Saturday, June 13, 2009

Understanding Ideology

James Joyner provides a very useful post for understanding the recent wave of ideologically-motivated murders, "Right Wing Extremists." Especially good are these diagrams, drawn from Conservative-Resources.com, "Right Wing vs. Left Wing":

I teach ideology, and most textbooks in comparative politics include some version of the graphs above.

That said, for various reasons I worry less about the extreme right wing in American politics. As I noted previously, "
it's my personal belief that radical left-wing ideology is the greatest threat to the country today."

That said, we'd probably have less confusion over who's on the left or the right if folks better understood the various ways to graph the ideological continuum.
James makes a good point below, although he needs to clarify this point about "racism is neither right-wing nor left-wing ..." Textbook definitions of Nazi ideology distinguish it from fascism with respect to theories of racial millenarianism. That said, it's true that anti-Semitic ideology today is found on both the extreme left and extreme right:

I prefer to think of ideology as a circle, rather than a line. Left and Right have meaning but, as one gets to the extremes on either side — depicted as anarchism in the top chart and “Everyone Against Everyone” in the second — the views diverge.

I actually prefer the bottom figure best in that it groups authoritarian states — Communism, Theocracy, and Fascism — very tightly and depicts, for example, Socialism and Libertarianism are near opposites. Additionally, it contrasts all governmental/ideological forms with Anarchy, or the absence of government. Those who murder to carry out their political agenda are in that category; their particular ideas otherwise don’t much matter.

Finally, I should note that racism is neither right-wing nor left-wing (nor, for that matter, is it centrist or anarchist). It exists at all points on the spectrum and isn’t a political ideology at all. Von Brunn’s hatred of Jews isn’t what makes him a right-winger but rather his views on politics.

35 comments:

Benjamin Blattberg said...

And again, maybe I missed when you gave reasons for why you believe that "radical left-wing ideology is the greatest threat to the country today," but it would be great to get a recap of that thought process.

davemartin7777 said...

This is irrefutable proof von Brunn was a racist, murdering rightwinger.

James Van Brunn was a frequent poster on the far-rightwing hate site "Free Republic".

His hateful screed "Obama is Missing" is signed by him, IN HIS FULL NAME, James W. von Brunn, on December 02, 2008 It is still up on that site... check it out before it's removed.

His postings were well accepted by the far rightwing "Freepers".

His Free Republic nick was "wannabegeek"... read his other rightwing hate posts.

Google "Obama is Missing"

Type in user, wannabegeek

http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/by:wannabegeek/index?tab=comments;brevity=full;options=no-change

Reliapundit said...

dd:

my charts are more accurate:


http://astuteblogger.blogspot.com/2009/06/big-lies-illustrated-fascism-is-right.html

Dana said...

There's a current events problem with the second line of the flow chart. We seem to have the combination of Mobocracy and Oligarchy, where the power of the mob voted in the oligarchs, and the oligarchs hold popularity by throwing out some populist bones, such as caps on executive compensation.

And the far left of the second line has Totalitarianism described as All over One, when in practice totalitarianism has been indistinguishable from the One over All of fascism, as far as the ruling structure is concerned. Totalitarians from the left talk a different talk from the totalitarians from the right, but their actions have been very similar. Perhaps the second line ought to be a circle.

Mongoose said...

Fascism is not really of the "Right". It is just socialism applied to a race, racially related peoples or a nation polity, as opposed to a "social class". Otherwise there is little difference.

Neither is Fascism a case of "one over many" as Fascism is ultimately oligarchic in nature. All totalitarian, authoritarian and monarchical systems eventually devolve to oligarchies. One man can not really keep power for long.

The mean of "left" and "right" has really been do corrupted by the Communists prior to WW2 that it has become almost useless for meaningful discussion. Certainly modern American conservatism has no place in a pre WW2, European "political spectrum" for the far right here would be occupied by forces that wished to restore the Monarchies of the Acient Regime period. Neither Fascists or American Conservatism would find a place here. This association is nothing more than Leftist agitprop and it is of quite old design.

