A reminder: America is a centrist nation

Aug 14, 2020, 12:42 PM

Just a friendly reminder from the fence-sitters: America is actually a centrist nation, not a right-or-left-leaning one.

We have fought wars against enemies from the extremes of either side of the spectrum...both in the last century.

North Korea - and the 800,000 Chinese "volunteers" who came surging across the border when we started whumping on the North Koreans - were Communists. The Viet Cong insurgents and uniformed NVA regulars we fought in Vietnam were Communists. At one point the Soviet Union had 55,000 tanks parked on the German border, and we did a 40+ year "cold war" with the Communist Bloc. As an aside, Stalin and Pol Pot, the head of the Khmer Rouge, were history's gold-and-bronze medal-winning genocides; Stalin was probably responsible for 30 million deaths in various purges, while Pot Pot killed at least two million. (Watch The Killing Fields if you want to see what Pol Pot's regime looked like, if you have the stomach for it.)

The Axis, on the other hand, was a coalition of imperial far-right powers. The Japanese Empire, the Fascists of Italy, and the Nazis were far-right. (Yes, despite the revisionist lies of fork-tongued Alt-Right propagandists who are, IMHO, committing borderline treason by messing with truth so flagrantly, the Nazis were indeed right-wing, probably the furthest-right nation that's ever existed. The fact that they called themselves "National Socialists" was a deliberately misleading name - after his first failed coup, Hitler spent some time in jail and threw a few populist riffs into his party's charter for the express purpose of better marketing his party to the working class. That doesn't make Hitler left-leaning...as Stalin found out the hard way when Hitler turned on him after Poland. The Nazi leaders were Nietzschean manipulators who regarded the common man as "rabble" - Nietzsche himself coined that term - and believed that the will to power was the hallmark of the true Aryan of the Master Race...and that the Slavs, like the Jews, were subhuman trash who needed to be killed, not Comrades in some kind of great struggle. Not exactly leftist sentiment, you know?)

It was more than a century ago, but the German Empire of 1914 we fought in World War I was also an authoritarian right-wing regime led by the "Kaiser" - the German emperor. They weren't as bad as the Nazis who followed but they were not a democratic government either. And Saddam Hussein was another right-wing dictator as well; his Baathists were similar to Mussolini's Fascists.

Again, the takeaway is that throughout its history, America has not gotten along with far-left Communists, or with far-right Fascists. You can be a villain at either end...and the trick with America has historically always been balance...and the ability to hear all sides. And also historically, the partisans of either extreme are dangerous fools.

So...just asking. Are you a partisan? Are you capable of hearing the other side and recognizing the value in their viewpoint?

flag link

military_tech

thumb_down