cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17805513
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While Americans have long clashed over our country’s cruel and bigoted past, Germans have undertaken one of the most thoroughgoing efforts of any nation on the planet to reckon with their history. Germany, perhaps more than any other country, has attempted to pull out by the roots its homegrown variant of the reactionary spirit — the tendency of opponents of social change to choose hierarchy over democracy, trying to constrain or even topple democracy to protect hierarchies of wealth and status.
The Nazis were born out of disgust with post-World War I Weimar democracy, led by men furious about both the new government’s weakness and acceptance of the Jewish minority into German society. After Nazism brought Germany to ruin, preventing a reactionary resurgence became one of the central goals of the country’s subsequent leaders.
So it’s all the more extraordinary that in the past few years, Germany’s far right has been on the rise.
In 2015, at the peak of the global refugee crisis, German chancellor Angela Merkel announced an open-door policy for those fleeing violence in Syria and elsewhere. In response, the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party, a Euroskeptic faction without a single seat in Parliament, morphed into a virulently xenophobic force calling for Germany to slam Merkel’s open door shut.
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But its rise illustrates something vitally important: That Germany, of all countries, could fail to prevent a surge in reactionary antidemocratic politics suggests there’s something eternal and enduring about the reactionary spirit. And there is something about our current time period that makes it especially likely to flourish — not just in Germany, but around the world.
Its a spectrum and its relative. What is left wing to you?
Relative to what, Clyde?
I’ll tell you… because in this liberal hive mind called lemmy.world you’re not going to find plenty of people who knows.
It doesn’t get any simpler than this. What is left or right is dictated by the status quo. That which seeks to dismantle the status quo is left. That which seeks to protect the status quo is right. That’s why there is no such thing as a “left-wing” government because all governments have a vested interest in protecting the status quo.
So no… there is nothing “left” about Canadian or European political establishments - they are all invested in protecting the liberal status quo and that makes them all right-wing. They are no less right-wing than the US government is. Pretending to be “nicer” about violently maintaining the status quo does not make a state less right-wing.
Thats not left wing at all. Hell, Stalin wouldnt be left wing under that definition.
Stalin? The guy who murdered more leftists than the US has managed in all of it’s (so-called) “Cold War” terrorism campaigns put together? Is that the Stalin you’re talking about?
Your history teachers did a piss-poor job at explaining this stuff, so I’ll fix this for you - the Bolsheviks stopped being leftist the minute they tasted power and became the status quo in Russia. Stalin was more of a right-winger than Putin is today. Groups pretending to be leftist until they get their hands on the steering wheel is actually pretty common in modern history - even the Nazis dabbled in it when they added the “S” to their name.
It’s not very difficult to understand once you trash all the garbage sloganeering that gets substituted for actual critical political thinking in our so-called “education” systems.
God Im so tired of this “not true communism” bullshit
If the truth tires you, I suggest you work on your intelectual stamina - yours isn’t fit for purpose.
Here’s some more truth to get you started - the USSR was about as “socialist” as the US is “democratic.” Ie, the media and the politicians constantly blast these concepts out as mere buzzwords at full volume, but nobody gets to actually see anything like it in reality that can be called such with a straight face.
Welcome to the real world.
I have plenty, I just dont use a lot of it on “not true communism” arguments
No. You don’t. Your political understanding is based on sloganeering and gaslighting, not actual political ideology.
It’s still your choice, of course… you can choose to stick to the comfortable lies Reagan and Thatcher told you and continue to live in a bubble of privilege and paranoia, or you can actually start making sense of what is happening around you.