It would be wise to abandon this approach altogether. The better approach would be to draw a spectrum between Oligarchy on the one hand and Republicanism on the other with the other forms falling in between. This would reflect the actual order of things and make clear the moral distinctions aross that spectrum.

Libertarianism? Should we consider it? It has never really existed in history and most likely never will. "Libertarian Man" is an even more elusive beast than "Socialist Man". Attempts at achieving a Libertarian society would soon devolve into tyranny long before that beast was found and tamed.

Mongoose said...

I also object to strictly eliding "Classical Liberalism" with American Conservatism. American conservatism also contains a element of Burkian conservatism, the true philosophical conservatism of 19th century Europe.
The America form adds to this an ebullient faith in both Man and God, sees the reasons behind tradition yet discards superstitions. It values Western Civilization as a bulwark against not merely tyranny but bestiality.
It well knows what is left should that civilization be torn away or "replaced" by the concoctions of intellectuals or politicians.

It understands that the world is diffuclt to imporve yet believes that there is such a thing as progress. It acknowledges that Man is flawed and cannot be prefected on this earth and yet knows that a man's duty is to improve himself and those about him.

It rightly knows that the core of this civilization is the Judeo-Christian legacy and the unique Classical synthesis achieved by European Christendom. It is not positivist, and shuns mere materialistic or naturalistic philosophy. Nor does it believe in economic determinism. Moreover, it does not place man and his works at the center of the cosmos: Art Reason and Science are tools and not elevated to the status of religious beliefs or turned into pseudo-religions.

Though it shares much with Classical Liberalism, in all this it moves away from Classical Liberalism.


We must acknowledge the various debased ideologies of the Collectivists all sprang from the fertile soil of Classical Liberalism, and this includes modern American Liberalism, which is just Socialism and Communism gussied up in the trapping of the Classical Liberal tradition.

It is perhaps inevitable that Classical, 19th Century Liberalism would devolve so for there is deep ambivalence about the nature of the divine and man's relation to the divene in the Classical Liberal tradition. It is a built in entropy.

d.eris said...

'Anarchism' might be better articulated in the top graph by distinguishing between the individualist and collectivist strains of the ideology, as represented by the competing theories of Stirner and Bakunin, respectively.

Mongoose said...

Dave martin, that is a lie, and a vicious one.

Van Brunt is not a poster on Free Republic,
And Free Republic is not "far right wing hate site".

It is a site for mainstream conservatism. The vast majority of the posters there are decent, hard working working and middle class Americans. You should be ashamed of yourself for characterizing them as you have.

You tip your hand has a far left propagandist with this assertion.
You are spreading lies and slander.
It is you that are indulging in "extreme political hatred".

There is no such thing as "the Extreme Political Right" in this country. That is just a Left Wing myth.

There is, however, most certainly such a thing as the Extreme Left: the are running the White House these days.

There is no proof at all for your assertions.

There is no proof at all that he was even on the right. He sounds like a liberal to me, and it appears that he was a registered Democrats.

Certainly,most of the racists and anti-semites in the country are in the Democrat Party, not the Republican Party. The Democrats after all are the party of the slave owners, the KKK and Jim Crow.

They have just lately found more clever ways to keep them on the plantation.

You should be asheamed of yourself.

That you are not shows what a low thing you are.

Watcher said...

"His hateful screed "Obama is Missing" is signed by him, IN HIS FULL NAME, James W. von Brunn, on December 02, 2008 It is still up on that site... check it out before it's removed."

You're either a liar or a fool... I suspect a bit of both.

That freeper was someone who cut and pasted something written by von Brunn about the media.

Maybe you should take your own advice and search his posts... the first post that shows up in the search is this:
"Too late? Not really. I'm praying in Jesus Christ Name! that the SCOTUS will be vigilant enough, that they'll uphold the Constitution no matter what. I'll pray that they'll check mate the Zero!"

Then ask yourself, why would someone who thinks Christianity was invented by the Jews as a conspiracy to destroy western culture be praying to Jesus Christ?

