I agree with the late Ronald Reagan:
You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I’d like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There’s only an up or down—[up] man’s old—old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.
EDITORIAL: Who is the ”far right”?
Posted by: Lars Hedegaard 24 November, 2013
Considering the epithets that the Swedish media normally use to describe Dispatch International, it is perhaps an improvement that Søren Villemoes writing for the Danish newspaper Weekendavise makes do with calling us ”right-wing radical”.
Weekendavisen has great influence on public opinion and before Villemoes’ characterization becomes received wisdom, it seems appropriate to ponder what he might base his portrayal on – and what criteria he applies when partitioning people according to a left-right scale.
His comment comes in the wake of the current debate about the Danish poet Yahya Hassan, who has written and said many naughty things about Allah and his prophet. Hassan has even said that the literary prize he received for his poems ought to have been shared with the utterly un-pc former leader of the Danish People’s Party Pia Kjærsgaard.
Does that mean that Yahya Hassan should now be called right wing or perhaps a far right radical? Nobody from the pc establishment – including the twelve Danish authors who condemned the ”tone” of the Danish discourse in 2005 but are now voicing new tones – would do that. And we must assume that Weekendavisen would refrain from sticking that label on him.
But there is still a difference between people. If those who for decades have been decried as racists, fascists and what not had said the same as Yahya Hassan, they would have been met with accusations of racism and dragged into court. But now the Danish tonal artists take their young colleague into their bosom.
That is cause for joy.
And fortunately Yahya Hassan has nothing to fear from the police or public prosecutor.
That is as it should be.
We have to conclude, however, that the criterion for what is right and what is left is not what is being said but who says it.
So we must return to the fundamental question: on what basis does Weekendavisen and other warm-hearted organs and people separate others as belonging to the left, i.e. the good ones, and the right, i.e. the bad ones?
