A commenter named "Sure" has a couple of bangers: Posting here so I can find them again.
Note: I fixed some obvious mistakes.
Oh a bind spot, like Che Guerra? Or perhaps you mean Yasser Arafat? Or maybe Mangione? People who have objectively done horrible things, by their own admission, are routinely celebrated.
Look the intellectual Left celebrated Lenin, Bela Kun, Calles, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Ghaddafi and the rest in turn. And when the nigh unto inevitable eggs get broken at scale, we are all supposed to just forget that the Walter Duranty's of the world thought these were the bright new stars to guide human evolution.
At some point, we need to acknowledge that we are generations deep where the promise of a glorious new dawn arrives soaked in blood and maybe there isn't some propensity for one side or the other to actually live by non-violence (by either the pacificist or militarist strains of peace).
Yeah, I think blind spot is much too soft. There's a tendency on the left to celebrate really awful, evil people.
It would be good to understand this. Some of it is surely just numbers - most of the really horrendously bad people in the last 150 years or so were left or hard left.
But it's still odd that there's no similar phenomena on the right. There have been serious bad guys on the right - maybe not on the same scale - but they exist. Nobody wears t-shirts with their profile in black on them.
Hazel:
Like how many of these neo-Nazis have you met? The ones I deal with in the prisons come in a bunch of flavors and many of them are not all that right wing.For instance, some of them are explicitly pagan. They oppose Christianity, often virulently. They tend to favor abortion (either on demand or forced) for minorities. And they oppose even private charity being given across racial lines.
Most are broadly anti-capitalist. They believe that private property is secondary to racial concerns (and have the rap sheets proving this).
Most favor very strong anti-free speech norms. They routinely incur punishment within prison by fighting over anti-white trash talk. They absolutely have shibboleths and where they have power they will exact punishment if they hear them uttered.
Guns? Again, many favor extremely constrained Second Amendment rights, generally being in favor of curtailing all such rights for minorities and race traitors.
Taxes are harder to measure, but they have no problem demanding prison negotiables from within their membership for redistribution within the group.
And more importantly, they just aren't celebrated by the right. I see wildly more hammers and sickles on the college kids than I do swastikas, double bolts, sig runes, or death's heads. And I was literally at a dinner with multiple physicians just a week ago where not one but two were snarking about how nobody cared that United Health Care had their CEO capped. Taylor Lorenz has a large following and she gushes of Mangione. Democrats in California stamp his name on assembly bills. A mural went up in Seattle. a pro-Luigi billboard went up in California, and in YouGov polling, 47% of liberals have a somewhat (25%) or very (22%) favorable view of Mangione.
Name for me an assassin who is so favored on the Right.
On God, Guns, Economics, Abortion, and many other highly salient rightwing issues, the neo-Nazis just don't align with the modern right. It is not just that the Right disagrees about using violence, it is that they have very different ideas about the ideal end outcomes.
The violence on the Left, on the other hand, generally is in support of end states the left desires. A lot of folks on the Left would like folks like Kirk silenced. Maybe they get jailed, as in Britain. Maybe they get banned from speaking on Campus. Or shouted down. Or the online mob destroys their finances. Speaking out against trans ideologies is something the Left abhors and routinely takes action to stop. End of the day, Robinson appears to have wanted Kirk's silence and a lot of the Left wanted that goal without being on board for pulling the trigger on the ultimate response.
Nor is it just the trans-issues. Healthcare is a big issue. Bernie tells us that billionaires and insurance profits shouldn't exist, and undoubtedly he means using the taxing authority of the state, backed by violence in extremis, to seize the property of such entities for some sort of redistribution. But if the hard left (and a lot of the soft left) could wave a magic wand that creates a world without for-profit insurance, highly renumerated healthcare CEOs, and the rest of Mangione's causes, they would take it.
And that is the rub. The only thing that unites neo-Nazis is the race stuff (and even within that, you have differences between the ones who just are white supremacists and the ones who oppose Slavs, Southern Europeans/Catholics, etc. or even the rare fear who only want Germanic and Nordic members) - some want a welfare state (for white people) some want a Social Darwinist free for all. Some want compulsory abortions for minorities, some are fervently pro-life. Some (e.g. Mahler) want a theocratic Christian Nationalist state, some want an anti-Christian state (i.e. Jesus was a Jew, like all other Jews, to be rejected). Some want everyone to be armed to the teeth with relaxed rules about self-defense. Others want strict gun control (i.e. recapitulating the rules of the Third Reich) with only select paramilitaries being armed.
If you think racist = rightwing, I guess. But that is not how the Right defines itself and certainly is less true today (when MAGA includes more non-whites than just about any conservative movement in the US since 1965).
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