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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: CYBERKEN who wrote (297674)	9/18/2002 6:33:47 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 769670

Totalitarians and Authoritarians can come from anywhere on the economic political spectrum. There are plenty of examples of murderous dictators who hail from the Communist 'left' and plenty who hail from the fascist 'right'. There are plenty in between those two economic/social extremes. You can't deny away the lessons and examples of history, despite all your grade school miopia. Was Chinggis Khan a 'leftie'? Ha! Hitler? Milosevic? You betray yourself as an illiterate fool.

To: CYBERKEN who wrote (297674)	9/18/2002 7:06:12 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 769670

Take the TEST, Cyber. Educate yourself! Are you economic LEFT, or economic RIGHT? Are you Authoritarian, or Libertarian? Plot the two scales on a matrix, and you'll see the whole world of political belief. I'll show you mine if you'll show me your results.... politicalcompass.org ----------------------------------------------------- About The Political Compass Remember that before the test, we explained the inadequacies of the traditional left-right line? If we recognise that this is essentially an economic line it's fine, as far as it goes. We can show, for example, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot, with their commitment to a totally controlled economy, on the hard left. Socialists like Mahatma Gandhi and Robert Mugabe would occupy a less extreme leftist position. Margaret Thatcher would be well over to the right, but further right still would be someone like that ultimate free marketeer, General Pinochet. That deals with economics, but the social dimension is also important in politics. That's the one that the mere left-right scale doesn't adequately address. So we've added one, ranging in positions from extreme authoritarian to extreme libertarian. Both an economic dimension and a social dimension are important factors for a proper poltical analysis. By adding the social dimension you can show that Stalin was an authoritarian leftiist (ie the state is more important than the individual) and that Gandhi, believing in the supreme value of each individual, is a liberal leftist. You can also put Pinochet, who was prepared to sanction mass killing for the sake of the free market, on the far right as well as in a hardcore authoritarian position. On the non-socialist side you can distinguish someone like Milton Friedman, who is anti-state for fiscal rather than social reasons, from Hitler, who wanted to make the state stronger, even if he wiped out half of humanity in the process. The chart also makes clear that, despite popular perceptions, the opposite of fascism is not communism but anarchism (ie liberal socialism), and that the opposite of communism ( i.e. an entirely state-planned economy) is neo-liberalism (i.e. extreme deregulated economy) The usual understanding of anarchism as a left wing ideology does not take into account the neo-liberal "anarchism" championed by the likes of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and America's Libertarian Party, which couples law of the jungle right-wing economics with liberal positions on most social issues. Often their libertarian impulses stop short of opposition to strong law and order positions, and are more economic in substance (ie no taxes) so they are not as extremely libertarian as they are extremely right wing. On the other hand, the classical libertarian collectivism of anarcho-syndicalism ( libertarian socialism) belongs in the bottom left hand corner. In our home page we demolished the myth that authoritarism is necessarily "right wing", with the examples of Robert Mugabe, Pol Pot and Stalin. Similarly Hitler, on an economic scale, was not an extreme right-winger. His economic policies were broadly Keynesian, and to the left of some of today's Labour parties. If you could get Hitler and Stalin to sit down together and avoid economics, the two diehard authoritarians would find plenty of common ground.