The Rise of the Far Right

Damocles said:
That sounds a bit thought policey the way that reads mate.
Click to expand...

It isn’t supposed to.

I would defend their right to march and protest and speak just as much as those doing the People’s March, who I actually support politically.

I just think it’s important to contest these views by discussing it to ensure we don’t return to certain societies of the 20th century.
 
Ban-jani said:
It isn’t supposed to.

I would defend their right to march and protest and speak just as much as those doing the People’s March, who I actually support politically.

I just think it’s important to contest these views by discussing it to ensure we don’t return to certain societies of the 20th century.
Click to expand...

I'm in the camp that I'd prefer we didn't go into the territory of the far right but ultimately, we become the country that people vote for and it's their choice if they want to do become fascist or communist or centrist or autocratic technocrats or whatever. As long as we have free elections and free speech then let the people decide.

The new idea that certain voices need to be drowned out is, to me, extremely concerning. I've said this before but I'll debate a fascist or a Communist all day long. My ideas are better than theirs, they're fairer and result in a more prosperous society. I'll do it in front of a billion people and be confident that I can change minds.

Maybe the "far right" as this thread deems them is on the rise because instead of actually talking to them about their politics and why they are ultimately self defeating in a rational way, people try to silence them which gives them an air of seduction? It's the banality of evil essentially. If you paint a group of opinions as ultimately something that needs to be banned of Twitter and thrown out of civilised society then you shrink the reference frame of acceptable views and create an underground culture. You make it exciting and revolutionary and important and everybody gets to play freedom fighter. If you stick them on the BBC and present them full fact then the people make up their minds and most people will determine that they're nonsense.

And if they don't, then it's the job of the rest of the political parties to determine what it is about these views that people are engaging with. And not stupid schoolchild type answers about "hate" or condescending shit about how everybody is some thick, immoral twat who just isn't as goddamn enlightened enough to vote "the right way". But that maybe the far right is on the rise because we're silencing voices that talk about legitimate issues in the conservative Islamic communities that people can see with their own eyes, we're calling everybody who has concerns on immigration (a purely political subject) a racist xenophobe, and we're starting to enshrine the idea of inoffensive as a key legal tenet. And that's without the social justice movement which is essentially fascistic, anti-science and racist logic locked behind a veneer of academic presentation in the same manner that eugenics once was, and how that all of a sudden has become a big thing in society.

Maybe if people start looking at WHY the public is engaging with the far right in an intellectually honest, good faith manner then they'll see that they're doing so because their ideals are getting recast as offensive and bigoted when they're anything but?

It's the "oppressive nature of love" that we have moved towards. Not only must we all tolerate each other now but we must also love and/or approve of each other and anything else is a sign of hatred, and hatred has become the buzzword for being immoral and evil. I hate loads of things without being evil. I hate Manchester United but I'm not a racist because of it. I don't hate them because they're from Salford or because they have black players or because they're supported by a bunch of Irish people or because of anything else. I hate them because they're Manchester United and have acted in Manchester Unitedey ways.

People keep quoting an absolutely bollocks idea by Karl Popper called the paradox of tolerance, the idea being that if you tolerate bad things then ultimately bad things will punish that tolerance and take over society. But that's bullshit. Firstly, that's the argument of pretty much every fascistic anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-woman and racist dictator in history and is still used to this day to enshrine homophobic legislation across the continent of Africa. "We can't tolerate gays because everybody will end up being gay" is as nonsense as the ideal that "we can't tolerate the far right voices because everybody will turn into the far right". It's yet again another highly patronising idea from the left and as a political viewpoint seems to be inferred in the idea that people are too stupid to be righteous or moral and they need their help to do so. Suppression of "intolerance" means nothing without a clear and understood definition of "intolerance".

There's tons of shit in society that I don't approve of. Absolutely loads. I think transitioning children before or during puberty is a form of child abuse and paedophiliac logic that children are sexually mature creatures intellectually. I think that motorway speed limits are stupid and outdated ideas that don't provide safety. And that the Government's attempt at internet lockdowns are ultimately fruitless and a measure of control for people who don't know how to be out of control. I think that the drug policy in this country is inconsistent. Specifically that the sale of alcohol yet restriction of other drugs is madness.

However I tolerate all of these things that I don't approve of, even if I find them intolerant to my sensibilities (and remembering that literally any issue on the planet can be reframed as intolerant to somebody or something if you're clever enough), because I don't need to approve of things for them to exist. Controlling your own existence to the level of legislating for it is insanity. Why can't alcoholics claim that the sale of alcohol is intolerant to their health condition and needs to be banned? Alcohol kills more people than the Second World War did over the same timescales. And I can't tolerate the intolerants who won't be tolerant towards my alcohol issue because if I do then the whole world will become alcoholics and we'll have an epidemic of it right? Bollocks.

