The intentional obfuscation between left and right is brought to light by Noam Chomsky here:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Tq4VE8eHQ[/youtube]
As far as socialism is concerned that term has been so evacuated of content over the last century that it’s hard even to use. I mean the Soviet Union, for example, was called a socialist society and it was called that by the two major propaganda operations in the world: the US, the Western one, and the Soviet one; they both called it socialism for opposite reasons: the West called it socialism in order to defame socialism by associating it with this miserable tyranny and the Soviet Union called it socialism in order to gain whatever benefit from the moral appeal that true socialism had among large parts of the general world population, but this was about as remote from socialism as you can imagine. The core notion of at least traditional socialism is that working people have to be in control of production and communities have to be in control of their own lives and so on. The Soviet Union was the exact opposite of that: working people had no control over anything; they were virtual slaves and the collapse of the Soviet Union is, in fact, a small victory for socialism in my opinion; it eliminated one of the major barriers to it and should have been recognized as such, but the term has become so meaningless that it’s hard even to use.
Red Scare
A “Red Scare” is promotion of widespread fear by a society or state about a potential rise of communism, anarchism, or radical leftism. The term is most often used to refer to two periods in the history of the United States with this name. The First Red Scare, which occurred immediately after World War I, revolved around a perceived threat from the American labor movement, anarchist revolution and political radicalism. The Second Red Scare, which occurred immediately after World War II, was preoccupied with national or foreign communists infiltrating or subverting U.S. society or the federal government. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare
Political ideologies exist as a dichotomy and the fact that the lines are blurred is a direct result of coordinated efforts to blur them.
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago July 02, 1932
There are two ways of viewing the Government’s duty in matters affecting economic and social life. The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small business man. That theory belongs to the party of Toryism, and I had hoped that most of the Tories left this country in 1776. presidency.ucsb.edu/documen … -chicago-1
(And the Tories are still donning their Redcoats and utilizing their RedScare tactics straight from the Goebbels’ playbook of accusing the other side of what they’re doing and it’s really ironic that the most robotically patriotic americans have been totally taken in by that. They are supporting, dogmatically, bullheadedly, ignorantly, the philosophies of the very enemy that was driven out the day this country became Free which makes their own patriotism is the most treasonous crime imaginable.)
There are two ways: either control is consolidated or control is spread out to the people. The labels we put on these ways are arbitrary.
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Free-market laissez faire will result in consolidation of power lest the people make for themselves a government to stop it.
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Governments themselves can cause consolidations of power by dictatorian/authoritarian rule.
There are two ways to the same end.
Peter Joseph gets it:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifyEPRvj2YI[/youtube]