Ummmmm... maybe because they are not the same person?

Kevin Robbins said...

So, where do you all place the epic political philosophy of neoconservatism in the grand scheme? I like to bend that top line into a circle and place it about half way between communism and fascism, since its founders made a small step further to the left from Trotskyism to a full on nationalism just short of militant fascism.

But, that's just my opinion.

cracker said...

Oooohh good question?

Where does Neo-conservatism land in on or around your graphs Dr.

with all seriousness, and genuine curiosity.

Cheers

cracker said...

or is Neo-conservatism a philosophy...? within an ideology?

Since you teach ideology....what texts do you utilize/require for your class?

Tom the Redhunter said...

Mongoose and Watcher are right regarding von Brunn and Free Republic. Here is the post in question, or one of them anyway, saved in google cache

wannabegeek is the actual poster. Now, that might make wannabegeek a nutjob, but that's not the same as von Brunn posting there himself.

Further, if you actually read the post, it's nutty but not racist.

Course, the libs call anything they don't like racist or hateful.

magpie said...

"the core of this civilization is the Judeo-Christian legacy ... it does not place man and his works at the center of the cosmos: Art Reason and Science are tools and not elevated to the status of religious beliefs or turned into pseudo-religions."

The Judeo-Christian legacy was, for centuries, the justification for monarchist absolutism, oppression, slavery, suppression of worldly learning, the source of hate, fear and religious war. It's not the reason we have a working civilization today.

The core of this civilization is its ability to feed itself and create broadly enjoyed material prosperity, which has been achieved by the fruits of reason, science, and education.... that we might enjoy art, and without which we'd all be tilling the soil for the comfort of 'someone else'.

JBW said...

Mongoose is my new favorite commenter on this site. Go off, boyo! Tell me exactly why there are no far right-wingers in this country yet why it is populated by scads of far left-wingers. I'm also curious as to why most racists are liberals. As I've said before, anyone who screams "we never do that but you always do that!" is extremely entertaining to me.

I'm sure you have some kick-ass theories to unload on these subjects and my brain is itching to be educated. Pretty, pretty please, thrall me with your acumen.

quietmagpie, you sound suspiciously like my buddy from down under, Van Zan. Are you related?

JBW said...

Oh, and when I tried to access Mongoose's profile I was denied. Courageous in anonymity. A trait to be celebrated, for sure.

magpie said...

Yes I am the nefarious Aussie moderate Van Zan, which username I retired as I set up my own blog. I have noted this elsewhere, but thanks for asking. It seemed a bit loud to declare it at the foot of every comment I write for the next 6 months...

repsac3 said...

Mongoose sez: "There is no such thing as "the Extreme Political Right" in this country. That is just a Left Wing myth."

"So rather than make the fairly easy and straightforward case that their ideology has little in common with white supremacy (any more), conservatives are making an extremely convolutaed case against the basic identity properties of the political spectrum. The attempt to deny that fascism and white supremacy are right-wing is silly in innumerable ways, but maybe the simplist is that it doesn't explain how right-wing thought can be extreme at all. I'd love to hear the answer from Jonah Goldberg: Is there such a thing as a right-wing extremist? When you go past the right wing of the Republican Party, through Tom Tancredo and Pat Buchanan, what comes next? Is there anything there or just a gaping void?" -- Jonathan Chait: Liberal Facism Reductio Ad Absurdum
---

JBW: Yeah, those "unshared profiles" are just anonymity by another name... (Not that I necessarily disapprove of pseudonymity or anonymity on most blogs... I'm just sayin'...)
---

quietmagpie: You could just add "the artist formally known as Van Zan" to the blogger profile, for those who're curious...

Mongoose said...

The Judeo-Christian legacy was, for centuries, the justification for monarchist absolutism, oppression, slavery, suppression of worldly learning, the source of hate, fear and religious war. It's not the reason we have a working civilization today.

What completely ignorant and infantile balderdash, quitemagpie.

Here you expose just how ill-educated, ignorant and uncivilized you truly are.

