Alternative viewpoint: platforms without censorship tend to be right wing because that is what succeeds in a free marketplace of ideas. Left wing ideas require censorship to thrive.
Mainstream ideas require censorship to survive. In the 60-70s it was the left that was obsessed with free speech because their views were less mainstream, something many people on the side of censorship seem to ignore.
As glen greenwald says, censorship eventually is always about those in power staying in power. Unless you are in power it’s sad to see so much pro censorship these days.
Read up on Ira Glasser at the ACLU or watch the documentary. Why did he as a Jew defend neo nazis?
Normally, people use "socialism" synonymously (intentionally or unknowningly) with _international_ socialism. There are plenty of other kinds, and _national_ socialism is one of them.
Obviously, if you're going to name your faction with a preceding adjective like national/international then:
a) it's important to you
b) you're probably not going to get along with the other faction that is named in direct opposition to yours
Which pretty much explains how these two groups of socialists hate each other and why the Nazi's 25 point plan [0] reads 50% nationalist and 50% socialist.
Oh, I see. Names don't matter if they are inconvenient....
Nazis (a literal shortening of Nationalsozialismus) - no they weren't the left.. 'cos Hitler, and Hitler bad.
Freedom is speech, but not 'hate speech'. (Who defines 'hate speech'?) What is hate speech except for a reason to stop people speaking. These are ideological positions couched as morality. And everyone needs moral busybodies who know it all, to tell them what to do, right?
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
- CS Lewis
Besides, party names have never been a good indicator of political standing. Only policy is. You can look at the Liberals in Australia as an example of a conservative party.
That's got to be the lowest bar for "socialism" i've ever seen. So, is Eisenhower socialist as well? The US Interstate highway is much bigger than the Autobahn, so it surely counts?
This only works if you put cold war blinders on and equate the word communism to being left wing. Their policy and actions were decidedly not left wing.
The problem is left and right are not a single dimension. Liberal left wing policies can often overlap with libertarian right wing policies. This is because the align on the freedom dimension. There are other examples but I don't think you can argue that Mao and Stalin are not left wing. They both push the idea that the state can and should supply the needs of the people. This is a very left wing view on both the financial and social dimension.
However it also depends are you simply looking at the economic beliefs of left/right wing idealogies or also social rights? It also depends on which era of left vs right is being considered, since the traits of the spectrum have changed over the decades.
Perhaps the issue is many consider only the economic models as the indicator, whereas many others consider the entirety of policy with regards to equality and rights.
If we're only looking at economic policy, then sure, Mao and Stalin are left wing.
If you look at it socially, then I'd argue they were not because they violently impugned on the freedoms of people to install totalitarianism.
Maybe one could argue they're far left, or alt left in todays vernacular however. But even that would be eschewing much of the social aspects of leftism. Mostly because their aspects of "equality" only applied to the people they deemed equal. Which was unequal to start with.
Well that is what I was trying to illustrate. There is an authoritarian right ( e.g. Hitler ) and an authoritarian left ( e.g Stalin ).
It sucks if you're on the left or right and are more on the pro freedom end when someone drags up the authoritarian cohort of your respective side.
I'm right of centre ( pro private industry ) but anti fascism. I'm pro private industry because I don't like a concentration of power. So a mix of small government with the power to provide basic services and break up monopolies seems the best way to keep everything free. So slightly left wing social policies such as free medical care aren't my first choice but much better than giving the government more surveillance powers. So I think I'm further away from fascism than I am from socialism. Yet as I'm right of centre people throw Hitler is on your side at me.
It's a bit rich to claim you're neither right nor left, when you're constantly repeating right wing talking points. Maybe you don't prescribe to a label, but all your arguments thus far all hinge on labels and not policy.
He didn't state any of his own political views so you can't place him. You should consider whether those talking points actually have some legitimacy rather than using them to identify which group he's in. This is actually part of the problem he refers to.
So you're l saying he raised specific points but that they aren't reflective of his political beliefs but are somehow reflective of mine because I don't agree with them?
That's certainly a level of mental gymnastics to paint things favorably for your political beliefs.
Ok - here's my criticism of the 'right'. They talk about less government, but never do anything about it! Never. They will say whatever it is that sounds good to conservatives, but do the opposite.
