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You would be wrong.  Hitler was a leftist.
 

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You would be wrong.  Hitler was a leftist.
 

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I am a fu**tard?



Seriously though, to me, a leftie favors the collective and the rightie favors the individual.

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Lots of rhetoric in two pages and we have yet to discuss just what constitutes as a modern, evil, and dangerous right winger.  

Charles Coughlin was a controversial Roman Catholic priest at Royal Oak, Michigan's National Shrine of the Little Flower Church. He was one of the first political leaders to use radio to reach a mass audience, as more than thirty million tuned to his weekly broadcasts during the 1930s. Early in his career Coughlin was a vocal supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his early New Deal proposals, before later becoming a harsh critic of Roosevelt as too friendly to bankers. In 1934 he announced a new political organization called the "Nation's Union of Social Justice." He wrote a platform calling for monetary reforms, the nationalization of major industries and railroads, and protection of the rights of labor. The membership ran into the millions, resembling the Populist movement of the 1890s.

After hinting at attacks on Jewish bankers, Coughlin began to use his radio program to issue antisemitic commentary, and later to rationalize some of the policies of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The broadcasts have been called "a variation of the Fascist agenda applied to American culture". His chief topics were political and economic rather than religious, with his slogan being Social Justice, first with, and later against, the New Deal... After 1936, Coughlin began supporting an organization called the Christian Front, which claimed him as an inspiration. In January 1940, a New York City unit of the Christian Front was raided by the FBI for plotting to overthrow the government. Coughlin had never been a member but his reputation suffered a fatal decline.

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Ok, but they still advocate government control over the individual.  which would put them on the left side of my linear spectrum.

When we talk about right wing/left wing, it leaves no room for anything else.   For instance, were would that leave libertarian type people?  If I say that I'm a centrist, people equate that as moderate, which I'm not.

The point that I'm trying to make is that labels in this day and age are useless.  You either favor maximum freedom on the individual, or you don't.

 

On his visit to Guangzhou to take the civil service examinations in 1836, Hong heard a Christian missionary preaching about the religion. While there he received translations and summaries of the Bible written by the Christian missionary Liang Fa. The following year Hong failed the examinations again and apparently suffered a nervous collapse. During his recovery in 1837 he had a number of mystical visions. One involved an old man who complained to Hong about men worshiping demons rather than him. In a second one he saw Confucius being punished for his faithlessness, after which he repented. In yet another he dreamed angels carried him to heaven where he met a man in a black dragon robe with a long golden beard who gave him a sword and a magic seal, and told him to purify China of the demons. Several years later he would interpret this to mean that God the Heavenly Father, whom he identified with Shangdi from the Chinese tradition who revealed himself to be Jesus Christ, wanted him to rid the world of demon worship. His friends and family said that after this episode he became authoritative, solemn and taller in height.

It was not until 7 years later that Hong took the time to carefully examine the religious tracts he had received. In his house Hong burned all Confucian and Buddhist statues and books, and began to preach to his community about his visions. His earliest converts were relatives of his who had also failed their examinations and belonged to the Hakka minority, Feng Yunshan and Hong Rengan. He joined with them to destroy idols in small villages to the ire of local citizens and officials. Hong and his converts' acts were considered sacrilegious and they were persecuted by Confucians who forced them to leave their positions as village tutors. Hong Xiuquan and Feng Yunshan fled the district in 1844, walking some 300 miles to the west to Guangxi, where the large Hakka population was much more willing to receive his teachings. As a symbolic gesture to purge China of Confucianism, he asked for two giant swords, three-chi (about 1 metre) long and nine-jin (about 5.5 kg), called the "demon-slaying swords" (斬妖劍), to be forged...

By 1850 Hong had between 10,000 and 30,000 followers. The authorities were alarmed at the growing size of the sect and ordered them to disperse. A local force was sent to attack them when they refused, but imperial troops were routed and a deputy magistrate killed. A full-scale attack was launched by the government forces in the first month of 1851. In what came to be known as the Jintian Uprising, after the town of Jintian (now Guiping) where the sect was based. Hong's followers emerged victorious and beheaded the Manchu commander of the government troops.

Hong declared the foundation of the "Heavenly Kingdom of Transcendent Peace" on 11 January 1851.