Everybody deserves their voice. Even Robinson and Choudary and the Communist Party. I'm not scared of them or their views enough that I need to cowardly try to reinterpret the legal system to stop them and that's how I see the people who are. Either authoritarians too scared to admit they're authoritarians and think that because they don't like someone then they should be removed from society, or cowards who believe that they have the right to not find any part of life disapproving. There's no social good from argument suppression. It's book burning by another name.
 
arbabarshad said:
The vocal contributors on the politics Forum are certainly full of right wing views. In some cases, it's the same people who defend Brexit, trump, tommy robinson, conservatives, UKIP, EDL etc regardless of the facts.

Only way to explain it would be that people with liberal views are more likely to avoid conflict, hence not many vocal contributors. So the forum may not be right wing after all despite it feeling like it.
Click to expand...
You’re making the mistake of assuming that because someone doesn’t outright condemn or finds fault in their accusers, they must be defenders or supporters.
Sometimes, absolute wankers are capable of doing or saying something that has a positive effect. It’s being able to see past hatred and acknowledging this.
 
Damocles said:
I'm in the camp that I'd prefer we didn't go into the territory of the far right but ultimately, we become the country that people vote for and it's their choice if they want to do become fascist or communist or centrist or autocratic technocrats or whatever. As long as we have free elections and free speech then let the people decide.

The new idea that certain voices need to be drowned out is, to me, extremely concerning. I've said this before but I'll debate a fascist or a Communist all day long. My ideas are better than theirs, they're fairer and result in a more prosperous society. I'll do it in front of a billion people and be confident that I can change minds.

Maybe the "far right" as this thread deems them is on the rise because instead of actually talking to them about their politics and why they are ultimately self defeating in a rational way, people try to silence them which gives them an air of seduction? It's the banality of evil essentially. If you paint a group of opinions as ultimately something that needs to be banned of Twitter and thrown out of civilised society then you shrink the reference frame of acceptable views and create an underground culture. You make it exciting and revolutionary and important and everybody gets to play freedom fighter. If you stick them on the BBC and present them full fact then the people make up their minds and most people will determine that they're nonsense.

And if they don't, then it's the job of the rest of the political parties to determine what it is about these views that people are engaging with. And not stupid schoolchild type answers about "hate" or condescending shit about how everybody is some thick, immoral twat who just isn't as goddamn enlightened enough to vote "the right way". But that maybe the far right is on the rise because we're silencing voices that talk about legitimate issues in the conservative Islamic communities that people can see with their own eyes, we're calling everybody who has concerns on immigration (a purely political subject) a racist xenophobe, and we're starting to enshrine the idea of inoffensive as a key legal tenet. And that's without the social justice movement which is essentially fascistic, anti-science and racist logic locked behind a veneer of academic presentation in the same manner that eugenics once was, and how that all of a sudden has become a big thing in society.

Maybe if people start looking at WHY the public is engaging with the far right in an intellectually honest, good faith manner then they'll see that they're doing so because their ideals are getting recast as offensive and bigoted when they're anything but?

It's the "oppressive nature of love" that we have moved towards. Not only must we all tolerate each other now but we must also love and/or approve of each other and anything else is a sign of hatred, and hatred has become the buzzword for being immoral and evil. I hate loads of things without being evil. I hate Manchester United but I'm not a racist because of it. I don't hate them because they're from Salford or because they have black players or because they're supported by a bunch of Irish people or because of anything else. I hate them because they're Manchester United and have acted in Manchester Unitedey ways.

People keep quoting an absolutely bollocks idea by Karl Popper called the paradox of tolerance, the idea being that if you tolerate bad things then ultimately bad things will punish that tolerance and take over society. But that's bullshit. Firstly, that's the argument of pretty much every fascistic anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-woman and racist dictator in history and is still used to this day to enshrine homophobic legislation across the continent of Africa. "We can't tolerate gays because everybody will end up being gay" is as nonsense as the ideal that "we can't tolerate the far right voices because everybody will turn into the far right". It's yet again another highly patronising idea from the left and as a political viewpoint seems to be inferred in the idea that people are too stupid to be righteous or moral and they need their help to do so. Suppression of "intolerance" means nothing without a clear and understood definition of "intolerance".

There's tons of shit in society that I don't approve of. Absolutely loads. I think transitioning children before or during puberty is a form of child abuse and paedophiliac logic that children are sexually mature creatures intellectually. I think that motorway speed limits are stupid and outdated ideas that don't provide safety. And that the Government's attempt at internet lockdowns are ultimately fruitless and a measure of control for people who don't know how to be out of control. I think that the drug policy in this country is inconsistent. Specifically that the sale of alcohol yet restriction of other drugs is madness.

