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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elsewhere who wrote (152264)	11/22/2004 4:11:08 PM
From: frankw1900	Respond to of 281500

Jochen, I was thinking about the left in fairly recent times when I wrote that. I think fascism and naziism were fairly discredited by the end of WW2. That was not the case with socialism and communism. You write, A huge part of the right adopted models based on fascism. Parts of both right and left did this in the 1930s but I think that in N America and Europe both have generally shunned overt expressions of fascist models since WW2. But it is interesting, and disturbing, I think, that a good part of the present day left don't seem to recognize the fascist nature of certain Islamist and Arab movements. My post was an effort to describe why this is happening. Please understand I think the lunatic edges of both right and left are indistinguishable due to their love of tyranny. The more sane parts might be generally characterized this way: The right is sceptical of socialist economics and liberal social doctrine and in favour of capitalist economics and traditional social doctrine; The left is sceptical of capitalist economics and traditional social doctrine and in favour of socialist economics and liberal social doctrine; Both sane parts might be safely described as modern - in favour of reason and democracy and against tyranny. So, why is it that certain significant parts of the left are supporting movements and governments that are against reason and liberal social doctrine, and for tyranny and kleptocratic economic "policy"? They are goring their own ox, aren't they? My post is an effort to describe why they are participating in an exercise in cognitive dissonance. It's short and probably needs work: What is it about the modern Left that reliably sides with theocratic fascist states against democracies? "Left" is kind of vague because it includes quite a large spectrum of folk but to varying degrees the following remarks do apply to a very large portion of it. A huge part of the left adopted models based on socialism and communism. The last twenty years the practical application of these ideologies in delivering either freedom or material security has been thoroughly discredited by events. Much of the left is in denial about this, and that's not surprising since so many leftists invested themselves in these ideologies in various ways. Many leftists thus feel abandoned by the modern world - which is dedicated to reason and democracy - and are fooled by the often socialist and anti-colonialist sounding rhetoric of the theocratic fascists and mistakenly support them as allies. The denial by a large part of the left can been seen in its blindness towards the anti-reason and anti-democratic stance of Iranian, Saddamite, Syrian, Palestinian, etc, rulers.