With James von Brunn’s attack at the National Holocaust Museum and Scott Roeder’s assisination of Dr Tiller in Kansas, there has been a real push to identify the killers as right or left wing.
With Scott Roeder there was not not much pushback on describing his views as being on the right. Anti-abortion is pretty much found only on the right these days and in fact a primary definition of what it means to be on the right. With James von Brunn the situation is much more murky.
James von Brunn believed a number of strange, and contradictory things. Antisemitism is neither right nor left. Rarely do people in general — and even less so for the emotional deranged — believe in wholly consistent philosophies. We all have our contradictions.
What has been happening with James von Brunn is that each side has grasped onto one or two points and tried to use it to proved that the nut-job was left/right depending on who was pushing the data around. No one ever says – he was a nutjob on our side and we should fry him.
Personally I think he falls more on the right than on the left, but that is because of how I see the core right/left split.
The real split in my opinion is not about governing methods or tax rates or who stick what bodily part where, but rather the division is about time. Conservatives – very broadly – are concerned and obessed about the past. About the way thing used to be and the way they should be again. The past is where wisdom is found and where good times lie. Life was better then and our answers can be found back then.
The left is concerned about and obessed with the future and nearly always in an dystopic manner. We are moving towards disasters, the population bomb, pollution, global warming, 1984, and the like. Oddly the left also tends to look to the future for the answers – recycling, green power, family planning, human rights are all about what might be and not what been. (The glaring exception to this is those on the left who are luddites and what to go way back to a non-tech kind of world. Here the future frightens them but the solution lies way back. Even then they do not see human systems of the past as ideal, just a lack of tech. They’d like to have modern ideas of human right and justice merged with a feudal or pre-feudal technology.)
James von Brunn seemed to want a past when Jews didn’t run everything. (In his deranged opinion.) When the races were propely separated and everyone knew their place. (Which just happens to have his people on top. No one ever wants to go back to a time when they were the oppressed of course.)
Expect more of this in the coming years. The combination of a minority raced president, Democratic control of the government, and a final collapse all will fuel the fires of madness in people like James von Brunn.