However I tolerate all of these things that I don't approve of, even if I find them intolerant to my sensibilities (and remembering that literally any issue on the planet can be reframed as intolerant to somebody or something if you're clever enough), because I don't need to approve of things for them to exist. Controlling your own existence to the level of legislating for it is insanity. Why can't alcoholics claim that the sale of alcohol is intolerant to their health condition and needs to be banned? Alcohol kills more people than the Second World War did over the same timescales. And I can't tolerate the intolerants who won't be tolerant towards my alcohol issue because if I do then the whole world will become alcoholics and we'll have an epidemic of it right? Bollocks.

Everybody deserves their voice. Even Robinson and Choudary and the Communist Party. I'm not scared of them or their views enough that I need to cowardly try to reinterpret the legal system to stop them and that's how I see the people who are. Either authoritarians too scared to admit they're authoritarians and think that because they don't like someone then they should be removed from society, or cowards who believe that they have the right to not find any part of life disapproving. There's no social good from argument suppression. It's book burning by another name.
Click to expand...

I’m in a very similar camp to you.

I think the last sentence of it being book burning by another name is absolutely correct.

If you don’t let those who you disagree with most have free speech, then you don’t deserve it yourself... and it’ll ultimately be taken away from you anyway.

I certainly believe that these things change over time and that we went through a period in Western society, where racist, homophobic and sexist views cooled, this probably the time of the 1990’s until 2010. We’ve now found ourselves not just calling out racism or sexism as being wrong but we now actively seek it out and it’s often where it actually isn’t present, it’s seeked.

Of course these issues are still present in society but the left are absolutely determined to find themselves in some sort of civil rights movement that need not happen today.

I like my fascists where I can see them, let them have their say but also give those on the far left a say too, in equal measure.

If you shove them underground that will only give them some sort of mystique and may well help them.
 
2sheikhs said:
You’re making the mistake of assuming that because someone doesn’t outright condemn or finds fault in their accusers, they must be defenders or supporters.
Sometimes, absolute wankers are capable of doing or saying something that has a positive effect. It’s being able to see past hatred and acknowledging this.
Click to expand...

Whose hatred should we be seeing past? Robinson’s?
 
FogBlueInSanFran said:
I hate Trump because he's Trump and acts in Trumpy ways.

I think at last we understand one another, Frodo Baggins.
Click to expand...

When Jose Mourinho says "that was never a penalty", I don't automatically assume it wasn't a penalty without viewing the incident properly.

Sorry Gandalf.
 
The perfect fumble said:
Apologists for the far left usually cite the enormous hostility far left governments face once in power to explain their trajectory in to authoritarianism. Western democracies are far more forgiving of extreme right wing governments, because for the most part they leave the people who own everything alone, or they are the people who own everything, or they rather obligingly co-opt them.

This country has never really had a powerful extreme right wing political party, our establishment dog whistles and subtly shifts if it feels things are drifting in that direction.

With that said political discourse in this country has definitely shifted rightwards, with "politicians" who only a few years ago would have been shunned or dismissed as cranks given column inches and air time. So now viewpoints that only golf club bores and retired army colonels indulged in are mainstream, shock jock right wing radio is still peripheral here, though Talk Radio flirts with it and of course we have celebrity fascist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon for the great unwashed.

I'm not sure how things will pan out, public discourse is now crueller and coarser than it used to be and will become more so if things start to really turn to shit, whether that means we'll see the rise of an extreme right wing party remains to be seen. What cannot be denied is that extreme right wingers now feel empowered to air their opinions as mainstream in ways unthinkable only a few years ago.
Click to expand...

Oddly enough, it is the extreme left which I see as getting more and more air time. The problem there is that They somehow believe that their extreme position is actually the political and moral high ground which is only being stopped from being climbed by those horrible Nazis on the right. They do this whilsy proudly standing behand a hammer and Sickle which has probably murdered and beaten more humans than any regime in history.

Moral high ground my arse.
 
Armchair Supporter said:
Oddly enough, it is the extreme left which I see as getting more and more air time. The problem there is that They somehow believe that their extreme position is actually the political and moral high ground which is only being stopped from being climbed by those horrible Nazis on the right. They do this whilsy proudly standing behand a hammer and Sickle which has probably murdered and beaten more humans than any regime in history.

Moral high ground my arse.
Click to expand...

You’ve obviously never watched Question Time.

On a more serious note what constitutes the extreme left? Other than the Hammer and Sickle bit, although as the Soviet Union collapsed nigh on 30 years ago I doubt if that means much to anyone under 40.
 
