> French Revolution,
How did that turn out?
> American Revolution
There is no definition of leftism that would include the American independence movement. The conception of leftism didn't even exist!. My head is about ready to explode.
> Mexican Revolution
See French revolution.
>And the all time greatest threat to the world has been a right wing populist revolution; the rise of Nazi Germany.
Pick up a book on the Weimar Republic some day, you might learn something!
> Right wing revolutions tend to curtail rights like the Iranian Revolution
'Tend to'
I have been repeatedly informed that the Iranian revolution was a liberation from the Western Imperialists & therefore left-wing (yes, seriously).
Strangely omitted are the Russian, Chinese, & Cuban revolutions. I wonder why?
Frankly, I'm shocked the mods let this topic survive on the front-page for this long. It's a honeypot for every kind of crank to show up and start arguing (myself included) In summary, you guys need to put down the IDEs & start reading actual history books (not wikipedia & and half-assed bastardized regurgitations of Chomsky)
Left is progressive, right is conservative. These terms can and are applied to historical events retroactively.
> Pick up a book on the Weimar Republic some day, you might learn something!
How is this a refute?
> Strangely omitted are the Russian, Chinese, & Cuban revolutions. I wonder why?
Neither Russia nor China are considered the West. But why don't you tell us. I can only guess your argument is that left wing revolutions are totally worse than Nazis.
The Nazis got elected, they didn't start a revolution. The Russian Revolution is missing.
Nazi's killed their political opposition, especially Communists.
The Nazis went wild with murdering everyone they didn't like after they got elected (not that they weren't into violence before, but Hitler's attempt at a revolution failed in '23, Hitler was convicted and went to prison). They got elected on a populist vote, but that's not a revolution. Revolution != getting elected by normal proceedings.
> ...got elected on a populist vote...
To my mind, a violent populist movement is a revolution.
It's not contentious term for me.
The American Revolution was absolutely leftist in the traditional sense right as "support of the monarchy" or conservative and left as "royal abolitionists" or progressive.
Of course, this maps a little awkwardly onto modern American politics. For example, the Americans of the 1800's were progressive in a lot ways, but they kept supporting the system of kidnapping Africans for slaves (and chattel slavery in general) for a lot longer because they benefited so greatly from it.
But that wasn't it at all. They didn't revolt "because kings are shit", they revolted because they believed the British parliament (where the anti-royalists had won against the royalists in the English civil war) didn't give them adequate representation. It was motivated by an unbalanced relationship between economic ability and political participation, not because of ideology.
Neo Nazis want to change things too. Does that make them progressive leftists?
Most people understand this to be the case, _unless_ the revolution is _reactionary_ which is traditionally conservative.
> reactionary denotes "a movement towards the reversal of an existing tendency or state" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary