Re: spectrum of ideologies

The point raised by Gert Kholer about the finding of Kurt Sontheimer is
interesting because it breaks away from the unidimensional perception that
many people have of politics, myself included. I have a notion of rank where
the end-points are left and right, then the names of the political parties
are arranged accordingly. Thus I might imagine, starting at the left, the
order of them being, Communism, Socialism, something in the middle,
something right of the middle and then the Capitalists. I know immediately
this isn't right but this is all I have to go on. Now what criteria do I use
to make this order? What criteria did Kurt Sontheimer apply? Instead of
looking along a straight line there is a map of some kind.

William Kirk.

----- Original Message -----
From: g kohler <gkohler@accglobal.net>
To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
Sent: 25 November 1999 16:16
Subject: spectrum of ideologies


> A political scientist who studied the ideological spectrum in the Germany
of
> the 1920s ("Weimar Republic"), Kurt Sontheimer, found something very
> interesting -- namely, the left-right spectrum of political ideologies is
> not a straight line but has the shape of a horseshoe or even a circle. He
> found that when you move from centrist positions to the left and then to
the
> far-left and when you move from a centrist position to the right and then
to
> the far-right you reach virtually the same point, just like moving along a
> horseshoe or along a circle either left or right will eventually get you
to
> approximately the same ideological location. In 1920's Germany the far
right
> were the national socialists (=Nazis), the far left were the national
> bolsheviks (similar to Pol Pot in Cambodia or one contemporary wsn
member).
> The ideological positions of the far right and the far left were both in
> favour of high degrees of violence and dictatorship. Another common
feature
> they had was that they were in favour of killing their own party
supporters
> if they were deemed "soft" in one way or another. (A little known
historical
> fact is that Hitler, long before he launched the war and the holocaust,
had
> about 1000 fellow Nazis murdered in the so-called "night of the long
knives"
> 1934. This is parallel to the Stalinist practice of killing fellow
leftists,
> like Trotsky and thousands of others.) I conclude from this that violence
is
> the mistake of 20th century socialism. Stalinists and some Leninists are
the
> Nazis of socialism and give socialism a bad name. A red-green world party
> must unequivocally reject that kind of bloody violence.
>
>
> Gert Kohler
> Oakville, Canada
>
>