cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17805513
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While Americans have long clashed over our country’s cruel and bigoted past, Germans have undertaken one of the most thoroughgoing efforts of any nation on the planet to reckon with their history. Germany, perhaps more than any other country, has attempted to pull out by the roots its homegrown variant of the reactionary spirit — the tendency of opponents of social change to choose hierarchy over democracy, trying to constrain or even topple democracy to protect hierarchies of wealth and status.
The Nazis were born out of disgust with post-World War I Weimar democracy, led by men furious about both the new government’s weakness and acceptance of the Jewish minority into German society. After Nazism brought Germany to ruin, preventing a reactionary resurgence became one of the central goals of the country’s subsequent leaders.
So it’s all the more extraordinary that in the past few years, Germany’s far right has been on the rise.
In 2015, at the peak of the global refugee crisis, German chancellor Angela Merkel announced an open-door policy for those fleeing violence in Syria and elsewhere. In response, the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party, a Euroskeptic faction without a single seat in Parliament, morphed into a virulently xenophobic force calling for Germany to slam Merkel’s open door shut.
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But its rise illustrates something vitally important: That Germany, of all countries, could fail to prevent a surge in reactionary antidemocratic politics suggests there’s something eternal and enduring about the reactionary spirit. And there is something about our current time period that makes it especially likely to flourish — not just in Germany, but around the world.
And which class always pushes for lowered wages, more hours, and less benefits? The rich who do what they can t put right wing candidates in office.
Which side pushes anti-competitive policies and removes regulations on banking/finance that always lead to a bubble that negatively effects the economy and raises inflation? The right.
Which side then rabidly votes against measures to help people affected by the downturn and instead redistributes wealth from the people to business and billionaires thru bailouts? The right.
Which side does everything in its power to make sure healthcare isn’t affordable and it bankrupts or nearly bankrupts you? You guessed it, the right.
Seeing a pattern yet? Putting two and two together?
Which sides cries until they’re blue in the face that their free speech is curtailed when they say the most hateful, mean, bigoted, sexist things their simple minds can think of and then wails like a spoiled 3 year old that there should be censorship when they are called out on their bullshit? You’re correct when you say the right.
Oh, and I’d love to see your and the entire right’s numbers on what costs the taxpayers more. The constant money thrown at corporate special interests, bailouts and subsidies to shitheels like Musk who never deliver on what they get subsidies for in th first place, or some immigrants.
Go ahead, I’ll wait.
The left wing governments, which pretend to be oh so compassionate, all so they can import more cheap abusable labor.
Which side abuses brown people while pretending to help them?
Last time I checked it was places like conservative led Florida passing laws that remove mandatory water breaks for migrant workers who work uprotected in the sun all day.
You’re saying it’s the left wing that imports brown people to abuse, but it’s the right that abuses them and then on the other hand you’re complaining that the hospitals are full because the left is giving free healthcare to the migrant workers that are abused by the right.
You can’t have it both ways.
Yes, I can have it both ways. The right doesnt want them here, and makes their live as bad as possible when they come.
The left loves cheap abusable labor, so they lie and pass laws that arent enforced to seem better than they are. The left hates the working class, thats why they pull this shit.
No, no you can’t. Lol. You’re making up some conspiracy theory that sounds like some pizzagate and it’s silly. There is so much wrong in what you said that the mental gymnastics needed to believe it takes a very special type of person and a very special type of mind.
So the “Christian moral majority” goes out of their way to abuse migrants. Got it. The same god that says “love they neighbor as thyself” and inspired it to be written thousands of years ago in a book still somehow read everyday just tossed that out? And in its place written down absolutely nowhere that god instead used small insecure men with agendas for power and wealth as vessels for his real message to hate and abuse others for their skin color instead. Ok. Lol.
Lol! “Left-wing” governments?
What “left-wing” governments, Clyde?
Pretty much any of western europe. Canada too.
So you wouldn’t know what left means if it were to bite you in the arrsse.
If you are so utterly incompetent on the subject matter in question, why did you feel yourself entitled to discourse on the matter?
Its a spectrum and its relative. What is left wing to you?
Relative to what, Clyde?
I’ll tell you… because in this liberal hive mind called lemmy.world you’re not going to find plenty of people who knows.
It doesn’t get any simpler than this. What is left or right is dictated by the status quo. That which seeks to dismantle the status quo is left. That which seeks to protect the status quo is right. That’s why there is no such thing as a “left-wing” government because all governments have a vested interest in protecting the status quo.
So no… there is nothing “left” about Canadian or European political establishments - they are all invested in protecting the liberal status quo and that makes them all right-wing. They are no less right-wing than the US government is. Pretending to be “nicer” about violently maintaining the status quo does not make a state less right-wing.
Thats not left wing at all. Hell, Stalin wouldnt be left wing under that definition.
Stalin? The guy who murdered more leftists than the US has managed in all of it’s (so-called) “Cold War” terrorism campaigns put together? Is that the Stalin you’re talking about?
Your history teachers did a piss-poor job at explaining this stuff, so I’ll fix this for you - the Bolsheviks stopped being leftist the minute they tasted power and became the status quo in Russia. Stalin was more of a right-winger than Putin is today. Groups pretending to be leftist until they get their hands on the steering wheel is actually pretty common in modern history - even the Nazis dabbled in it when they added the “S” to their name.
It’s not very difficult to understand once you trash all the garbage sloganeering that gets substituted for actual critical political thinking in our so-called “education” systems.