Left and right are all on board with the same system. And this is increasing a fascist system, run by corporations.
But whatever the case - if people purport to have a constitution that allows for free speech - but that a lot of people do not have meaningful ability to exercise it, well its not surprising that places like Gab spring up. And that all those de-platformed views make their way there. People need to be able to have their say.
It used to be that it was a left position to say 'I don't like what you say, but I'll fight for your right to say it'. Those days are long gone - de-platform the hate speaker!
Not really if you read Kershaw's two vol bio early on the NAZI party did have some "socialist policies" but Hitler changed the policy and threw those out in the late 20's.
Its also one of the reasons that the SA was purged.
The Nazis were socialist only in name. I highly suggest reading at least the first book in Richard J. Evans’s trilogy on ‘The third Reich’ if you want your eyes opened to unbiased historical facts. Referring to names to determine the leaning of a political party or even community groups is never a good idea. Look at their policies and what their people are saying.
Absolutely, look into it. Mixed with their tyrannical racial nationalism, you will also find many socialist ideas; here are some examples from the 25 point plan, their early party platform:
> We demand that the State shall above all undertake to ensure that every citizen shall have the possibility of living decently and earning a livelihood.
> We demand... that all unearned income, and all income that does not arise from work, be abolished.
> We demand the nationalization of all trusts.
> We demand profit-sharing in large industries.
> We demand a generous increase in old-age pensions.
> We demand the creation and maintenance of a sound middle-class; the immediate communalization of large stores which will be rented cheaply to small tradespeople
> We demand...the abolition of ground rents, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.
> We demand that specially talented children of poor parents, whatever their station or occupation, be educated at the expense of the State.
> The State has the duty to help raise the standard of national health
Edit: I'm not surprised that these inconvenient facts are being downvoted. Why acknowledge facts when you can attempt to suppress them instead? Why read history in the very words of the people of the time, when you can rewrite it instead?
It's hard to argue against this, that really is the 25 point program of the Nazis. However, I think it is generally understood that Hitler's entrance into the National Socialists marked a deviation from Socialist ideas.
My understanding was that there were literally two factions, one which took the socialist aspects seriously and one which had no interest in socialist principles.
The socialist faction had people like Gregor Strasser as figureheads and they got routed out as part of the night of the long knives.
Much of the Big Business that invested in the Nazi party were tentative at first because of socialist name and were convinced by Hitler et al that it was in name only..
> I think it is generally understood that Hitler's entrance into the National Socialists marked a deviation from Socialist ideas.
No, the 25 point plan was announced by Hitler in 1920, including all of those socialist ideas.
And the night of the long knives was in 1934. For over 14 years, socialists like Strasser were an important part of the Nazi party, working side by side with Hitler.
Then Hitler consolidated power and eliminated all rivals - not only socialists like Strasser, but people with many ideologies. His primary target was not the socialists, but his most dangerous rival, Ernst Roehm, the leader of the brownshirts.
Even after that purge, the socialist programs continued, such as Volksgemeinschaft (people's community), Deutsche Arbeitsfront (the German Labor Front), and Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt (National Socialist People's Welfare).
> The NSV [National Socialist People's Welfare] was the second largest Nazi group organization by 1935, second only to the German Labour Front. It had 4.7 million members and 520,000 volunteer workers.
> The Nazi social welfare provisions included old age insurance, rent supplements, unemployment and disability benefits, old-age homes and interest-free loans for married couples, along with healthcare insurance, which was not decreed mandatory until 1941
> No, the 25 point plan was announced by Hitler in 1920, including all of those socialist ideas.
I'm not contesting that.
Here's what the book I'm reading has to say about the 25 points:
> A good many paragraphs of the party program were obviously merely a demagogic appeal to the mood of the lower classes at a time when they were in bad straits and were sympathetic to radical and even socialist slogans. Point 11, for example, demanded abolition of incomes unearned by work; Point 12, the nationalization of trusts; Point 13, the sharing with the state of profits from large industry; Point 14, the abolishing of land rents and speculation in land. Point 18 demanded the death penalty for traitors, usurers and profiteers, and Point 16, calling for the maintenance of “a sound middle class,” insisted on the communalization of department stores and their lease at cheap rates to small traders. These demands had been put in at the insistence of Drexler and Feder, who apparently really believed in the “socialism” of National Socialism. They were the ideas which Hitler was to find embarrassing when the big industrialists and landlords began to pour money into the party coffers, and of course nothing was ever done about them.
