lenharper said:
I would quibble with your characteriaation of the Aryan Nations as a leftist organization. It seems your a being a little disingenuous here.
A little, but only insofar as no extant American political ideology is uniformly "right" or "left" wing. I rest my case for classifiying the Aryans as a leftist movement, for practical purposes, on the basis of its following, defining features:
-It is internationalist as opposed to nationalist: it posits supra-national bases of solidarity and loyalty (race, and, in this case, even common cause against opponents), to the point of open treason
-It is fanatically hostile to the State, once again to the point of open treason; it dreams of abolishing the State in favour of restoring the mythical absolute sovereignty of the individual supposed, a la Rousseau, to have existed in some lost golden age (see the crackpot pseudo-legal and pseudo-common law theories of the "sovereign citizen" that this sort of movement always subscribes to)
-Hand in hand with this radical individualism goes an equally radical collectivism, which seekd to defend the purity and integrity of the social (in this case, the "race") against threats associated with excessive individual freedom and untrammelled desire: race-mixing, homosexuality, drug use, and the pursuit of wealth. As a corrollary of the last point, it is:
-Fanatically hostile to capitalism, which it radically opposes to the well-being of the social as a despotic and corruptive force Where most leftists identify
economic corporations as the ultimate embodiment of the capitalist bogeyman, AN and other similar groups target
finance above all, reflecting the rural origin of their movement (independent farmers, on the basis of centuries of historical memory, tend to see debt as inseparable from servitude).
Generally, it's been pointed out on this forum that you can't spell "National Socialism" without "Socialism"; AN, realizing the tension between the national and the social that was only implicit (but clearly present) in the thought of Hitler, proceeds to remove "National" from the equation altogether; only a few, patriarchal-type elements (veneration of God's authority, support for the subordination of women, rejection of equality in general, etc.) remain to differentiate AN from any number of far-left ideologies from which it is otherwise indistinguishable. I stand by my characterization.