Comment by bananaface | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bananaface | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think there's crossover but I don't think those two groups are motivated by the same thing.

My observation is that far-right activists tend to feel that they're being deliberately stabbed in the back by the powers that be, rather than seeing themselves as collateral damage. They're also significantly more likely to be paranoid, and they perceive their targets as you would an invading army.

Far-left activism isn't like that. They don't perceive The Man as sadistic, they perceive him as disinterested. "Nobody cares about global warming" vs. "they're deliberately raising the temperature of the earth to hurt me." I also get the vibe far-left activists often engage in activism for fun. It's an exciting mission to break into the farm with your friends. They almost always do it in groups, whereas you're more likely to see jilted right-wingers plan solo attacks like this guy.

(I'm not trying to paint the far-left as better here. I think they're often quite dishonest about their motivations, whereas the far-right is extremely up-front, pied piper gurus aside. I think that's one of the reasons paranoid schizophrenics gravitate more toward the far right, although it helps that their narratives are more about conspiratorial persecution.)

The demographic distributions are also different. Almost all far-right activists are male, whereas vegan & climate activists are mixed.

> They don't perceive The Man as sadistic, they perceive him as disinterested.

This doesn't fit with the whole oppression thing where essentially everything is done to hurt $class, $minority, or $cause.

The social thing seems accurate. There are far right networks, but their violent extremists appear to be mostly loners, which seems to be extremely rare on the far left. The gender distribution is a good point as well. Would the far right act the same if half their members were women?

The left-wing narrative is usually "[group A] is hurt by [issue and thus group B]", whereas the far-right is, "[group C] will hurt you, if you let them." I think it's a deliberate difference. The far right would never say Jews were accidentally conspiring against Americans, it wouldn't help them. But it helps the far left to say their issues are inadvertent, that [villain] can't help his bias, or that he doesn't have to do it deliberately.

Left-wing narratives are often decoupled from intention (e.g. systemic and unconscious bias) because it makes them easier to propogate, whereas right-wing narratives are the opposite - intention is ascribed whether or not it's there, also because it helps the narrative propagate. They're selling to different human tendencies, I think.

Watch the far-right protest. Their eyes usually convey fear or animalistic aggression, even when they're dominant. Far-left groups carry very different emotions, even violent ones like Antifa.

I'm not sure, class warfare isn't a thing that's accidentally happening according to those that subscribe to the theory, it's intentional. Not as a genocidal "let's annihilate the lower class" war, but to perpetually oppress, enslave and exploit them.

The Great Purge didn't consider its targets as accidentally doing harm, they were portrayed as a "fifth column" that sought to destroy the Soviet Union. That external enemy is what creates group cohesion and strengthens the resolve of members. "They're just people like you and me, but the circumstances make their behavior harmful to those people over there" isn't what you mobilize with, so we get White Supremacy behind everything or Patriarchy conspiracies that read like The Protocols.

I get what you're saying but Marxists don't bomb the homes of billionaires, or shoot them. There's no actual warfare, genuine violence is directed at the right, not the rich. They do make a show of constructing a set of gallows in front of Jeff Bezos' house but they don't actually do anything to him, and that's a big difference. I think it's because they don't have the fight-or-flight terror that drives far right-wingers to push the gas pedal of their car into crowds of protestors. They might, in a different system. But I think then the ideology would be different.

In the 70s there were genuine left-wing terrorists like the Weathermen, which might be a good comparison, but the vibe I get is that they liked violence first, and fell into a movement that gave them a justification to perform it. They didn't seem scared to me. The far left rarely seems genuinely scared, but the far right seems very scared.

The difference to me is that nowadays, left-wing threat narratives tend to exist to justify behaviour they already want to engage in, whereas right-wing threat narratives exist much more to be scary. Toward the center things are similar but the differences are quite stark at the fringes.

I don't mean this as a technical argument or anything. I could be wrong, I'm just trying to describe my instinct.

> The Great Purge

Was a genocide by people who attained power, not the fringes of society acting out for weird psychological reasons. I wouldn't really compare the motivations. Dictators are dictators, right or left, and the support they get is much more transactional. I'm also skeptical that Lenin was genuinely motivated by Marxism. I think Marxism was an excuse he could use to gain power.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com