oh dear, oh dear, oh dear

Submitted by Ian Biddle (United Kingdom), Mar 4, 2009 at 18:54

Here is something that must be said here, and I say it not merely to find a middlegorund, but to clarify something quite specific about the terms 'left-wing' and 'right-wing' (forgive me for being 'academic'). Both left- and right-wing political positions are demonstrably capable of extreme positions. Christian right-wing positions, for example, seek to marginalise (indeed pathologise) homosexuals, atheists and anyone else opposed to their worldview. This is not a million miles from Hitler's project and, indeed, the conflation of Jewry with homosexuality, Roma, Slavs, socialists, and anyone else not fully in line with his agenda was key to his strategy. His was a political agenda based on knee-jerk romantic politics (and, in case you haven't read a history book, the capitalists who were not Jewish did EXTREMELY well under Hitler, thank you very much). Right-wing politics CAN mean:

"accepting the historic forces and accepting how people's own diversity and freedom have shaped the nation, and allowing the nation to blossom not by state planning but by individual effort"

as you put it, but that is by no means a guarantee that it cannot also mean:

"accepting the historic forces (as outlined by the state) and accepting how some people's own diversity and freedom have shaped the nation, and insisting that the nation (as we understand it) blossom by individual effort, as encouraged and sanctioned by the state."

Whos is to say that your view of the nation is not oppressive? Who decides what kind of nation we are talking about here? The distinction between the two versions is actually very small and the one can (and invariably does) so easily drift into the other, and both positions are undoubtedly *right wing*.

Commentators on both sides of the political spectrum accept the basic left-wing and right-wing designations and there is plenty of argument about which is best, but BOTH have their totalitarian forms. What you need to be doing, it seems to me, is to argue for your OWN version of right-wing politics, not disavowing other right-wing politics, any more than socialists should disavow Stalin's left-wing politics. This is not about mere name calling. It is about careful and rational political analysis. ...

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