Here you show your true lack of insight, cultivation and critical thought. It is all so typical of a the young (and not so young) ill-educated and foul mannered "liberal" barbarians that make up the Democrat Party and now want to pick the pockets of every productive citizen.


I have news for you, quitemagpie: You are just along for the ride.
You will add nothing of value to our civilization. I doubt that you will ever even make enough money to make the tiny contribution of paying meaningful taxes.

You are just regurgitating the usual nonsense that comes out of the left.

It is a self serving and cartoonish assessment of Western Civilization, no doubt served up to you by your left wing "professors" in what ever 3rd rate school in which you managed to get that indoctrination you call your "education".

It is all compete hogwash. Just bromides and sloganeering used to manipulate useful idiots. And these slanders are not even new, they are not even form the 20th Century. Go google the debunkings before you make such spurious claims and repeat such slanders and libels.


But just off the top...

Christianity is at the very core of Western Civilization. It is in fact Westerns Civilization.

The philosophic basis, the very metaphysical (as in ontological and epistemological) underpinnings and stance of Western science would be impossible without it. That God created the world but in not immanent in it, that man is a individual and a thinking that has the duty pursue truth and be accountable for that search before God. There is a reason that science arose in the West and nowhere else.

It is complete nonsense that Christianity is anti-science. Most of the great universities of the West were created by confessions of faith.


Christianity has been the greatest patron of arts, intellectual life and science, particularly in its nascent stages, than any other force in history. And what magnificence has flowed form it.

Copernicus was a Canon in the Catholic Church and spent an entire life holding a position at the Collegiate Church of the Holy Cross.
Newton's Chair at Cambridge was a religious scholar's chair.

The list goes on and on.

If you actually knew anything about Christianity you would know that it (and Judism) is the only major faith that requires the assent of reason and the rational mind.

Mongoose said...

(Had to break this up because of comment size)

The notion of in alienable rights would be impossible without Christianity.
You stand history on its head in your ignorance. Christianity has been used to "justify" the long march from Monarchy. It is the Christian position of the dignity of all mankind as the creation of God that leads out from the hierarchies of the early middle ages, hierarchies that had pagan origins, i might add.

The whole body of Western Music would be impossible without Christianity. So to the visual arts and literary traditions of the West.

You are just mindlessly spewing 19th and 19th century collectivist slander and cant.

If you want to see real barbarity, real decadence, real superstition, and real tyranny, have a look at the 20th century: Here the rejection of the Judeo-Christian heritage led to more deaths and more blighted lives in one century than could possibly be lain at the feet of Christendom in all of her centuries of ascent.

These are your fellow atheist collectivists that are spilling most of this blood and destroying societies and civilizations.

I doubt that you have the cultivation to even know what a civilization is, let alone appreciate the greatness of your own civilization.

It certainly is not about the choice of coffee drinks that you make at Starbucks. I imagine that you think that you created who you are and what you "think".
Far from it.

Mongoose said...

And, of course, there is no mainstream "extreme Right Wing movement" in this country.

It is just a Marxist agitprop. Prove it.

You are so far gone in your juvenile, left wing dream world that you imagine that mainstream conservatism is "extreme right wing".
Pat Buchanan as "extreme right wing"? How silly.

You have no idea of what "extreme right wing" means. (Hint: the Nazis were Left Wing; that was the National Socialist Workers Party. Mussolini was a Socialist.)

Who are those "extreme right" people? People that do not believe in public fire departments? People that believe there is no Constitutional basis for income tax?
That is about as extreme as the right gets here in the USA. Really now.

But go over to the DailyKos if you want to see extreme (and I mean extreme) left wing politics.

These people are Stalinists. "Moderates" over there are Trotskyites, for Pete's sake.

And this sort of thing has become mainstream now.

Your bleating show that you have little knowledge of political and economic life on the long history of our civilization, and are comically misinformed about American politics outside you your little MSM lefty media bubble.


You come here ignorant and lacking even the most basic capacity for reflection and then think that your juvenile personal attacks somehow have merit or are winning arguments.

