grew up a good little liberal, which meant I was trained to discount anything coming from far-right sources. I'm sure conservatives are trained in the opposite way. But with the internet it's a lot easier to do detailed research because of the google. And I found out that some of the stuff from the hard right is factual -- they spin it weird, of course, but the basic facts seem to be correct. Like Lincoln having any connection to Marx, something I never would have believed, say, in high school or college. Probably there was some college course that might have noted the connection, but I daresay most students didn't take it.
Another interesting thing I've learned, though not from the far right, is that a lot of "southerners" were actually yankees who went south at the start of the cotton boom (early 1800s) and then reinvested the profits up north. Down south they were trading slave-grown cotton, up north they were starting up textiles mills using cheap exploited labor. The families of George Bush and John Kerry both have this kind of history, and in the same city -- savannah. They *knew* each other.
There's also the history of various capitalists giving aid and funding to various communist entities -- nations, parties, revolutionary groups, oversears and in the US. In our own day, various "left" media gets foundation money or is run by rich people's kids or CIA brats like Katherine van der Heuvel or people connected to the democratic party.
I recently read the book None Dare Call it Conspiracy, a big hit with the far-right in the 70s. In it I discover that what those people mean by "communism" doesn't have much relation to what people in this thread mean by communism. As best I can tell, what they mean by the word is something more like a collectivist "new world order" orchestrated and controlled by eastern elites. In their world view, talking about people like the Rockefellers being "communists" makes sense. And talking about Lincoln being a communist makes sense too, not only because of the facts you noted, but also because he was a lawyer for the big (eastern) railroad interests. And that connection is historically important, I think, even if they spin it weird.
As near as I can tell, underlying all this is a fight between various capitalist gangs. At any rate, the story I grew up with, ideological capitalists opposing ideological communists, doesn't make sense to me any more in light of all these odd facts that go against that story. I find that today's world seems much like Orwell's 1984. I could never have imagined myself thinking that when I read the book in high school.
I assume Orwell's prescience had something to do with his experiences in the Spanish Civil War (experiencing the betrayal of the left by the Soviets) and in British intelligence during WW2 (experiencing the totalitarian/propagandist aspect of his own government). It's a world where everything is fake, the news, the wars, the government proclamations and the revolutionary movement, and the hand of real power is unseen by the general population and thus immune to any actions by the general population. If you don't know who they are and can't correctly analyze their actions, their motivations, and the levers of their power, how do you combat them?
Throw in a bit of Huxley's orgy-porgy sex and drugs opium of the people stuff and it seems to me you've got the basic themes of our time.
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