> They were the ideas which Hitler was to find embarrassing when the big industrialists and landlords began to pour money into the party coffers, and of course nothing was ever done about them.
I think that's fair, but I would characterize it this way:
The Nazis started out "socialist" in the traditional sense of collective ownership, and ended up "socialist" in the modern sense (popularized by Bernie Sanders) of a strong social safety net.
(That safety net being restricted, of course, to those the Nazis deemed worthy.)
Yeah and the really really bad part that we all remember the nazis for took place after hitler rose to power and all the socialists in the party were murdered.
When people say “the nazis were socialist” they are trying to draw a line from the modern left to genocide. But this is just not a functioning argument.
I'm not trying to draw a line from the modern left to genocide. But I don't agree with refusing to acknowledge historical facts for fear someone might draw that line.
> Mixed with their tyrannical racial nationalism, you will also find many socialist ideas
Yeah, that's true of their early platforms, but even on paper (and much more in practice) socialist elements were progressively deemphasized as Hitler consolidated power within the party.
> Why read history in the very words of the people of the time,
You should definitely read their words, but you should read all of them as they change over time, and track the objective external facts of who held more power as they changed, and also check words against actions. Because just because something was at one point the words tied to a faction doesn't mean:
(1) that it represented that factions immutable view for all time across changes in internal power dynamics, or even
(2) that it was ever anything more than cynical, opportunistic manipulating propaganda.
1. national-socialism seams to have equality as a target. But this equality accounts only for a small group of superior people. In case of Hitler that was the aryan, german race.
2. Those points and the reality are two completetly different things
In fact Nazi-Germany was not socialist but capitalist. Rich people and companies became richer. The only people that were expropriated were jews, political enemies and minoritys. The jews were working as slaves until death to provide wealth for a capitalist upper class. Siemens for example increased their turnover by a factor of 5. Single persons became incredible rich. At the same time, the normal citizens of germany had to live under the worst circumstances because of the war. (You would not believe what my grandma experienced...)
The core idea of national-socialism is inhumane.
Who ever was not productive like disabled people, or people with mental illnesses(which includes homosexuals etc.) got killed.
The Nazis propagated the rule of the strongest and racism. They propagated social darwinism.
That stands completly against everything the left parties in Germany , even socialism, stands for. The main target is equality and equal oppurtunities for everyone. The main target is a humane society. One of the main points of our left wing, is to fight any form of facism to prevent anything similiar to Hitler from happening ever again.
The right wing partys are the Heirs of the Nazis. They want to exclude minorities and restrict their rights.
They propagate racism.
I'm certainly not defending the Nazis here. I'm cherry picking because someone claimed there were no cherries (socialists) in that bowl of grapes (nationalists) and cherries. So I'm pointing out the socialists.
The role of the left in the rise of the worst governments of the twentieth century should be remembered, so that nothing like Hitler ever happens again.
Many horrible governments start with promises of equality and a humane society (not the Nazis, who promised revenge, but certainly the communists), because that much concentrated power is a catastrophe waiting to happen. A government big enough to give equality is also powerful enough to impose tyranny, as we saw far too many times in the 20th century.
Even the Nazis only rose to power because of the horrible mistreatment imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. Germans saw themselves as the oppressed people.
I am not sure If you got my point.
I never said that your are defending the Nazis. But you were and still are refering to Hitler as a part of the political left. Something he definetly wasn't.
I'm not referring to Hitler personally as part of the left, I'm talking about the support he received from so many socialists on the left.
Hitler himself was, I think, a megalomaniac who wanted nothing but his own power, and a delusional madman intent on killing almost everyone. He doesn't belong on the left-right spectrum, because he was motivated by nothing other than his own madness.
I can’t downvote. I’m also being downvoted and definitely don’t think people’s goals are to ‘rewrite history’ here. But also the list you mentioned is just that. A list. Behind every bullet point there’s a grimmer meaning, if a meaning at all outside of gaining more support from the socialist groups who had more political sway at the time. No sane person would place Nazi ‘state education’ in the same class as a modern day public school for example.
