As a personal example, I was introduced to 9/11 Trutherism via a debate where someone noted that jet fueled fires cannot burn hot enough to melt steel. I have a chemistry degree, I was able to discover that burning kerosene does in fact not burn in open air at temperatures hot enough to cause steel to melt, yet I didn’t know a rebuttal to that claim. I certainly didn’t know that it was irrelevant to 9/11 (for the record, steel melting most certainly not the cause of the tower’s collapses, plus no critical steel elements melted at all; the Ground Zero recovery and cleanup process established that). In spite of sensing that something was wrong with the argument, I did for the sake of that debate accept the central notion that steel melting was the cause of the Towers collapse. It just sounded right, and I floundered about figuring out the answer. The lesson here is that every claim needs to be sourced and examined at a very fundamental level, and that applies to any conspiracy delusion, 9/11, Holocaust denial, etc.
2. The sense of superiority that the conspiracy addict has in regards to “knowing something no one else does”. Supposedly, that little factoid mentioned above was unknown to us believers because we were inattentive students of history. Of course, the reality is that some of us (myself excluded) knew already that it was actually erroneous, and the rest of us knew that it wouldn’t have mattered anyway since Nazi Germany clearly established policies against Jewish people. But that doesn’t stop the arrogant presumption that the conspiracy addicts are the superior students of history, and that the rest of us are ignorant.
So… what does this all have to do with violence? Well, it’s that it forms the basis of a worldview opening the possibility of violence either being used to rectify the supposed injustice, or simply to highlight the “illusion” the rest of the uninformed populace supposedly accepts without question. But before going further, it’s worth noting that the two elements I mentioned above are not in and of themselves dangerous, nor are many of the others. They’re self centered, obnoxious, obviously delusional, and in too many cases, quite arrogant, but not actually dangerous by themselves. What they do allow for is the construction of a complex picture of society acquiescing meekly to governmentally constructed narratives of history for the good of their own selfish ambitions. Or in short, that everyone’s guilty of submission to dictatorial or tyrannical propoganda. Now, in many cases, the delusions stop there and conspiracy addicts just bitch and whine about society and life; the Holocaust denier and 9/11 truther I mentioned above thankfully falls into this category. In others, they progress towards something with the superficial appearance of being constructive: David Irving is one such example in Holocaust denialism, having produced (pseudo) scholarship for historians; 9/11 truther demonstrations and petitions (like NYCCan.org – a petition for another investigation into 9/11), as well as their infamous “politician ambushes” are others. Those are bothersome, and a waste of people’s time (especially in cases where it interrupts legitimate work, such as the truther invasion of NIST’s expert’s conference regarding their studies of the Twin Towers collapses), but you can argue that that’s simply an honest, albeit senseless, useless, and wasted exercise of free speech and therefore harmless in the end. But it’s the minority such as Bedell who are the worrisome members of the conspiratorially obsessed club because they’re the ones who can conclude for whatever reason that open violence is the only thing that will get people to pay attention to their cause. And they get driven forth by the rhetoric of other conspiratorially deluded individuals who, while careful to preserve their own hides through nonaction, openly advocate for violence (Keven Barrett of Wisconsin is one such example of this).
This goes on to show that deluded nutcases are still something to be concerned about even when the vast majority of them are not violent, because it only takes a single, unhinged individual to use their irreducible delusion as motivation to commit acts such as the one Bedell committed; the only saving grace of that incident is that he’s apparently a lousy shot. But the problem is that it’s difficult to pick those people out of the conspiracy addicted club to begin with; which truther/chemtrailist/Holocaust denier is going to just write missives and manifestos on the internet, and who’s going to decide that a firefight is the best thing to do? And that’s the reason behind my highlighting a possible link between Bedell and Holocaust denialsim: Those folks tend to talk big but not carry through. Yet, if one of them was agitated enough to pull a gun out at a major Washington location, then maybe it’s worth it for law enforcement officials to take a peek at the Holocaust-denial boards and groups to see if a substrain of violence-tendencies is cropping up. No, that’s not a case of “guilt-by-association”, but it is cause for a closer look, just to determine if he’s truly an aberration, or symptomatic of something larger.
Anyway, delusion as a driving force: Perhaps Neo here would know a bit more about the psychology behind delusionary worldviews, but there’s no doubt that those central, irreducible delusions are what motivates many of these folks to do what they do. We’re just lucky in this society that there are far more people who resort to Irving-type pseudoscholarship, or Truther type demonstrations than there are those who follow Bedell’s example.
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