My comments inline:
On Tuesday, November 20, 2018, 11:45:27 PM PST, juan <juan....@gmail.com> wrote:
 
 
 On Wed, 21 Nov 2018 17:04:56 +1000
jam...@echeque.com wrote:

> On 2018-11-21 12:39, juan wrote:
> > On Tue, 20 Nov 2018 21:31:11 +0000 (UTC)
> > jim bell <jdb10...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > 
> > 
> >> In any case, I think that the 'convention' that we refer to "fascism" as 
> >> being "right-wing" was, and is, completely phony.�
> > 
> >     so assuming that commies and nazis and other fascists are on the left, 
> > who is on the right then?
> 
> Whosoever wants to restore civilization against the darkness is on the 
> right.


 >   uh oh. So let's make clear what "the right" means. As Jim B. pointed out, 
the left/right classification comes from the french revolution. What needs to 
be added is that the people who sat on "the right" of the assembly were the 
conservatives/monarchists/theocrats or representatives of the 'ancien regime'.
That explains how it applied in France, in 1795 or so.  


 >   Now, key features of fascism are close cooperation between the 'private' 
sector and government and nationalism-militarism, also known as imperialism. 
Fascists usualy believe that they are god's chosen master race and that they 
have a Manifest Destiny. In other words the old mercantilists from the british 
empire and modern day fascists like the americunts are both 'right wingers'. 
And actually modern day corporatists-imperialists  are simply the continuantion 
of 18th century imperialists. 
I won't argue with this, now, except to point out that the so-understood 
"leftist" dictatorships of the 20th century (usually based on Communism) tended 
to have analogous beliefs.  Not identical, of course, but analogous.  For 
example, Juan says:
"Fascists usualy believe that they are god's chosen master race and that they 
have a Manifest Destiny."
My response is that "race" is fairly irrelevant:  We can't choose our race.  
It's not a "variable", and certainly not in the short-term.  One could argue, 
"What does it matter if one person believes, and even declares, that his race 
is superior?  Unless he tries to act on this belief in a hostile or otherwise 
violent way, it is functionally irrelevant".   Yet, you will notice today that 
most of the American Left obsesses about "Nazis"  (seemingly their chosen label 
for anyone who they have come to dislike) who, they claim, believe themselves 
to be superior.  My response is:  "Does it really matter what THEY believe 
about themselves?  Is it relevant?  Is it significant?  
As for "Manifest Destiny":   Communists had the idea that their system would 
inexorably spread around the world, destroying all other forms of government.  
(So, that is indeed akin to a "Manifest Destiny".)   
Nevertheless that never happened, and it presumably didn't happen because 
Communism was eventually revealed to be horribly flawed.  Even by the late 
1920's and mid-1930's, Russian Communists had begun murdering over a million 
Kulaks (people who didn't want to give up their on personally-owned farms to 
the collective.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak     From that article: 
("The word kulak originally referred to independent farmers in the Russian 
Empire who emerged from the peasantry and became wealthy following the Stolypin 
reform, which began in 1906. The label of kulak was broadened in 1918 to 
include any peasant who resisted handing over their grain to detachments from 
Moscow.[1] During 1929–1933, Joseph Stalin's leadership of the total campaign 
to collectivize the peasantry meant that "peasants with a couple of cows or 
five or six acres more than their neighbors" were labeled "kulaks".[2]")
Another enormous flaw with Communism (and really, with all systems that purport 
to be 'centrally-planned') is that it is virtually impossible to run an economy 
by central control.   I saw an essay once that discussed, as an example, the 
food-distribution function in Manhattan.  It explained that it was enormously 
complex, and only 'worked' because all the components made their own decisions. 
 (Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand").    It was certainly not possible to do so in 
the era before computers and Internet networking, and remains impossible today. 
 
Does anyone remember the stories about the Soviet Union, with its "5-year 
plans"?   Shoe factories, for instance, were ordered by "the plan" to produce a 
certain number (at least) of millions of pairs of shoes.  Well, they did so, 
but they tended to be of a small number of styles that many people didn't want! 
  Sure, they met 'the plan', but they didn't meet the wants and needs of the 
public.   Walk into any shoe store today, in America, and there are many 
hundreds of styles, multiplied by dozens of sizes.  A centrally-planned system 
never could accomplish this.  

    China killed perhaps 20 million people in the "Great Leap Forward", a plan 
which no doubt was intended to bring the prosperity that Mao saw in Western 
nations.  Ironically, now China is achieving prosperity, but it is doing so by 
employing a (not-perfect) pseudo-'free market' which it had not previously 
attempted.  Curiously, Russia has remained economically stuck, for reasons I 
suppose economists and technologists can explain.  

    
 >   So the question for Jim Bell remains. What political doctrines are 'right 
wing'?

First, sorry for taking so long to respond to this.
Also, I did not mean to suggest that 'all extremist governments are left-wing', 
although it might have seemed that I intended that.Rather, take a look at the 
Nolan Chart as I usually think of it:   A diamond-shape (a square rotated by 45 
degrees.)   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart
At the top is "100/100", complete freedom.  (Libertarian).  The left vertex is 
100/0, complete social freedom but zero economic freedom.  (I do not know if 
there is a convention as to which number goes first, "social freedom" or 
"economic freedom").  The right vertex is 0/100, zero social freedom but full 
economic freedom.  The vertex on the bottom is 0/0, no social freedom and no 
economic freedom.
One of the first things I noticed about the Nolan Chart is that it seemed to 
explain why 'dictatorships of the left' and 'dictatorships on the right' 
appeared so similar. (at that time, about 1980, I was not aware that there was 
a challenge to the idea of "fascism" as being "right-wing").
 For example, you can imagine that as most freedoms (both social and economic) 
go away, the position on the Nolan Chart begins to approach the bottom-most 
vertex, 0/0.   Thus, as you get close to that point, say a strong "leftist" 
dictatorship at, say, 10/0, or a strong "rightist" dictatorship at 0/10, you 
see that these points are actually quite close to each other.  
This led me to the conclusion that in the limited area of dictatorships, there 
really isn't much difference between "left" and "right".  These labels become 
fairly irrelevant.  Nevertheless today, people can get into fierce arguments as 
to whether "fascism" is "left-wing" or "right-wing".   Does it really matter?   
True, we are today conditioned to accept the idea that "fascism" is 
"right-wing".  But I think a study of the relevant history shows that these 
labels are virtually meaningless in the extreme case of a dictatorship.  Would 
you have preferred living in Nazi Germany, as opposed to Stalinist Russia?
                Jim Bell 
  















 

  

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