I personally think it’s just a bit odd that you’re using a propagandist list by the Nazis on its own as proof that they were socialists. The Nazi playbook is so much deeper than that. The books I recommended earlier quite literally only scratch the surface around the tricks the Nazi's played to consolidate power by all means necessary.
I would argue that there was a grimmer meaning behind similar promises from every socialist leader, except those where there was no meaning at all other than cynical pursuit of power (like Stalin).
Despite that, the Nazis did gain support from many socialists, and ultimately, like so many other governments that rose to power with socialist promises, failed to live up to those promises.
But I don't think Hitler himself was a socialist, and I agree that Hitler was using the socialists just as he used everyone else who supported him. I just think people should acknowledge the role that socialists played in helping him rise to power.
> I just think people should acknowledge the role that socialists played in helping him rise to power.
I think practically everyone, including myself agrees with that. And I pointed that out in my original posts. Power doesn't occur in a vacuum and the Nazi's capitalized on peoples (mostly unfounded) fears and anger to grow their base. My original point was that the Nazi's themselves were not socialists. Referencing a name they came up with and their published propaganda was not a convincing argument to say otherwise.
Hitler wasn't the only Nazi. Some socialists, like Gregor Strasser, weren't merely supporters, they were full members and even leaders of the Nazi party.
Do you not see the irony in the fact that you had to grab a tiny snippet of a response several posts prior to 'prove' your counterpoint to a criticism made towards you in regards to practically every response you've had in this thread thus far?
I'm going to give this thread a break since it seems as though you're simply looking for arguments where none exist.
Again, this only applies if we blindly use the cold war association that communism is a left wing ideal, without actually looking at the policy of the people.
The reality is that communism as a movement spans a wide political range, and both Stalin and Pol Pot had diverged significantly from any form of leftist Marxism in their hunt for power.
This is a very interesting world view you have where Hitler is left wing. I think that alone scuppers any substance to your argument.
Stalin and Mao would only be left wing if you prescribe to the thought that communism by nature must only be left wing. I assume your train of thought on Hitler is similar because you're likely equating the socialist word in the Nazi party to left wing socialism.
At best this is dishonest and ignoring actual policy.
Isn't the flipside of that coin that leftism is more or less just plain good and ceases to be leftism the moment it deviates from what we think of as good, ie. basically a No True Scotsman?
One reason the Marxist kind of thought pattern is dangerous is because of something like that. The ideas in and of themselves can sound good and appealing - who wants poor people to live in squalor and so on? But if we look at what natural and sexual selection ingrains in biological life - it is by necessity kin-preferring, competitive and in non-eusocial social creatures, status seeking, for example. Things that prefer non-kin and don't compete just die out.
In that light, a sound philosophy would understand that those things can't be eradicated by human will, take the impulses and hone something constructive out of them. But Marxist thought is rationalist in the sense that it thinks doctrine and reason can mold human nature to whatever shape, and then achieve their utopistic ends. That, of course, cannot happen because we're built from competitive, kin-preferring, status-seeking genes, not utopistic ones. Marxism is incompatible with biological life, and to get biological life to comply for any length of time, it must be forced constantly, or the utopian society degrade into tyranny, which has thus far happened every single time these things have been tried. But it's never done properly, so we should try again.
I'm hardly invoking any sort of no true Scotsman fallacy.
I'm asking for people to delve into the so called left wing policy of the people they're claiming are left wing dictators.
So far people have only been listing people by their party names. Which would mean that North Korea is a bastion of democracy. I'm asking for substance to back up their assertions.
As a german, I can definitly tell you that Hitler was not left wing. There is no overlap in the political views at all. (Something I can not say about germany's far right.)
I have to add that "no overlap at all", may not be correct, as those points were shared by different political spectrums in the history.
The point is: The core idea, is completly different.
Wow. This comment section is a mess. Did y'all miss the other countries in the world that seem to be left wing without censorship. Or just history in general. Typically it tends to be a bit cyclic cycling between "left" ideas being popular at certain times and places, and right wing ideas being popular at certain times and places.
