Soviet Union, [People’s Republic of] China, Cuba, pre-1990 Eastern Europe, ets.
All havens of pluralism with thriving opposition parties.:rolleyes:
From tigsnort
From rjung
Hannity?!? Limbaugh? Liddy? Coulter? You guys think THEY are extreme right?? In the same league with Hitler?? My god. That tells more about YOU than them.
Remember, the OP said:
Not going to say that Coulter and Limbaugh (Savage is also a nut ball IMO) at least aren’t nuts (I personally feel Coulter in particular has a very tenuous grasp of reality), but they aren’t even CLOSE to being in the same league with Hitler or Stalin, guys. Get a grip.
I think that the extremes at both ends are equally evil and destructive. I think extreme right and extreme left begins to look a lot a like when you get that far out. As there is little distinction, I’d say that both are equally odious.
Examples of left wing extreme-ism that is on par with the gas chambers of the Nazi would be the gulaga’s of Russia, killing fields of Cambodia, re-education camps, terrorization of the intellectuals (Cambodia, Vietnam, China, USSR, etc), the crushing of Poland in the 50’s, the mass ‘purgings’ at the end of the Vietnam war, mass ‘purgings’ by the soviets, Cultural revolution in China, Tieneman (sp?) Square…the list is as long and distinguished as it is on the right. Sickos come in all flavors, and run the gamit of the political spectrum…no side is free of it unfortunately.
-XT
Aha! I see the point of this…
“My side’s extremists are not as bad as your side’s extremists, so therefore my side’s views are better than your side’s views.”
huh.
I submit that this is a ridiculous question to try to answer unless somebody decides on a more rigid definition of what will be considered “extremist”. There are examples in this thread of people killing in the name of their cause (abortion clinic bombers, the Unabomber). There are examples of people who are simply proclaim their opinion loudly and in a way that puts them in the public eye (Rush Limbaugh, Howard Dean). I hardly think these are comparable. Unless I missed an important news report, I don’t think either of the latter examples have engaged in murder or terrorism for “the cause”.
But in the spirit of the game currently being played here, I’ll submit that the moderate extremists could very well be the worst. After sitting on the fence so long with the barbed wire up their butts, who knows what these wackos could be capable of?
Of course, there are also many who tend to define “extremist” as “person who disagrees strongly with me”
Your assertion is still specious since you’re limiting your method of violence to bombings. You conveniently ignore all the shootings perpetrated by anti-abortion terrorists.
And a lone nut does not equal a political wing or movement.
Just to add on to my last post, Rudolph, unlike the Unabomber, was part of a real political movement. He became a sort of folk hero to right-wing, anti-government types. He had online fan clubs and great support on the internet. On the day he was arrested, people praised him in the streets. One restauraunt hung out a sign reading “Pray for Eric Rudolph.”
No one on the left has lionized Ted Kascynsky. There is no subculture of anti-technology terrorism. He had no accomplices or co-conspirators, he didn’t even have any friends. He was simply one mentally ill individual. Rudolph was part of a genuine political subculture. Kascynsky was not.
To my knowledge there have been zero deaths attributed to the spiking of trees. Please provide a cite, if I’m mistaken.
Joe McCarthy alleged that there were 86 Communists in the State Department. This is hardly “currently”, as you state.
Yes, just stupid. :rolleyes:
Rudolph was part of a real political movement - the anti-abortion movement. Kascynsky was part of a real political movement - the environmentalist movement.
And the clinic bomber’s actions were repudiated with near-unanimity by virtually the entire mainstream anti-abortion movement within hours of the news that a clinic had been bombed.
Rudolph has sympathizers on the fringes, no doubt about that. In the same way, the environmentalist movement has groups like ELF and Earth First! and so forth, that use sabotage, acts of vandalism, and even acts that you and I would agree are terrorism.
For instance, not a death from tree-spiking, but this is not for want of trying.
It seems the environmentalist extremists engage in a number of actions roughly equivalent morally to those taken by extremist anti-abortionists. ELF does trespass and tree-sitting; radical anti-abortionists do clinic protest. Earth First! and similar groups engage in sabotage of logging equipment; radical anti-abortionists put SuperGlue in clinic locks. PETA splashes blood on fur coat wearers; radical anti-abortionists scream “Murderer!”
