A few fascist movements sprang out of leftist movements, or had some small overlap in rhetoric with the left, but by and large the most repressive Western governments have come firmly if not exclusively from the right.
So sure, if you ignore all Communist countries and lump in Islamist countries with the western 'right' you can make that argument.
Back on earth, its always the left that is motivated by ideology. The only right wing governments who turn authoritarian do so for money and power, not ideology. The ideology of the right (in the west) is specifically designed to be against that.
That's why the biggest body counts always come from the left. At this point, Communism and all wars combined are running neck and neck for the cause of the most violent deaths. Somehow, you lefties always forget that.
Answer the complete demolition of your "non ideological" nonsense, why are you silent, why did you fucking vanish from the replies? Man up send reply a rebuttal or own your failure.
1. When discussing "the most repressive Western governments", we exclude Communist and Islamist regimes by definition. The West refers to North America and Western Europe, where no Communist or Islamist government has held power. You can't reasonably claim the Western right is less authoritarian by pointing to non-Western examples.
2. The claim that "it's always the left that is motivated by ideology" ignores that right-wing movements are frequently driven by ideological commitments: religious conservatism, ethnonationalism, free-market fundamentalism, and so on. Authoritarian right-wing regimes often justify their actions through explicit ideological frameworks.
3. What mechanism in right-wing ideology "specifically designed to be against" authoritarianism are you referring to? Current consolidation of executive power in the US, rollbacks of institutional checks, and expanding surveillance capabilities suggest otherwise. If right-wing ideology inherently resists authoritarianism, how do you explain broad right-wing support for these trends?
4. Body counts correlate with state capacity and willingness to use violence, not economic system. Authoritarian regimes across the political spectrum have committed mass atrocities. Capitalist regimes have overseen famines (Bengal, Ireland) and genocides just as Communist ones have. The common factor is authoritarianism, not left vs. right.
Both extremes don't listen and arguments always fall on deaf ears, especially when perceived as ideologically different. Merits of the argument are irrelevant. Most don't evolve past"My dad is stronger than your dad", it just morphs into "my God is better than your god", or in more recent years "my politics/policy smarter than your policy".
The people at the top want the same thing: to remain in rule. They agree the best way is oppression, they just don't agree who the oppressors should be.
People in the middle usually all want the same thing: better lives, but can't agree which oppressors are the lesser evils
I meant more generally, that the ruling/politico class is the same everywhere. They'll weaponise ideology they think will get them more votes. They're basically just wealthy and powerful reprobates playing us all for emotional fools.
As for the concentration camp thing you brought up, I know it's hollow words on the Internet, but I'm sorry that it's happening. I live in the UK and tend to avoid news halfway across the world that I can't do anything about. It tends to make my (already precarious) mental healthy worse.
As for the Twitter thing... I think Twitter (or any privately owned social media platform) is free to ban people. I think going to jail for hollow comments made on the Internet is not okay though.
But also, these things are kind of orthogonal anyway.
And for context, I'm what most people on the right would call a libtard: gay, neuro divergent, and the cherry on top is that I'm also a filthy immigrant. So it goes without saying that I strongly disagree with a lot of the stuff said by the"hard right", but silencing/cancelling people won't help improve the situation. It just breeds more contempt and leads into authoritarianism. And it makes the people in the middle question why is the other side so afraid of oppositing ideas.
Authoritarian systems are bad whether right or left leaning. I come from a country ravaged by left leaning authoritarianism that's still recovering from that aftermaths (economically, politically, etc) even if I was born after it.
The zeitgeist changes, so just because it's in my "libtard" interest right now, it doesn't mean it will always be. The left becomes right and vice versa. It's happened before, and it will happen again.
So who will pay for universal healthcare? And if we spend on universal healthcare, what do we give up in return? If we don't exploit resources and capacities, we have less money to go around. Standards of living suffer, mostly affecting the very same people who want free healthcare.
People who want universal healthcare exercise magic money thinking, even though others keep trying to explain that there's no free lunch. It's always other people or other sources who should bear the burden because they cannot afford healthcare for their loved ones. It's obvious why others don't want to pay to everyone else.
Being banned from Twitter is not oppression, but canceling a late night TV show is. You may want to pull your skirt down, your hypocrisy is showing.
I live in France, we have Universal Healthcare here. We individually spend less than you Americans on healthcare, as the costs are distributed across the entire population. The state also acts as a single buyer, giving them more leverage against labs, and we don't have to pay our tithe to parasitic insurance companies either. Finally, we live longer than you, so clearly our system is superior in every way. Stop rehashing the same old republican soup about "no free lunch" or "magical thinking".