In fact, they show you up as a barely civilized, willing dupe for the enemies of our Civilization, the greatest civilization in history and one that you understand but little.

You do not deserve to be a member of it or to reap the fruits of its centuries of labor.

I imagine that you are under 30, have no children, rent your "space"
and have some silly little job somewhere with grim chances for advancement. You contribute extremely little to your civilization--in fact you aid her enemies.

And yet think the you can sit back and throw rocks at Western Civilization and those who would defend her. You think that you can spread your revisionist lies and then parasitically live in the very civilization that you seek to tarnish.

What a narcissistic, solipsistic and selfish little girl you are.

When you grow up, I hope remember how you behaved when you were young.

As for anonymity, this is a completely spurious argument and a complete evasion of the issues at hand. So like a liberal.

It is none of your business how impact choose to post on this site, and it has no impact whatsoever on the discussion. Fact is, you cannot deal with a rational discussion of ideas and have to resort to tactics like this to keep that fact from yourself.

With the increasing thuggery of the left, it is in fact shrewd decision.
Why would you want to know? for what possible reason? So you can personally assault me?

So typical of a Socialist thug.

You have neither a grasp of the facts or the intellectual skills for a meaningful discussion.

You merely repeat what your you Lefty propagandists have told you.
After that is done all you can do is evade, assault, bluster and threaten. It does not even occur to you that you are being used or that these propagandists have utter contempt for you. Come the revolution, folks like you are among the first to be sent to the camps.

Keep mumbling in your lefty echo chamber, but do not be alarmed when the political ground moves beneath your feet. We are going to get change alright. You will not like it. Not one bit.

repsac3 said...

Oh yeah...

JBW's right...

Whoever s/he may be, Mongoose is my new favorite commenter here, too... S/He may even turn out to be more entertaining than our long lost lady, Grace...

"In the village, in the jungle, lies a body..."

Kevin Robbins said...

Great minds, Repsac... I was also thinking along the lines that Mongoose might actually be the blogress known as Grace Explosion. It would be irresponsible not to speculate. I believe JBW has declared Mongoose to be his new favorite and I can see why.

Just to pick out a small piece of the insanity:

Who are those "extreme right" people? People that do not believe in public fire departments? People that believe there is no Constitutional basis for income tax?
That is about as extreme as the right gets here in the USA. Really now
.

People who go to war with another country based on "evidence" they have tortured out of untermenschen might fall into the category of far right. Then those people do all they can to feed uber-nationalism (not patriotism). They declare rights to privacy and habeas corpus to be old-fashioned. They set up gulags in Cuba, Afghanistan and elsewhere, renditioning suspects without trial or counsel. And so on and so forth.

By the by, since no one has objected to my proposal to place neoconservatism between fascism and communism, might we now refer to it as fascocommunism? I'm sure true conservatives everywhere will rejoice at no longer being associated with it.

Kevin Robbins said...

I believe JBW has declared Mongoose to be his new favorite and I can see why.

Oops, Reppy already said that. Well, megadittos anyway!

Anonymous said...

That is a generally good set of illustrations because it shows the ideological "spectrum" to be circular. It errs in lumping monarchy with fascism, though. The deficiencies of monarchies have been observed since Ecclesiastes and led to the Founding of our country, but monarchies belong(ed) to civilization and not necessarily to tyranny. Fascism was a modern phenomenon which owed much philosophically to the French Revolution. The middle one is probably the best, because it does not make this mistake, and because even though it is a straight line it best illustrates the circular and cyclical nature of the "spectrum."

Mongoose said...

X DBL:

People who go to war with another country based on "evidence" they have tortured out of untermenschen might fall into the category of far right....


Total nonsense. No one was tortured in Cuba. Not one. In total we had three of those bastards water boarded. Three. Water boarding is not torture. Nor is flushing a Koran down a toilet.


