Left and right differences
My own take : The Left has clear origins and can be traced to sources like Marx and post-modernism and specific opinions like the State being in charge of everything, or principles like equality of outcome. The right, on the other hand, has been whatever the left says they reject or when people speak out rejecting policies of those on the "Left".
So if the Left says biological men should be allowed to use ladies bathrooms or compete in womens sports if they just declare themselves transgender, and if I oppose this new policy created by the Left, then I'm automatically "right wing" in that regard as of today.
So, what is "right wing" appears to change from place to place and time to time. It's more of a {NOT-Left} thing.
For example, The "right wing" in the US has been leading the anti-GMO fight whereas leftists seem to be catching up only after organic food became a buzzword for folks in Silicon Valley and New York. But that stand has been claimed by the Left in India as a leftist stand.
Opposition to forced vaccination is seen as far-right in the US, whereas in India the same anti-GMO leftists are strongly pro-forced-vaccination, and the topic isn't even in the conversation amongst BJP folks. At my alma mater Swaraj University, they're self-described Left and they're very against forced vaccination. So it's confusing.
"Conservatives" in the US include women flashing bikinis, celebrating heterosexual sex, wearing whatever they want and refusing to accept the Hijab or Burka as a legitimate choice made by Muslim women.
But we may not be able to say the same about "Conservatives" in India.
That said, I don't think our right-wing folks are as oppressive towards women as our Left paints them to be - I don't see dedicated BJP-supporting people restricting their daughters the way my impression of them was. But that may just be city folks - I don't know properly.
In the US itself, the "right" was associated with war-mongering from Bush's time. But the left that were pointing fingers there fell silent after Obama did even more war than Bush and specifically when he took the drone bombing to unprecendented heights and destroyed Libya and then Syria. Imagine 5 billion dollars a month pumped into Kashmir by Pakistan - that happened in Syria and the huge supply of weaponry and resources mysteriously stopped as soon as Obama left the White house. It's open to speculation but there was certainly something fishy about the whole thing. And today the majority of Conservatives that are labeled far-right are consistently anti-war. In fact, Infowars folks were labeled as liberals in Bush's time because they opposed war, and then got labeled right-wing in Obama's time when they called out his wars. Even prominent anti-war left media like The Guardian has turned into war-mongering since Syria (because of which I do not trust them any more). But when talks about bombing Venezuela or Iran start then again the Left are mysteriously anti-war again. And I still find it funny that the Left in USA hate Russia so much.
Also, my opinion about where Hitler and Nazis fell in left vs right is now that they were actually Left wingers - their ideology and policies implemented included several aspects like the State being everything and people owing their existence to the State and massive tracking etc. There's folks pointing out that at the time they said they were Left, and everybody agreed they were Left. Branding them as far-right seems to have been a post-war sleight of hand pulled off by Marxist history book writers. This is of course uncomfortable for folks who go around calling people Nazis today.
And then there's the matter of almost 100 million people being slaughtered by Socialist/Communist regimes (honestly I don't know the difference) since the end of WW2, in "peacetime". I've spent a lot of time in leftist circles and I'm now questioning why no one ever mentioned anything about Cambodia where a communist government killed off 25% of the country's population. In percentage terms that's the worst genocide in human history. When I asked a prominent leftist about this in Pune recently, he replied that haan haan he is fully aware of it all but no relevance.
I then found this article that digs into what the most prominent leftist intellectuals in the world including Noam Chomsky were saying while the Cambodian genocide was happening, how they treated the refugees that escaped from it, and in the years after it became accepted fact :
Devastation and Denial: Cambodia and the Academic Left
And that I found troubling. I can't gel with folks who are so desperate to hide something. Have a differing opinion on something? That's fine. Hide a huge thing entirely and hope nobody finds out? That's dangerous. Especially when they tout such sky-high morals for themselves. That makes me ask what else are these people hiding.
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