15K+ people with no criminal records detained for no other reasons than because they displeased the racist masked thugs made armed force by the Trump admin. But oh no, someone somewhere might get "cancelled" and never be able to speak ever again in public because of left meanies complaining about them online (something that actually never happened).
I do not think that it makes sense to call the Communist governments as "left".
Almost all Communist governments did not obtain the power by a political fight between "right" and "left", but by being installed in power by foreign invaders (in most cases by Russians).
Typically the first action of all Communist governments has been to imprison and/or kill all "leftist" politicians of that country, this having a higher priority than any actions taken against "right-wing" politicians.
Even in Russia, the Bolsheviks and Lenin obtained the power only due to the support of the German war enemies, which they paid back by removing Russia from the war.
The Communists that have been in power have never been any kind of "right" or "left" politicians, they have been just a class of hereditary parasites that have exploited those societies, by controlling everything that was of any value in that country, while claiming that they do this for the good of all people.
The Western politicians are crooks who succeed to fool the feeble minds into voting them. I contrast, the Eastern communists were just slave masters, who did not need any kind of skill, except of displaying loyalty to their immediate boss.
> I do not think that it makes sense to call the Communist governments as "left".
Oh? What an interesting attempt at a retcon. So folks on the left are socialists, but not as socialist as communists? Poor Marx must be spinning in his grave.
> Almost all Communist governments did not obtain the power by a political fight between "right" and "left", but by being installed in power by foreign invaders (in most cases by Russians).
Except for Russia and China, the original communist countries, of course. Even India was influenced, although to a lesser degree. But don't let facts get in the way of your argument.
Islamic fundamentalists support the Republican Party in the USA, the AfD in Germany, Reform UK in the UK, etc? Please. They definitely do not exist on the same one dimensional political spectrum constantly harped on about in the West.
Furthermore, I will put it to you that there are a great many people in the "center" who are tired of hearing about the "left" and the "right", have varying opinions on hot topic issues from both sides, and do not fit neatly into these classifications. They just aren't out there screaming in the streets and on the Internet.
Hey, if you don't believe me, go to your local library or university and use their journal databases to search for studies on whether or not religious fundamentalism like Islamic fundamentalism is a right-wing. You might even learn something!
How is religious fundamentalism not right wing? I mean what are you even thinking? The fact they don't exist appreciably in the West doesn't suddenly make them not right wing? Christian nationalists and theocrats are rightly considered far right and therefore naturally so should Islamic fundamentalists.
> Back on earth, its always the left that is motivated by ideology.
Is it? I don't really remember the last time I've seen right-wing discourse that wasn't centered around moral panic, whether terrorism, immigration, reactionary anti-leftist worldviews, or the opposition to LGBT rights, women's rights, abolitionism, or whatever else is the current threat to all of western society. Not to mention all the damn religious fundamentalism.
Also, in the EU, Croatia with Orban, Poland with PiS, and a few others I can't name off the top of my head are all far-right parties following Russia's playbook, with mass social media campaigns, turning state media into propaganda machines, replacing top government positions with cronies, etc.
Also, it seems extremely bad faith to compare thinly veiled attempts at seizing power with vague promises of "communism" to every single instance of anything left-aligned ever. Might as well start comparing every single right-aligned thought to Nazi Germany, it's roughly just as accurate of an argument.
The way it seems to me is that the right is about preserving the status quo, moral panic, and worship of strong(or more like loud macho) male leaders, while the left is about not-always-well-considered attempts to better the world whose main problem is that there is indeed a lot of empty virtue signalling and misprioritizing of policies around the place, especially among the center-left which is like 90% of the large "leftist" parties.
If you go back in time just 40 years, the countries you did (and didn't) mention, were all governed by communists. With considerable body count. Right-wing regimes in Europe after WW2 have negligible body counts compared to communists, and if you want to include WW2 and pre-WW2 times, then communists are still worse, even if you count all victims of Germany and/or NSDAP, incl. Holocaust/Shoah, towards right-wing violence.
Just because communism didn't happen in your country doesn't mean in didn't happen elsewhere, and there are still some of us who remember exactly what it was and will protest when someone attributes violence and/or authoritarism only to right wing.
Okay? It still has no real relation to present-day politics and doesn't constitute any kind of good-faith argument about either worldviews or policies that are currently bi-partisan.
this just sounds like a disagreement on what left and right means, like which extreme is at either end, many people put fascism and nazism on the left because we are currently further right of them while still being left of anarchism, authoritarianism is a leftist thing, “minarchists”, libertarianism and then anarchism farthest to the right, it’s a measure of authoritarianism where the further left you go the less freedom there is, not the same as left-wing and right-wing in terms of the US Congressional politics