This whole business of the Left crying about decent American's trying to protect their country shows just how filthy people like you are. You have more concern for a mortal enemy of the Nation than your own fellow citizens. You have more concern for you self-indulgent moral posturing than you do for your nation or civilization. And the posturing is totally bogus: You are no one's moral superior. Far from it. You are completely detached for reality.

No proof for Afghanistan? It is voluminous.

Irag? there were major resolutions out of the UN for over a decade. Is the UN a right wing organization?
Was the Clinton Administration a right wing administration?

The only reasons that powers obstructed the Bush administration in the UN is that they were either in the pocket of Saddam or up to no good, or both. Who are you aligning yourself with here, the Russians, the ChiComs, the French? What rubbish.

No WMD? that is a canard and has been toughly debunked. Google "Iraq yellow cake".

If the Democrat party would have stood with the rest of the country,
things would have gone much better, but they could not. Just as they sabotaged the Viet Nam War, they sabotaged this effort too. This is because they are traitors. They can not move but move against this nation.

(I will also point out that like the North Vietnamese, the Baath Party was a socialist party. Democrats always stick up for their collectivist coreligionists no matter what damage it does to the nation.)

This all will surely backfire on you come 2010. People outside of the loony echo chamber of the Left know that Bush did the right thing.
They know that they would do the same thing that he did to protect their families. In fact, they marvel at his restraint.

I was a quarter mile away for the WTC when the first plan struck. I lost 15 employees and scores of friends. Go tell their families about this torture BS of yours.

They know who the enemy is, and it is not conservatives.

This whole torture thing is just a detraction technique to draw people's eyes away form the colossal theft of the country that the DEMOCRATS are up to at the moment.

It is whole torture agitprop campaign is just another bogus atttack and slander on real Americans by the Faux-Americans of the Democrat Party.

The Bush administration was right to do what they did, and decent Americans knows this. Obama knows it too, that us why he is continuing Bush's policies. In any event, the Democrats on the hill voted in concert with them.

But what is really comic is your formulation of "Well this is a gulag thing so it must be right wing."

In fact, the history of Gulags as a systematic form of political oppression is almost exclusively the
territory of the Left.

It is the left that set up gulags, go read Solzhenitsyn. It is only because of his writings on the Soviet Gulags that you even know enough to use the term.

I lived for a time in Russia. believe me, you have no idea what a gulag is, though Obama yet might give you a chance to broaden your eduction. How sorely do you need this.

It was Hitler who set up the concentration camps, and Mao that set up the re-education camp.

So here again you set history on it head and make claims that are 180 degrees opposite to the truth of the matter. Typical left wing projection, deception and hypocrisy.

You either do not know what you are talking about, you are a liar or you are an imbecile.

I imagine that it is all three.

Typical young Liberal Democrat.

If another has to die for all of the Democrat treachery over the WOT, I hope it is a Liberal Democrat.

You deserve it. Conservatives do not.

JBW said...

Wow Reppy and exDLB, I go golfing for a few hours and Mongoose goes all rhetorical Wolverine berserker-style up in this bitch! This guy is like explosive diarrhea with an inferiority complex and a word of the day calendar. I must say his scatter shot acumen has me sufficiently within its thrall.

And I don't think that he's my girl Grace in disguise for two reasons: 1) This is obviously a dude. He's just too angry and calling another guy a girl isn't usually an insult women employ. 2) He writes better than Grace. A low bar from which to measure to be sure but Grace was disjointed and rambling at the same time. Mongo seems to have fairly decent sentence structure for a screaming wingnut.

Fortunately for us though he's also a crazy Christian with a chip on his shoulder and plenty of free time to type, so I'm going to sit back and enjoy for as long as he can keep up this level of crazy energy.

Oh, and I've got this one, Don: "Thanks for commenting, Mongoose!"

Dave said...

davemartin7777,

You are a lying, stinking sack of sh*t, and that is the kindest way I can put it:

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=100882

For a hard-core, flaming "right-winger," Brunn sure did hold a lot of views espoused by the left.

Clearly, you know little if anything about what a conservative, or conservatism, actually is.

