Comment by kmeisthax
15 hours ago
> OK, let's go 30 years back and see how many terror attacks, worldwide, were from islamists: it's something like 95% of all terror attacks.
Islamism is a far-right ideology. Islamists even collaborate with other flavors of far-right. A lot of American leftists don't like talking about it because they also want solidarity with liberal and leftist Muslims, and the biggest vulnerability to that solidarity is for the American right to demonize Muslims by pointing out that there's an Islamist right. The far right is always inherently scary to anyone outside the preferred in-group.
> Leftists somehow tried to dissociate themselves from all the socialist promises that got Hitler elected.
Even though the Soviets and the Nazis did collaborate, Hitler wasn't a leftist by any definition of the word. Both sides of the collaboration hated each other's guts and figured they'd be able to beat the other once they silenced their mutual threat: liberals and liberal socialists[1]. Hitler was clearly sponsored by German and American[0] business interests looking to maintain their wealth by any means necessary - including putting a meth-addled idiot in power. Everything that "seems socialist" about Hitler (or Stalin[1], or Trump, or Napoleon) is either a concession, or a lie, made to fool people at the margins of the left wing.
The ultimate goal of any fascist is to divide and conquer the people by using non-class divisions (e.g. race, language, religion) to keep the people from realizing whose boot is on their neck. In America this was "Why would you join a union? Do you want to be paid the same as a black person!?". In Germany this was "Why would you vote socialist? Don't you know the Jews made that up!?". The labels are different but the effect is the same: don't join together and fight us, your friends and neighbors are your real enemy.
> And it's kinda, sorta, indeed not a world where "far-right" terrorism ain't that much of a big thing.
It stops being far-right terrorism when the far-right is in power. There's no need to maintain a large insurgency against... what, exactly? Yourself?
[0] Casual reminder that Henry Ford was a huge Hitlerite and that cars are inherently Hitlertech.
[1] Hitler was an example of what happens when the reactionary counter-revolution succeeds. But there's a second possibility: the reactionaries only succeed at pushing the left in a far more authoritarian direction. A Reign of Terror happens, in which both the reactionaries and left-libertarians are purged as equal traitors to the revolution. This continues to burn through the political hierarchy until the forest fire runs out of fuel to burn, Robespierre is hung by his own guillotine, and Thermidor comes. Russia's communists went down the same path the French left did a hundred years ago, and that's why you sometimes hear socialists say "true socialism has never been tried".
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It's generally considered rude to stop reading one sentence into a message in order to shoot off pithy replies
The author did not take a stance on the question if Hamas and Iran are leftist Muslims or far-right Islamists, so I dared to ask. You might not believe this, but many German leftist - even moderate ones - supported explicitly the Islamic Revolution, as well as the first or second Intifada. The author might include Hamas and IIR into his conclusion of some groups being "inherently scary to anyone outside the preferred in-group", but by observation, that doesn't seem to be true once your own out-group (i.e., Capitalists, Jews, and Jewish Capitalists) seems even more inherently scary to you than some Islamist thousands of miles away. It's also not true for the governments of Russia or China, which are neither Muslim nor Islamist, thus not part of the proclaimed Iranian "in-group", but they are not at all scared of them.
Furthermore, the author's claims demote "left" and "right" to some kind of synonyms of what they have labeld as "good" and "bad" on their personal moral compass, robbing them of any systematic meaning in political reality; those definitions match neither scientific consensus, nor the way people self-select into groups that call themselves either "left" or "right", nor the way these terms are used to describe policies. The reason is simple: the goals that he attributes to his idea of what "left" means cannot be achieved and sustained on the scale of modern governments and states without the means of authoritarianism, which is, by his definition, exclusively a "far-right" thing.
Yes, the Ayatollahs were very notable in using foreign media to provide cover while they turned a liberal revolution into a far-right Islamist one. I believe there was also a few radical feminists who were so pissed off about America they thought Osama was one of the good guys. The history of left-wing own goals is frustratingly long.
Idiots aside, Islamism is obviously far-right. Okay, left- and right- don't have good definitions as is, as they were defined in response to where people physically sat in the Estates General during the French Revolution. But I can at least point to a few properties that are manifestly right-wing and why Islamists all tick those boxes:
1. Right-wing politics supports and defends already-established power structures. Islam (Sunni-Shia divide notwithstanding) is an established power structure; in fact, it's the dominant power structure in the region. Ergo, Islamism supports and defends an established power structure: a specific religion.
2. Right-wing politics is Wilhoitist: it believes in an in-group, to whom the law protects but does not bind; and that the law binds but does not protect the out-group. Islamism specifically wants an Islamic theocracy, that's about as Wilhoitist as it gets.
3. Right-wing politics demonizes the other, to the point of spreading lies about people outside their preferred in-group. Whenever there's someone shitting on Islam you can count on Islamists to make shit up about them to stoke the flames of outrage.
To me, at least, those properties alone are enough to confidently put Islamism in the far-right bin. The fact that some ignorant leftists do the whole "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" bit without actually reading what's on the tin is immaterial.
> 1. Right-wing politics supports and defends already-established power structures.
Once the left is in power, they immediately turn out to be right wing? Does it happen in the very second they gain power or only when try to keep it? Is running for the next election even though you're already in power inherently right-wing?
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