When I was much younger, certain anti-Viet Nam extremists (Karl and and Dwight Armstrong, David Fine, and Leo Burt) bombed the Army Math Research Center at my alma mater, as a protest. They timed the bomb to go off at night, when they thought no one would be in the building. They were wrong, and they killed a young post-doc researcher who had nothing to do with the ARMC, and wounded several other people. Just like the clinic bomber, they were part of a larger political movement (the anti-Viet Nam movement). Just like Eric Rudolph, they received support from those who should have known better (the student government voted funds to defend David Fine when he was apprehended, although they did not care to spend a dime to support the family of the man they killed).
It was thirty years ago this month that they killed an innocent man - August 19, 1970, to be exact. Do you really think it would have made any difference if the bombers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison were far right instead of violent left?
Extremists are more alike than they are different, regardless of ideology.
Regards,
Shodan
hahah… its pretty funny what some people consider extreme left when they mentioned Eco Warriors and tree huggers. Obviously the US doesnt have a history of extreme left people.
Other poster got it right thou… extreme left would be guerrilla movements Pol Pot and FARC style and Communists. Right extremists would be KKK, some US groups, Nazi/Fascists. Overall I would say Right wingers… but not by much. In the west they have a greater acceptance which makes them more dangerous.
Still one might hijack a bit and ask:
How many people have liberals killed ? Do Extreme liberals exist ? Left, Right and Religious Extremists have always killed a lot. Never heard of Atheist extremists and Liberals killing much… or at all.
I think Theodore Kazinski (the Unabomber) counts.
I think Ted would disagree with your contention. In his writings he rails against the evils of liberalism.
Extreme left, extreme right, there’s not so much difference…
"Just another set of bigots with thier rifle sights on me’
The extreme left and the extreme right do not care about being on the left or the right. They care about being on the extreme. Ann Coulter for example if you looked at her lifestyle you would consider her pretty liberal and I am sure that if she had thought she could get more attention and money as a liberal than as a conservative she would have.
Stalin or Mao are “far worse” than Hitler? Communism was “much more devastating” than Nazism (and Japanese militarism)? Equally as bad, yes, and one could get into fairly silly numbers games with their various body counts (as if mass murder was baseball), but I don’t think anyone is “far worse” or “much more destructive” than the men responsible for the Holocaust, the “research” programs of Dr. Mengele, and the European theater of the Second World War; or nearly 15 years of naked aggression in China and the rest of East Asia, forcing women to become sex slaves, and biological warfare experiments on living human beings.
See my previous cite of Unca Cecil and his listing of the tens of millions of people killed by Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot.
Regards,
Shodan
Extreme is extreme. Both the extreme left and the extreme right would kill lots of people (and have in the past) if they could. The intent is what matters, not how successful they were about doing it. Hitler’s intentions were to kill all the jews, political dissidents, homosexuals, gypsies, and general people he didn’t like. Stalin’s intentions were to kill everyone he thought was plotting against him. They both wanted lots and lots of folks dead, so what does it matter the stated rationalizations of it? Whether it was for the good of the Aryan race or the good of the proletariat, they both made a lot of people suffer. Stalin just had more time to do it in.
What is everyone thinking?
Hitler was extreme “LEFT”, not right.
Hitler was a socialist, he led the National Socialist Party, and his beliefs were clearly socialist, leftist.
About the only difference between Hitler’s socialism and communism, is that he allowed the owners of privately held businesses, like Porche, to continue to own and profit from their businesses, although control of their businesses was turned over to the state and what the businesses produced were controlled by Hitler.
There was nothing “rightist” about Hitler. I havent seen you guys come up with a good example of an extreme “rightist” yet.
Hitler used both left and right. He wa a socialist, by the standards of his day at least, although not in any way a Marxist one. But Marx wasn’t the first or last socialist. The specifically antisemite views came more from conservative (again, in the contemporary german sense) origins. His desire to kill all the Poles seems to have been based ont he aristocratic class of Junkers.
Lets not forget that what was conservative in one sense isn’t today. Modern conservatives (or at least the more libertarian branches) are very much like the liberals 300 years ago. Except when their not. Surprise! Liberals have ideas that were based in social conventions of Romanticism (environmentalist movement), or even ancient (as in BC) philosophical ideals.
Nope; sorry. Hitler USED socialism as a tool, because it garnered more support for his power base. But what he WAS, was a fascist. And I’d say that tilts more right than left.
Hitler wasn’t a socialist or a lefty. That’s just Conservative porn.