Despite this evidence of forward planning, Hong and his followers faced immediate challenges. The local Green Standard Army outnumbered them ten to one, and had recruited the help of the river pirates to keep the rebellion contained to Jintian. After a month of preparation the Taipings managed to break through the blockade and fight their way to the town of Yongan (not to be confused with Yong'an), which fell to them on 25 September 1851.

Hong and his troops remained in Yongan for three months, sustained by local landowners who were hostile to the Manchu Qing Dynasty. The imperial army regrouped and launched another attack on the Taipings in Yongan. Having run out of gunpowder, Hong's followers fought their way out by sword, and made for the city of Guilin, to which they laid siege. However, the fortifications of Guilin proved too strong, and Hong and his followers eventually gave up and set out northwards, towards Hunan. Here, they encountered an elite militia created by a local member of the gentry specifically to put down peasant rebellions. The two forces fought at Soyi Ford on 10 June 1852 where the Taipings were forced into retreat, and 20% of their troops were killed. But in March 1853 Taiping forces managed to take Nanjing and turned it into the capital of their movement.

Hong Xiuquan ruled by making frequent proclamations from his Heavenly Palace, demanding strict compliance with various moral and religious rules. Most trade was suppressed and property socialized. Polygamy was forbidden and men and women were separated, although Hong and other leaders maintained groups of concubines.

Yang Xiuqing was a fellow Taiping leader (the "East King") who had directed successful military campaigns and who often claimed to speak with the voice of God. Hong became increasingly suspicious of Yang's ambitions and his network of spies; in 1856 he had Yang and his family murdered.

Following a failed attempt by the Taiping to take Shanghai in 1860, the Qing forces, aided by Western officers, slowly gained ground.

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The question you pose does not have a simple answer.

My views have always landed me in the "libertarian, with conservative leanings" category any time I have answered any questionnaires like the one for the "Nolan Chart"... yet over the years peoples' opinions of my points-of-view have changed.  Over the last five years or so "conservatives" have tended to view me as a "democrat who can't call himself a democrat"; "libertarians" consider me a "fascist/ statist"; and leftists consider me the "hell-spawn of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher".  I don't know any fascists, so I have no idea where I would rate in their minds.

Each of those groups have people who would consider me to be the antithesis to their beliefs - the "extremist" on the other end of their scale.  In reality, "not so much".

Just for one example from my personal experiences and observations... conservatives with a strong social conservative streak generally do not like me in a political sense.  I've been called all sorts of names IRL by this group, and I've seen some of those same monikers tossed around on this site.  What's funny/ sad about that, is that I personally share about 90-95% of the same beliefs.  But my libertarian grounding does not believe that it is the Federal government's place to dictate what should be a personal issue.

Personal issues should be handled by the person and their family/ friends.  If, and that is a big if in my mind, something rises to the need of being regulated, it should be regulated at the lowest level of government - State government at the highest.  This meets the standard of minimal federal government, maximum liberty.  The States keep most of the power, and the citizens of those States have a better chance at actually influencing the laws than they do trying to influence laws on a national level.  Why people fail to grasp the basic concept that local governance is the easiest for the people to maintain control of, is astonishing to me.

This one basic difference leads to a rift where there should be unity.  I am willing to compromise - to a point.  I am very reluctant to vote to replace a statist with another statist - what's the point?  Statists are eroding our liberty, and I don't care for it one bit, regardless of the flavor of koolaid they happen to be serving.  People need to start looking at the real issues that face this country.  We need fiscal responsibility, a smaller federal government, a return of power to the States, and a return to personal and social responsibility by the people.

Yeah, I know.  Wishful thinking on my part.  

I don't speak for anyone other than myself, so this is definitely IMHO and YMMV.                

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yep. Read "The Road to Serfdom" by F.A. Hayek or "Liberal Fascism" by Jonah Goldberg. You only need to read those books if you don't remember from school that Hitler was a National Socialist

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Yes both extremes are bad. I'm not sure what the extreme right would be though, short of hardcore bible thumpers?

Posted Via AR15.Com Mobile

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German:Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)  

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Leftism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot by Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (a friend and neighbor of von Hayek's) is a good one as well.