Armchair Supporter said:
Oddly enough, it is the extreme left which I see as getting more and more air time. The problem there is that They somehow believe that their extreme position is actually the political and moral high ground which is only being stopped from being climbed by those horrible Nazis on the right. They do this whilsy proudly standing behand a hammer and Sickle which has probably murdered and beaten more humans than any regime in history.

Moral high ground my arse.
Click to expand...

Extremism from either left or right inevitably meet up at a logical point: totalitarianism, which is the determination of the destiny of the all by the very few.

Politics isn't a spectrum graphed along a line. It's a circle. The center isn't the middle of a line, it's the top of a circle.

Which is why the farther the extreme left and extreme right are apart rhetorically, the closer they actually are in the implementation of their views.
 
Armchair Supporter said:
Oddly enough, it is the extreme left which I see as getting more and more air time. The problem there is that They somehow believe that their extreme position is actually the political and moral high ground which is only being stopped from being climbed by those horrible Nazis on the right. They do this whilsy proudly standing behand a hammer and Sickle which has probably murdered and beaten more humans than any regime in history.

Moral high ground my arse.
Click to expand...

So you see more and more air time given to Communists, framed by a hammer and sickle, urging the toiling masses to throw off the chains of their oppressor!

You need to go easy on the Stolly pal.
 
FogBlueInSanFran said:
Extremism from either left or right inevitably meet up at a logical point: totalitarianism, which is the determination of the destiny of the all by the very few.

Politics isn't a spectrum graphed along a line. It's a circle. The center isn't the middle of a line, it's the top of a circle.

Which is why the farther the extreme left and extreme right are apart rhetorically, the closer they actually are in the implementation of their views.
Click to expand...

The amount of people who outright deny horseshoe theory now makes me depressed.

Because it's never THEIR SIDE that could do such a thing. It's always the bastards opposite.
 
Armchair Supporter said:
Oddly enough, it is the extreme left which I see as getting more and more air time. The problem there is that They somehow believe that their extreme position is actually the political and moral high ground which is only being stopped from being climbed by those horrible Nazis on the right. They do this whilsy proudly standing behand a hammer and Sickle which has probably murdered and beaten more humans than any regime in history.

Moral high ground my arse.
Click to expand...

It's just a theory, but . . . as late 20th/early 21st century Western allies, I'd suggest modern day Brits and Yanks often recoil most at the totalitarian horrors of fascism (the extreme right) because those who espoused it were our most visceral enemies, and the fruits of their terror (WW2, the Holocaust) we know about in detail, and the older among us know or knew those who had direct experience with it. As such, the aggressive negative reaction to right-leaning extremists is greater among many than to left-leaning extremists.

Fewer of us have had direct connectivity to the totalitarian horrors of Communism (or whatever ism you want to call it) because the fruits of that terror were kept more hidden and closed off away from us, and to this day still are. The most recent "war" with the Soviet Union was a Cold War. The "smaller" more visceral hot wars with Communism-spouting totalitarian despots (for Americans, Korea and Vietnam) were not wars in which the Western allies fared well, and consequently not as interesting as propaganda fodder for the masses. Are you more likely to read a news story about (or watch footage of) a City win or a City loss?

We as Yanks are more familiar with the horrors of Saddam Hussein though because we "beat" him, though I doubt many could pin down where he fit on a traditional political spectrum.
 
Last edited:
BobKowalski said:
You’ve obviously never watched Question Time.

On a more serious note what constitutes the extreme left? Other than the Hammer and Sickle bit, although as the Soviet Union collapsed nigh on 30 years ago I doubt if that means much to anyone under 40.
Click to expand...
Well I’ve already asked you who you considered as extreme left in British politics today and you said “Chairman Mao” and “Che”.
 
BobKowalski said:
Whose hatred should we be seeing past? Robinson’s?
Click to expand...
Whoever does a good deed or says the right thing.
This is what’s wrong with British politics, Labour will oppose virtually everything the tories come up with and vice versa. It gets us nowhere.
 
FogBlueInSanFran said:
Extremism from either left or right inevitably meet up at a logical point: totalitarianism, which is the determination of the destiny of the all by the very few.

Politics isn't a spectrum graphed along a line. It's a circle. The center isn't the middle of a line, it's the top of a circle.

Which is why the farther the extreme left and extreme right are apart rhetorically, the closer they actually are in the implementation of their views.
Click to expand...

I quite like that idea (never heard it like that before).

I see good politics as a scale which balances out with real weight on both sides. Having no weights (policies) on any side is as bad as having an imbalance.
Or in other words, it is better to be both than neither.
Which is balance and life is about achieving balance isn't it?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Unread Posts

Don't have an account? Register now and see fewer ads!

SIGN UP
Back
Top