Intriguingly, the researchers found some common traits between left-wing and right-wing authoritarians, including a “preference for social uniformity, prejudice towards different others, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior, cognitive rigidity, aggression and punitiveness towards perceived enemies, outsized concern for hierarchy, and moral absolutism.”
It seems like any self-described “leftist” (or described as such by psychologists) who have those traits is by definition a right-winger.
They want the same things the left wants but forcibly for everyone. Like, I know vegans who are very vehement about others eating meat. Or folks forcing LGBTQ+ folks to be open or more so, whether they want to or not. Oooh, another example - Gwenyth Paltrow.
And letting others die because of their political beliefs, which is prevalent on both sides of the aisle.
I was alive when that went on, but was a toddler/child, so I was blissfully unaware. Like the White Panthers, John Sinclair’s “party”. (I promise, I won’t start ranting about him, lol.)
I would argue that such people on the left are only a very small and marginal fringe… the death cult of the far right has taken control over the GOP. It’s really not the same at all. Most Democrats do not want republicans to die, which is why they are pushing for them to get vaccinated.
The two parties are not the same at all right now.
Sure. But right there they are pretty a large part of the mainstream GOP. I don’t really think the fringe of the left has ever even remotely managed to get anywhere near being in any sort of power. The people who have are folks like Sanders and AOC who very much want to help everyone, not kill the other side…
I agree, but I’ve seen it in left-wing orgs coming from putative centrists and people who were especially privileged. It may be that privilege is the common factor in driving authoritarian groups, explaining why it skews right but isn’t unheard-of on the left.
Addendum: To me, the war is between the haves and the have-nots, with money and equality being the major things that HNs don’t have. Everything else is just created to divert people’s attention from that, IMNSHO.
I vaguely recall the use of “no go area” to stoke xenophobic fears among daily mail readers-- “here’s a piece of merrie old england that has been turned over to the new caliphate!”
But, there is a rival definition that puts this sort of agitprop in perspective.
The notion of ‘national liberated zones’ (no-go-areas) has appeared in the dis- course of right-wing extremist groups in Germany since the 1990s [Wagner 1998]. These zones were first mentioned in Germany in articles published in magazines, like Einheit und Kampf (no. 2, September 1990) and Vorderste Front (1991); [Jaschke and Rätsch 2001: 119], and in the magazines of the National-Democratic Univer- sity Union ( Nationaldemokratischer Hochschulbund ) and the Young National Demo- crats ( Junge Nationaldemokraten ), a student organisation of the NPD. According to a main article in Einheit und Kampf , titled ‘Make National Liberated Zones’ ( Schafft national befreite Zonen ), it is the objective of right-wing extremists to take control of different parts of towns, such as discos, bars, public squares, and other (for them) important public places. Attempts to take control of these places have so far always been accompanied by violence against those parts of the public that extremists view as a problem. Reading these and other extremist texts about no- go-zones (they will be mentioned below) evokes an association with the period of National Socialism, when Nazis battled to establish ‘Jew-free’ zones (‘ judenfreie ’ or ‘ judenreine Gaue ’). There is no doubt that creating such a situation is the objective of the ‘zone’ initiators today.
Memorial worked to recover the memory of the millions of innocent people executed, imprisoned or persecuted in the Soviet era.
Formally it has been “liquidated” for failing to mark a number of social media posts with its official status as a “foreign agent”. That designation was given in 2016 for receiving funding from abroad.
But in court the prosecutor labelled Memorial a “public threat”, accusing the group of being in the pay of the West to focus attention on Soviet crimes instead of highlighting a “glorious past”.
