Radical authoritarianism - Left vs Right

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
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In my country there was an incident some two weeks ago when a Nazi swastika pattern was sighted on the soccer field. The authorities still, weeks later, claim to have no idea who the perpetrator is, or might be. Highly unlikely, since there are video cameras all over the field, and under a 1000 people have access to the field at all. Our police are capable of finding a criminal in towns of over hundreds of thousands of people, even if they weren’t filmed perpetrating the crime.

Interestingly enough, anybody famous who speaks their mind about it, and points all of this out, has the secret police dig up something in their past, anything - real or not, and they are threatened with jail/prison. The evidence indicates that it was all orchestrated by some big shots who are probably never going to get arrested. At most, they will lock up some bum accused of conducting the act, and not the one who gave the order in the first place.

Croatia isn’t very Westernized and leftist yet, we have a moderate-left and moderate-right party who have about the same number of supporters, but currently the left is in power so I doubt they are the ones protecting anybody here.

That was some background information. More interesting than all of that for us philosophers though, is the uproar this has caused amongst people – everybody gets overemotional and morally upset at the mention of Nazism, and when asked why the general answer can be summed up as ‘Do you know how many people were killed under that symbol?’
I asked people would they mind as much if it had been a heart pattern, instead of swastika. Obviously, they wouldn’t, so this rules out the uproar because of simple hooliganism, since people didn’t mind the act of making a pattern, but the pattern that was made.
Then I further asked, what if it was a communist symbol, and people were, mostly, indifferent. Some say they would be annoyed but wouldn’t really care much, others give you the usual ‘communism is a good idea, just that it hasn’t been implemented in practice properly yet’ excuse. This determined it – the uproar was not merely because of a political symbol, or a radical political symbol, but because it was a far right, Nazi one.

I don’t think the majority of us are indoctrinated and conditioned to react the same way at communistic, and otherwise far-left authoritarian imagery, are we? Did they not commit the ‘evils’ or whatever you want to call it, of an identical or at least similar magnitude? As far as I know, the communists killed even more people, much more.

The phrase ‘winners write history’ appears to be remarkably accurate, since the only relevant difference, unless I missed something, is that the communists were on the winning, the majority side.

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Another interesting fact I would like to add is, people barely know anything about Nazism, or communism. Most of them couldn’t name a single Nazi aside from Hitler, and sometimes Rommel or Goering. When asked about the tenets of Nazism, and what they advocate, they knew almost nothing but the very basics, aka, that it is an authoritarian ideology which promotes nationalist values. They don’t know much more about communism either. I’m not an expert myself, but that it just pathetic and sad considering how certain they are about their positions, as if their positions are results of a thorough, academic research rivaling science.

It’s sad once you realize that most people’s opinions, and positions, are based on the majority view or poorly researched data at best.

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Nazism wasn’t particularly right-ist anyway. They were for Goverment control of the economy and aggressively tried to re-write their people’s religious history and shut down Churches that didn’t fall in line. That’s leftist. You could say the nationalism elements were rightist, but of course plenty of socialist nations do that. The racist elements would be the most commonly-attributed aspects to the right these days, but in the 1940’s that wasn’t true either.

 Anyway, that aside, you're basically correct- authoritarian regimes will ban symbolism of things they don't approve of. Nazi flag, Confederate Flag, Rainbow Flag, crucifixes.  Leftist ones will also [i]define[/i] what those symbols mean as they are banning them, so they can use them as a symbol for their enemies. In effect, they use the symbol by banning it- they say "This represents all that is evil",  then tell people what is evil, thereby turning the symbol into a psychological tool that provokes revulsion for whatever it is the State doesn't want you to like, whether that be Nazism, slavery, or being a white male from the southern United States.
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Yes. The same went for the people of Nazi Germany, though. I mean, what if someone had painted a Star of David on their soccer field? “Do you know how many Christians/Germans were bled dry under that symbol?”

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Ucc yes, Nazi were socially very conservative (usually associated with the right), but economically, they weren’t far-right at all.

Other examples of how leftists manipulate language and thus concepts, is the word ‘equality’. There is ‘equality of opportunity’ and ‘equality of outcome’. Because I thought that leftists advocated the first is why I considered myself a leftist.

