edit: at the same time, in the same conflict.
I remember reading a few years ago about a conflict in (I want to say) 1980’s Latin America where this occurred; however I can’t find anything about this with current online search tools. Did I hallucinate this or did this actually, and if so what groups?
The world isn’t only about leftists and rightists.
Even your country wasn’t, most of the time. There are so many more ideas and interests and strategies and beliefs…
Left and right aren’t political/economic ideologies; they’re broad categories and any economic system will necessarily have to lean towards one or the other.
Demagogues like to reduce complex problems to a binary choice, so they can label one as righteous and the other as witchcraft . If they find something complex, they create an arbitrary (and often flexible) dividing line. That’s their method of creating fear, hate and fervent support for their case to have power.
Will any economic system necessarily succumb to demagoguery? maybe, it is a depressing thought. But I do think they’re more like cyclical memes. They’re not very stable societies - fear is a great short term motivator, but not so in the longer term - so they probably don’t last too long, but may rear their ugly heads after enough people forgot how bad they were. And short term might be 10-20 years in this context.
There are always socialist and individualist elements with any society or economy, such as between partners, families, neighborhoods, within small businesses, between vendors and buyers, or small teams within larger businesses. I think most large armies are ran similar to socialist dictatorships at the top level - at least the ones based on soldier’s labour, but there will be individualistic parts within, like ‘you look after your own sidearm’. Just like there are always private and individualistic elements within each of those groups, the types of relationships between people and businesses are never as simple as black and white, trust matters, legal system matters, past experience matters, ability to demonstrate ‘skin in the game’ matters, expectations about the future matters (reciprocity), observability/transparency matters, the possibility of free ridership, the benefits of free ridership, the emergence of standards and so on. All of these things influence some economic and social interactions to appear more ’ social’ in some cases, and more ‘individual’ in others.
Certainly two party democracies are basically set up for the top level to disintegrate into demagogic shit slinging about ‘our side’ vs ‘their side’, but real people and businesses will always have a diversity of types of behaviour and relationships - and I really don’t believe you can genuinely classify any economy (a collaboration of people) as ‘left’ or ‘right’ or ‘socialist’ or ‘individualist’.
Their “leaders” might well call them that though.
Left and right aren’t […]
They are also occupying many people’s minds.
any economic system will necessarily have to lean towards one or the other.
That’s just some categorization (it isn’t even the same around the world). It doesn’t keep that economic system busy.
The snail and the spider both don’t care too much about the effort a scientist puts into counting their legs.
They do care when the scientist is picking which one should survive based on the number of their legs, which is exactly what was happening in the Cold War.
there were times where the US funded groups that were leftists as means of countering, to their perception at the time, even more radical communists.
it was more in the way of ‘enemy of my enemy, might still be an enemy, but they’re not the current problem’ than anything else. I don’t think it ever ended the way we wanted it to, or the way that it should have.
As an example, we funded FSLN against the Samoza family, in Nicaragua. we also supported the Derg- an ML military junta- in ethiopia against the Eritrean independence peeps (who were at the time even more communist.
Keeping in mind the Ethiopian junta was also waging genocide against the Eritreans.
oh. Yeah. Apologies if you thought I was saying we were backing the good guys.
we just backing the assholes killing the assholes we had a problem with at the time.
What could go wrong, amirite?
Maybe the United States involvement in regime change in Latin America is what you had in mind?
Or perhaps you’d like to peruse through old CIA files.
It’s not like they backed factions based on ideology…
In virtually everyone of those proxy governments it was a dictator who agreed to back one side or the other
They absolutely backed factions based on ideology, it was the Cold War lol
Interesting claim that it didn’t matter because “it was all just dictators fighting each other” btw
