It was the century of the Holocaust and the two World Wars; of communist, socialist, Nazi, fascist and military dictators who between them killed more than a hundred million people. It was a fight between opposing political ideologies, on a scale, never witnessed before.
It took all so much, before the so-called political “left” and “right” stopped the violence and henceforth began to live together under an umbrella of peaceful negotiable politics, constantly crossing swords. All this bloodshed, fighting and chaos redefined the political spectrum of the world. It taught us the difference between good and bad, the difference between right and wrong. And most importantly, it laid the foundation of world politics for the times to come.
Though the terms were first coined during the French Revolution of 1789. It was in this century, that “left” and “right” came to be extensively used as a system of classifying political positions, ideologies and parties.
Since then on, the “left” and “right” have become political umbrellas, accommodating different political parties and ideologies. The left is considered to include, anarchists, communists, socialists, democratic socialists, social democrats, left libertarians, progressives and social liberals. The right on the other hand is said to include, conservatives, right libertarians, neoconservatives, imperialists, monarchists, fascists, reactionaries and traditionalists.
There exists a theory in physics which says, that gravitational fields have negative energy and matter has positive energy. All the positive and negative energy cancel out each other (provided the universe is flat) and the net energy of the universe turns out to be zero. And only so, can it last forever.
Drawing an equivalence in politics, the political left and right fight a constant battle to emerge as the more dominant ideology. And in the process, keeping a check on one another. Hence, resulting in the maintenance of stability.
An increase of one is certainly a possibility in the short run of a few years. Given that stays the scenario in the long run too, would certainly lead to imbalance and disfigurement of society. A predominant presence of one ideology in the absence of the other, automatically leads to augmentation of power. An increment of such unchecked power acts as an impetus towards extremism.
As history has demonstrated many a times, a dominant presence of either only the left or right has always fuelled fanaticism.
China's so-called “Great Helmsman”, Mao Zedong, was in fact the greatest mass murderer in history. Most of his victims ( sixty million in total) were his fellow Chinese, starved in his misnamed ‘Great Leap Forward’ of 1958-61, or killed and tortured in labour camps in the Cultural Revolution of the Sixties.
Lenin’s paranoid successor, Joseph Stalin, was the runner-up to Mao in the mass-murder stakes. Stalin imposed a deliberate famine on Ukraine, killed millions of the wealthier peasants, and purged his own party, shooting thousands and sending millions more to work as slaves and perish in the Gulag.
These were classic cases of left extremism. Not to say that the right has its hands clean. In fact, the right has its own form of extremism, called fascism. Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler are it’s two greatest example.
The horror of Hitler’s dictatorship lied in the uniqueness of his most notorious crime, the Holocaust, which stands alone in the annals of inhuman cruelty, carried out under the cover of World War II.
To prevent such atrocities from happening again, is where the fundamental need for democracy lies. It establishes a system of checks and balances. So, whenever there is an upsurge of one ideology, it cannot easily go down the path of extremism and create havoc.
A hundred and sixty seven countries in the world now practice democracy. A number larger than ever before. This provides a platform for peaceful, stable contestation between the left and right.
There has been a shift of political preference towards right-wing political groups, evident in the last few years. A significant but subtle repositioning of people’s political views has led to a predilection for the right, throughout the world. Whether that be in the form of Trump being elected as the President of America, Britain voting in favour of Brexit, or Modi being elected as PM of India. It is highly visible that people all over the world are favouring right-wing political groups.
Consequently, there has been an upsurge of policies and political exercises favouring the majoritarian viewpoint. As the left puts it, there has been growing dissent towards the minority in the last few years. On the other hand, the left has been accused of playing minority politics, by the right. The right opposes immigration (putting it as a hindrance to national security), whereas the left is in favour of it. And so this never ending argument goes on..........
The “left” and “right” is here to stay. And they will remain the engine of politics.
One thing is for sure, news channels aren’t going out of business any time soon.
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