138
Why "Neither Left Nor Right" Just Means Right Wing
(www.youtube.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
138 points (99.3% liked)
Politics
10114 readers
503 users here now
In-depth political discussion from around the world; if it's a political happening, you can post it here.
Guidelines for submissions:
- Where possible, post the original source of information.
- If there is a paywall, you can use alternative sources or provide an archive.today, 12ft.io, etc. link in the body.
- Do not editorialize titles. Preserve the original title when possible; edits for clarity are fine.
- Do not post ragebait or shock stories. These will be removed.
- Do not post tabloid or blogspam stories. These will be removed.
- Social media should be a source of last resort.
These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
'Neither Left nor Right' is a fascist dogwhistle. Fascism has a rich history of marketing itself as the apolitical choice.
Yes, everyone who doesn't align with your political view is facist. That in itself doesn't sound facist at all, does it?
We need to not just be careful about what some horrible people are doing right now, but also about what we become as we react to it.
We do need to be careful, yes. But this isnt a case of mislabelling views just because they disagree with their politics. Its important to call out far right nationalist parties for what they are.
As is discussed in the video, Omega_Haxor wasnt making a baseless attack on a belief they disagreed with. Authoritarian politicians do have a history of using this dogwhistle messaging.
No, it's a dangerous, generalized statement that if you're against what the far right is doing, you have to align with what we stand for. If not, you're the far right. That is literally what it's saying, and folks might add on some stuff in their head when they interpret it, or some additional hidden intention when they utter it. But ultimately, it will distill down to the literal meaning.
Who said you have to align with a certain set of beliefs to oppose the far right? (Beyond thinking nationalist, xenophobic views are shitty) All kinds of varying political views hate nazis. Anti-facsism is a very large tent.
i think that's a bit of an alarming stance, to be honest. authoritarians have a pretty long history of characterizing protest movements as looting and rioting, characterizing protestors as "outside agitators", and other nonsense as a way to justify violent oppression, and the vast majority of the time for the vast majority of participants it really isn't the case.
maybe there's some people who would say that (are these like twitter guys or something?), but in the vast majority of cases the actual objection to "antifa smashing up your city" was "no, actually, the amount of smashing being done is much less than what right-wing media sources are saying, "antifa" is often broadly applied to the protest movement in general, and police officers coming in with tear gas and rubber bullets often leads to escalating violence from protesters in response."
Antifa and "the Black Bloc" are not organizations that disrupt protests, they are decentralized left-wing political strategies that do quite a bit of organizing for protest movements. they are just protesters, and the vast majority of the people who self-identify as antifa demonstrably don't do violence. but again, right wing groups designate any kind of left-leaning of liberal protest action as "antifa", so the actual utility of opposing "antifa" is kind of dubious to me. the entire BLM protest was called antifa by the right, despite the protest on average being quite peaceful.
Yikes. A lot to unpack here.
... nah can't be bothered, goodbye.
This. There is a distinct lack of awareness by both parties of just how fascist their tendencies are. The right has more of the authority-centric tendencies of fascism, and the left has more of the out-of-control virtue signaling, demonization, etc that can lead up to things like the struggle sessions that occurred during China's cultural revolution.
Anyone who says 'those who are not explicitly on our side are enemies' is deeply at risk of losing it to fascism, if they're not already gone.
The interesting thing about this aspect of fascism is how, although it leads ultimately to centralization of power and authoritative control, it's more of a decentralized, manipulative mob of social anxieties run amok.
this is such a weird thing to say. fascism is all about authoritarian shit, it is defined by ultranationalism, racism, bigotry, and centralized control, not by "virtue signaling", a phrase more common in right-wing spaces than anywhere else. we can quibble all we want about the left, but demonstrably, who is limiting the freedoms of minority groups, which states are attempting to disenfranchise voters, who has actual real ass nazi's hanging at their parties? it isn't the left, or whatever you think the left is.
like, don't get me wrong, there are very many ways a left wing government can demonstrably get authoritarian, but the term "fascism" is defined by being far-right on the political scale. i would just generally suggest reading some stuff about fascism, because you don't seem to be very well informed on what scholarship says about the ideology at large.