Conservativism largely fails over time in the free marketplace of ideas as evidence by human progress and societal change. Conservativism is fundamentally about suppressing change in favour of familiarity and established norms, which could certainly be seen as censorship. An obvious example of this is the conservative/Puritan influence in American culture, which has lead to excessive censorship of sexual content and cursing in American media.
Censorship is a product of political extremism though, it has no basis in one political ideology, only in how aggressively it is applied to society.
Counterexample - Islamic culture is conservative and thriving in the world (20% of all humans are Muslim), with roughly the same beliefs and culture as it's had for the past 1000 years.
I'm not sure thriving is the correct term. When it comes to HDI, human rights record, freedom of press/expression/etc. i can't think of a single Muslim-majority country ( which isn't the same as Islamic, and i chose the former because they fare better by definition on various freedoms)
On the HDI, the first majority Muslim country is the UAE, at 31, and that's probably highly skewed by its limited population, extreme natural wealth, and slavery. And considering it's involved in a human rights catastrophe in Yemen, it fails any human rights record-based index directly.
On the contrary, I'd say that Islam is stuck in the past, which doesn't help Muslim nations thrive and develop, and those that do, do it based on "luck" ( natural resources).
Who cares? Gradual changes in a philosophy of a culture that has become the great game-board of all adjunct powers, over and over again, is not relevant. At some point all that remains, is the fact, that getting pushed around on the school-yard of the world, is a bad idea.
Nobody cares for the history of getting pushed around.
Just for the now full of mud, blood and laughter.
It'd be hard to make a monolith out of the beliefs, practices and behaviour of over a billion people even if you could boil some of it down into one book (and you can't even do that as even the Sunni majority uses at least 7).
> Conservativism largely fails over time in the free marketplace of ideas as evidence by human progress and societal change.
This is obviously just selection bias. Everything that changes is a loss for "conservatism"; ignore everything that stays the same, which is the majority of everything.
Here are some "conservative" (i.e. longstanding existing) policies: Due process, separation of powers, warrant requirements, freedom of speech. They are currently under attack. But the attackers are the ones on the wrong side of history -- even if they succeed, they lose, because then the monsters these policies were established to vanquish return and the polices get reinstated once the current generation has had a taste of what happens without them. But that route is a lot harder and bloodier than learning from history.
This depends on is being cancelled. It's not the left that cancelled Kapaernick or the artists formerly known as the Dixie Chicks or howled with rage that the Supreme Court - with the exception of three conservative justices - ruled their longstanding practice of cancelling gay people unconstitutional.
No, but the juxtaposition of "footballers' antiracist gestures must be silenced" with "We must intervene to prevent Big Tech from declining to broadcast racism" in the rhetoric of prominent mainstream US conservatives is a pretty good indication that the longstanding tradition they are actually defending isn't "free speech"...
That only works if your frame for literally everything is racism.
Kaepernick kneeling during the pledge of allegiance can only parse as an antiracist gesture if the thing being disrespected (flag/country) is presumed to be intrinsically racist, i.e. it's accusing the whole country of racism. There are a lot of non-racist patriots who would take offense to that. The answer still shouldn't be censorship, but calling any opposition racism is accepting the very premise that the people opposed to the gesture are opposing it over.
Moreover, the implication that everyone who has been canceled was a racist is contrary to evidence unless you're making some heavy tribalist assumptions about anything vaguely conservative automatically implying racism.
And you're still not addressing the original point, which was that the left going around canceling people over speech is inconsistent with freedom of speech. Nothing anyone on the right does can make that untrue.
Show me a case of "cancel culture" and I will show you a case where the "cancelled" person benefitted in popularity on the right wing side. The people that really do get cancelled, you don't hear from them. The examples you know of are all people who benefitted hugely from the "cancelling". Unless you count the #metoo people. But you probably believe all these men are innocent. I don't really get how due process and opposition to trial by media is usually not important with right wing people when someone is suspected of robbery, but when someone is suspected of sexual misconduct it is suddenly a problem. This feels like the protection of elites (because elites will never be part of a robbery, but can be hurt by a metoo-scandal). And I am seriously curious who is calling for a new war in terror. Tell me, who is doing this?
Ok, I'll bite. First three examples of cancel culture I can think of: dongle gate, rosetta mission guy, and more recent J. K. Rowling. How exactly they benefited?
