“Order of magnitude?” I question that.
The numbers killed by tyrants are sometimes fairly firm, but in other cases can only be estimated within a wide range.
I’d be more comfortable just saying that left or right, there is potential for mass death regimes.
Just to amplify …
When considering Reagan, Bush (41/43), Clinton, Obama, Trump, and Biden, who honestly has more in common with the modern-day fascists?
I think a healthy dose of exponential weighting is called for, here.
Yeah, but when post after post after post is about a global holocaust caused by the evil white supremacist fascists that only care about cruelty and suffering are going to nuke the whole planet in thread after thread some historical context needs to be provided by somebody.
I’m not sure if our sample size is quite big enough. You had three stunningly evil leaders in the 20th century, one on the right, Hitler, and two on the left, Stalin and Pol Pot. I’d put Mao in the middle; I don’t think he actually set out to kill millions of people, but he was evil and/or incompetent enough not to stop it. Japan is an outlier in that, while on the right and quite evil, there is no single leader that really led the evil; it was collective in nature.
Stalin and Mao also have to be given credit for doing an incredible job of industrializing feudal-level countries and fighting off almost maximally evil attackers. It’s not an acceptable excuse, but they at least probably believed it themselves.
In the 21st century, Putin is on the right, and that dude is pretty damn evil.
The right tends to attack the Other. The Left tends to eat itself via purity tests, etc. Even in the US, one can see the latter at work through cancel culture, etc.
It’s indeed false, but it’s unclear whether the Left can ever be as evil as it was in the 20th century, when the context was much different. In contrast, the right is clearly the more evil and destructive force in the 21st century: basically fucking things up out of sheer lust for power and domination, without even a coherent ideology as an excuse.
And is no longer left wing in any meaningful sense. And your statement even if it was true ignores that Communism lasted much, much longer and had far more time to kill. And most important of all, killing and oppression isn’t the point of the Left; just a side effect of stupid utopianism and power lust by dictators.
Killing and oppression is the point of the Right. As far as the Right is concerned only three states of existence is permissible for people: being them, being slaves, and corpses. If aliens existed they’d want to kill the aliens too.
:: bump ::
Have any of you changed your opinions since I posted this? Please show your work.
Myself, I filed a Canadian family sponsorship application for my husband Tom_Scud and am relieved that it’s now at the point where if we decided to get the heck out of Dodge, he’d be eligible to apply for employment authorization. We haven’t decided to pull the trigger on that yet, but I’m definitely not ruling it out and really wish processing times hadn’t gone from 9 months when I first checked, to 15 months when I checked again a couple of days ago.
Like “Trans activists”. Who could be basically anyone to the left of the GOP. Even if they don’t actually do anything about trans issues, and only reference it occasionally. Their base will eat it up since there are plenty of people who thought that the Democratic party was obsessed with trans issues when they barely discussed it and only wanted the status quo.
No, I have not changed my opinion on whether the US is about to have civil war. Because, while I do not think that the opposition is doing nothing like a lot of people claim, words and nonviolent actions are not war.
On the other hand, I think we’ve severely dropped down in the “Freedom index” even just in the past 2 weeks. There just isn’t any militant resistance to it.
I guess the state compacts for mutual health care guidelines may provide a template for future separatist agreements, but that’s a strained enough hypothetical that I don’t think it portends civil war as of yet.
Rereading the thread is interesting six months later. So far, I’d say “civil unrest” is on point, but I don’t see any signs of civil war or revolution. It mainly seems to be a cowed nation grumbling a bit as they learn to accept their new fascist reality, because what can you do?
(Edit: posters here and many other Americans excepted, of course. I was speaking for the aggregate.)
My opinion is unchanged. For there to be a civil war there needs to be at least two sides willing and able to fight, and so far all I see is the fascists relentlessly punching down on everyone else with barely a protest, much less resistance.
FWIW I’ve just read a bit about the unrest during the depression and financial crisis of the 1870s. “Street battles in Baltimore and Chicago, a massacre in Pittsburgh, martial law in Scranton*.” But hardly civil war (not surprising if no-one wanted one so soon after the actual civil war).
*from a discussion of the background to 1984 in Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth.
The future of the US will likely look like the Years of Lead.