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The communitarian types of Rightists were not collectivist, though.  They were still individualists but they did not take the route of the extreme forms of autonomous individualism that arose in the latter half of the 19th century and which has much to do with the influence of the Enlightenment, which older liberals (predating classical liberals) had either rejected or by which they had only been influenced miniminally.  The neoliberals, who succeeded the classical liberals, reverted to that older sort of liberalism in many ways.  Conservatism in the older sense tended to describe character traits more than politics and could have been applied to liberals as well as non-liberals.  Today in America it is one of two major terms used to describe true liberals since subscribers to an illiberal ideology have taken on the word liberal for themselves (and we can thank American classical liberals for that), the other being libertarian; sometimes they are even used in conjunction with one another, much as conservative and liberal were (and still are in Europe).

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So what Arfcom is saying is, there is no extreme right.

Gotcha.

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I've scoured this thread and I don't think I've seen one single reference to Timmy McVeigh.

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Let me answer in the voice of ARFcom:

He's a leftist.


 

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Wow... 25+ minutes and still crickets?
ARFCOM doesn't speak for me.  McVeigh was a nutter and a white supremacist IIRC, amongst other things.  I don't generally wish ill on people or the dead, but I hope his time in Hell is painful.
"Extreme"?  Parking a truck-bomb outside a Federal building falls into the "extreme" category.  "Right"?  With his views on racism, drugs, kooky gov't conspiracy theories, taxes, militias, the UN, etc... I'm not exactly sure where he fits with regards to the whole left/ right BS - some liberal/ libertarian/ anarchist ideals thrown in with the conservative/ "right" ideals.  I've never really thought about it as I have considered him a nutcase, a terrorist, and a coward.  But I don't think I'd consider him a "leftist".



   

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But yet Nazis were not right wing.

As with the Nolan chart, Nazis & fascists are certainly not right-wing when it came to market policies. The only fascist I can think of that was actually right wing was Augusto Pinochet.

Here's PoliticalCompass' on political leaders using a 4-axis chart:

http://www.politicalcompass.org/images/axeswithnames.gif

As you can see, Hitler was certainly no right-winger.
 

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Someone like Francisco Franco, the National Party of South Africa, or possibly Hideki Tojo.

 

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Wrong.  Facism = extreme right

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Dude, facism is a system in which the means of production are privately owned, but tightly controlled by The State.  It is socialism light, and a stepping stone toward communism (full ownership of everything by The State).

You are regurgitating leftists talking points.

Nazism was known as the Nationalist Socialist Party.  
 

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Franco didn't have much of an ideology, really.  I think his inclinations were Rightist but I don't think he ever really had any substantial political views.  The National Party was quite Leftist.  A number of critiques came from the Right in regards to their racist policies (which were due to the typical ethno-centric nationalism) and their more socialist-leaning economic policies combined with greater centralization of power.  Having read some essays from both the American and European Right on South Africa written in the 1960s and 1970s I see little love for the National Party, although there was understanding of the desire to not have universal suffrage.  I don't really think Tojo could be classified as a Rightist, either, much less an extreme Rightist.

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The extreme right in America built this country and made it the greatest nation on earth. The extreme left came along much later (about the time of FDR) and started it's decline.

Zero tolerance for liberals. Zero tolerance for communists. Zero tolerance for democrats.

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So what Arfcom is saying is, there is no extreme right.

Gotcha.

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Dude, facism is a system in which the means of production are privately owned, but tightly controlled by The State.  It is socialism light, and a stepping stone toward communism (full ownership of everything by The State).





You are regurgitating leftists talking points.





Nazism was known as the Nationalist Socialist Party.  


 

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Here are 10 things that I believe strongly in.  You all classify me



1)No person, or collective has the right to the property or life of another

2)I do not believe in any government social safety net

3)I do not believe in government protecting us from ourselves (drugs, fatty diets, etc)

4)I am pro life but do not want a government strong enough that would investigate any lost pregnancy

5)I do not support government restricting Plan B contraception or birth control pills

6)I do not believe in government funding of education

7)I do not believe that property, income or investments should be taxed

8)I believe in a powerful military that will keep our foreign enemies in check and allow for free trade across borders and seas

9)I'm for free trade

10)Religious dogma should not play a part in the creation or enforcement of laws.