And when it comes to racist murderers, we of the conservative persuasion have a long, long way to go to catch up to you on the racist left, as we are almost 50 million murders behind you:

http://www.blackgenocide.org/planned.html

-Dave

magpie said...

Mongoose, I sort of expected that emphasizing reason over religion would upset someone with an unreasonable world view, but please don't assume I am ignorant or uneducated.
That's just stupid.
I don't assume you're an idiot because you go to church. Fair's fair.

I happen to think things like the industrial revolution were sort of...significant.

By the way the Catholic church has only just let Galileo off the hook for asserting that the Earth orbits the sun. John Paul II was kind enough to admit the Earth is not stationary in 1992.
Now.... because I - unlike you - am fair-minded, I will add that the Vatican has proposed that a new statue of Galileo be made on Vatican land, and the current pope has lauded his contributions to science.
Jolly good eh?

Dave said...

Here is more on our "conservative" museum shooter:

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/15/the-left-cries-racist-in-a-crowded-country/?feat=home_headlines

Some right-winger this clown is.

-Dave

Tim said...

Wow, this Mongoose is something else. Donald, you are great at picking up lunatics masquerading as intellectuals.

Again with the Nazis as socialists argument? Really? Does he not know that the primary enemies of the Nazis weren't just jews, but commies and social democrats? Basically anything to the left of the political spectrum. I am loving the whole new "extreme right" is the new "extreme left" meme. It ain't working though. We are simply not THAT stupid Mongoose.

And does Mongoose not know that scripture and adherence to God's law supported things like slavery, the extermination of the American Indians, censorship of scientific works...the list is endless. Even Copernicus was nervous about publishing some of his works for fear of retribution from the church.

You have to balance the good with the bad, otherwise, Mongoose, you look like the intellectual equivalent of a bird dropping. Which, right now, you are. Sorry bud. Work on it.

paul zummo said...

Does he not know that the primary enemies of the Nazis weren't just jews, but commies and social democrats?

Wow, Tim, you are like the first person ever to make that connection. You must be incredibly proud of yourself for regurgitating the little bit of WWII history you learned as a junior in high school.

Unfortunately you aren't as perceptive as you think you are. As many others have pointed out, Nazis and Commies hated each other because they were fighting over the same turf. Similarly, you may have noticed that neocons and paleocons hate each other as well and spend more time belittling each other than they do the left. Now, unless you think they represent opposite ends of the political spectrum (and some paleocons do), what do you account for such radical hatred between two groups that are clawing for the same turf?

And does Mongoose not know that scripture and adherence to God's law supported things like slavery, the extermination of the American Indians, censorship of scientific works...

This is nothing more than anti-religious piffle. Even the Galileo stuff has over time grown into some kind of left-wing legend about the supposed anti-science bent of the Catholic Church. Once again, history shows this all to be a massive distortion. The Church didn't condemn Galileo because he taught against geocentrism, but because they disagreed with some of his scientific methods.

We are simply not THAT stupid Mongoose.

Based on the comments, I'm going to have to disagree.

repsac3 said...

@ Paul:

"Similarly, you may have noticed that neocons and paleocons hate each other as well and spend more time belittling each other than they do the left. Now, unless you think they represent opposite ends of the political spectrum (and some paleocons do), what do you account for such radical hatred between two groups that are clawing for the same turf?"

Wait... Are you saying that *you* believe some paleocons represent the opposite end of the political spectrum from neocons, or are you saying that *some paleocons* think so?

(Too many pronouns, not enough clarity... --and if you ask me, anyway, not a truthful statement/opinion either way...)

Mark Harvey said...

I am more inclined to go with this graph:

http://tinyurl.com/mqlf7n

as I wrote here:

http://tinyurl.com/cwl9bz

Having visited every single "Stan" country there is, the underlying theme I discovered was that the alleged right-wing Anarchists are more in line with the left-wing Marxists seeing their goals are virtually the same.

Mark Harvey said...

Brunn was a left-wing Jew Hating, neocon hating, Bush hating leftists. It is quite comical how the Leftinistra try and distort everything that points iin their direction.