So basically what leftists do, is use equality to mean ‘equality of outcome’, and this is what they try to implement in schools, universities and jobs too with all their women-only scholarships, fixed quotas and all that. You know them, the vulgar mob of immature youth gathered together, screaming ‘equality’. Then when you criticize equality as they present it (equality of outcome), they begin defending equality of opportunity because it is easier to defend, ‘so you think women shouldn’t be allowed to do X job, you sexist misogynist?’ If by some miracle you manage to convince them you’re not a sexist, misogynist pig, and that you defend actual equality of opportunity, then they will revert to the argument that women can’t do as good as men in certain fields because of oppression and social constructs/stigma attached to being a female in a certain field, which inhibit them. Then you point out that there are few women who actually do manage to be as good as men in certain fields, and ask them to explain how that can happen if their claim that women are inhibited, is true, how come there are some women who clearly aren’t inhibited at all. I propose the explanation based on scientific data and simple inductive reasoning, that since males are proven to be more intelligent on average, and more capable of abstract thinking, that they will do better on average in jobs which require intelligence and abstract thought, and then it’s all back to you being a sexist misogynist.

This is why equality as proposed by modern leftism is a disease. Equality is the social construct, nature is diversity, multiplicity, nothing is equal in nature, there is always variation, regardless of how minor. In minds of most modern people, ‘equality’ now has positive connotations, is associated with positive emotions, so people feel very uncomfortable attacking it even if it is a subversive disease.

The word ‘discrimination’ is another example of this.

Anyway, new development in the last couple of days: turns out it possibly was the leftist government that orchestrated it, in order to put the blame on some rightist public personalities they disdain. The kind of shit that happens in my country politics is what movies are made of. Politicians acting in contradiction with the law, knowing things they aren’t supposed to know, being recorded expressing their knowledge of those things, then later claiming how they know nothing when they realize they weren’t allowed to in the first place. And we are being governed by these idiots…

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If people weren’t so eager to divide and conquer then surely none of this would matter.

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 Euthanasia and eugenics are both part of the 'social' wing of ideology, and the Nazis progressive/leftist with regards to both of those.   But yeah, they were socially conservative with regards to homosexuals and patriotism. Maybe marriage and family issues too, not sure about that.

I don’t have a problem with equality as a social virtue…as one competing virtue among many. The problem with leftists isn’t that they stand for equality, it’s that they stand for it to the exclusion of anything else. They’ll chop some of us off at the knees so none are taller than the rest, and they will outlaw or censure merely noticing differences between people.

Right. Equality of opportunity means something different to a leftist than it does to you. For you, it means everybody gets their shot without the State deciding in advance who is allowed to succeed ( I suspect). For them, it means that everybody is, [i]in fact,[/i] equally capable of everything.   Therefore, if some class is underepresented in some way, it can only be because they are oppressed.  Since 'everybody is equally capable of everything' is an unassailable doctrine, if an IQ test shows that men are smarter than women, the only acceptable explanation is that the IQ test is flawed somehow.  They will go so far as to say that the very [i]notion[/i] of intelligence as classically defined is sexist. 

Well, remember that there is nothing wrong with this to a leftist.  Marxism in a nutshell is the idea that human society and human nature are completely malleable and determined by how society is organized.  So yes, equality is a social construct, but they would deny that there is any 'true way of being human' absent some construct.   This, by the way, plays into their political and debate tactics: the point of a debate is to contribute to the reshaping of society in a particular way in order to facilitate the molding of human nature according to their designs.  That's why you get called a misogynist all the time- the point isn't to convince you you're wrong, the point is to associate your views with a negative term, and thus shift society away from your views without actually refuting them.  If there is no readily accessible negative term for whatever position you have, they will happily make up a new one: so now suddenly' ableist' and 'transphobic' are in our collective vocabulary as of the past few years.  

We get something similar over here in a sense. Nooses hanging in trees near black people's homes, or "Niggers Must Die" spraypainted on a campus wall - only to find out that a black person or social-justice craving white person did it to 'raise awareness about racism'.  Professors and journalists do shit like that with some regularity.   The Government has too, though we haven't caught them in a long time. Operation COINTELPRO is the most famous example, where the FBI infiltrated politically radical organizations and pushed them to do ridiculous things in order to wreck their credibility wth the public.
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The practice is thousands of years old (also known as “scapegoating”) and a well documented part of certain religions.
Read the article now. It gets rewritten quite often.