Challenge: Were these guys conservative?

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Hi all. Today, I want to talk about one of the most common criticisms that I get from conservatives.

"You liberals aren't intellectuals! You know nothing about history! You just get your political beliefs from Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga."

Alright, smartypants. It's time for a challenge. I will demonstrate my vast knowledge of history by naming various historical figures. For each one, you tell me if he was a conservative.

King George The Third: King George was one of the greatest British patriots ever. He tried to defeat some traitorous punks like George Washington. He ultimately failed, but he was still a good king. Democracy is for liberals! Respect the Divine right of Kings you godless heretic!

Cato the Elder: He ended all of his speeches with "Carthage must be destroyed!" The Carthaginians were not Romans, so they were probably evil. Rome owned the Carthaginians with the help of brave patriots like Cato. SPQR! SPQR!

Genghis Khan: He conquered a great deal of land for Mongolia because he was a Mongolian patriot. Think he was a bad guy? Quit being a sore loser! He won those battles fair and square! Why of you hate Mongolia?

Alexander the Great: All of those people benefited after they were conquered by Alexander the Great! Why don't you liberals understand that? We need the military to protect ourselves. Those conquests were done in self-defence. Don't you remember what the Persians used to do to the Greeks? Why do you hate Macedonia?

Pachacuti: Yeah, he conquered many other ethnic groups. Who cares? They were barbarians anyway! Pachacuti had a good reason to do all that conquering. He believed he was a direct descendent of the sun god. You need to be more respectful of other people's religious beliefs! Why do you hate the Incan Empire?

Antonio López de Santa Anna: He was a brave Mexican patriot who was just trying to protect Mexico! Why do you hate Mexico?

Julius Caesar: What? You don't think that Caesar was an awesome guy? You must be one of those people who thinks that the Gauls are prefect noble savages! A lot of brave Roman soldiers DIED conquering the Gauls you little punk! Show some humility! What have they been teaching you in university? SPQR! SPQR!

Chief Sitting Bull: He was a brave patriot who fought back when foreigners were trying to take his land. I'm not even exaggerating. That's literally what he did. Why do you hate the Lakota Nation?

Muawiyah I He was a deeply religious man and a patriot of the Umayyad Caliphate. It takes real bravery to stand up against the Byzantines.

Moot exercise, people of all political persuasions make ignorant statements about history. My question for you DarthMetaKnight, is what positive outcome do you hope to achieve with this topic? If it's just to brow beat conservatives they're not going to submit to this, and you've just lost moderates as well because they just want the D vs R clusterf**k to stop and you're stoking it, and the left is already riled up by the current state of affairs both at home and abroad. So again, what positive achievement do you hope will come from this?

Liberals remind me of the kind, simple, naive Gomer Pyle.

"Well golly ... I thought government was here to help everyone"

Here's something you might enjoy.

http://thermidormag.com/some-ironies-an ... g-history/

Some pickings:

The final abolition of the modern Greek monarchy was accomplished not by Venizelists, communists or the usual candidates you'd suspect, but by the right-wing military junta. They were also the ones who initiated democratization to start with: the "Metapolitefsi."
...
Women in the Weimar Republic more right-wing than men.
Also, an influential spokesperson for the Weimar-era German Protestant nationalist party, the DNVP (the largest until its eclipse by the NSDAP), was a lesbian feminist.
...
The biggest interwar French Catholic nationalist party (the Croix de Feu, also its successor the Parti Social Francais) endorsed women's suffrage. In fact, women basically ended up running the party in its last years.
...
Georgia founded as an antislavery colony. "We shouldn't have imported the darkies in the first place" to this day remains a way of both belittling the Old South and being more-right-wing-than-thou at the same time. We'll be doing a review of some Old South proslavery thought soon, by the way. It's inferior to the Staendestaat theories of the Prussian Junkers, but it's still worth reading.

I made this thread to prove a point.

My Point
VVV


- What seems like the undeniable word of God to you, seems like a silly superstition to someone else. You have a personal relationship with the almighty? Every religion makes the same claim. Every single religion grounded in "personal experience".
- What seems like noble patriotism to you may seem silly to someone else. Most people will love a particular country because they were born there, and not for any rational reason.

So ... poor people who are dying from preventable illnesses shouldn't ask the government for help?

That doesn't sound like rational self-interest to me.

The cops and the military are run by the government too. Should we get rid of them?

Who will build the roads?

Why of course the dying shouldn't get government help - - if they're poor!
Why, the Lord in Heaven has given riches to the true faithful, and poverty and death to the unbelievers!
(Just to make clear, as this is a forum for autistics who might take me literally, I am being sarcastic.)

To be honest, I've never understood the right-wing obsession with "small government" and "self-reliance".

"We need to have the smallest possible government ... but not anarchy! Anarchy is bad!"

Additionally, what does "self-reliance" mean? Even "self-reliant" people will go to the store and purchase things. Thus, we rely on shopkeepers. We also rely on our employers. We also rely on the cops and the military for protection. I don't like some of the things that the cops and the military do, but I don't think that they should be eliminated entirely.

The people with the least self-reliance are fetuses ... so shouldn't right-wingers be pro-abortion? Why should we keep fetuses alive ... but let poor people starve?

In the olden days, many people had family farms and grew their own food. Was that self-reliance? It technically wasn't capitalism. Are hunter-gatherers self-reliant? They technically aren't capitalists either.

When you are on the internet, can you call the mods on people and still call yourself "self-reliant"? I'm pretty left-wing and I almost never ask the mods for assistance on any site.

Right-wing buzzwords like "self-reliance", "small government" and "free market" are just as meaningless as liberal buzzwords like "tolerance", "diversity", "love", ect. In that past, I have stated that the left should not rely so heavily on buzzwords, which is why my criticism of right-wing buzzwords isn't hypocritical.

In college, I had had a Labor History instructor who made it clear what he thought about the individualism and self reliance of conservative ideology: the individual is impotent.

Right-wing "individualism" often includes "the right" to subjugate other people and deprive other people of food.

Here's the difference between right-wing individualism and left-wing individualism: Left-wing individualism doesn't give you the right to deprive other people of liberty whereas right-wing individualism does. In other words, right-wing individualism is surprisingly Neitzschean.

Of course, most right-wingers claim to hate Nietzsche. Nietzsche was basically an honest right-winger. That's the philosophy of Nietzsche in a nutshell. Right-wing, but refreshingly honest.

Additionally, the right-wing concept of "private property" is a trainwreck when you think about it. If I find an unclaimed lake somewhere, can I declare that I own it? Can I legally shoot anyone who tries to drink the water? That's why the concept of "private property" shouldn't be an absolute. There's a big difference between owning your toothbrush, and owning something that other people need to live.

The right actually has a very superficial understanding of Nietzsche, which evolved into Ayn Rand's twisted ideals.

... and Ayn Rand had a huge fatal flaw. If her "ideal society" ever came into existence, lobbyists would destroy it.

To be honest, most lofty political dreams come with this fatal flaw.

Agreed. That, and any lack of moral center.

I actually think that morality is an overrated concept. Most people follow their own self-interest whether they admit it or not.

The real problem with our society is this: The poor cannot adequately follow their own rational self-interest because they lack the proper information. With the power of the internet, we can change this.