Reply #100: Hard to label internationally... [View All]

[LeftishBrit]

Firstly, I would put Pat Robertson right there at 1 with Hamas! Identical nasty theocratic religious-right attitude to life. Robertson fortunately isn't running the government and doesn't have direct access to weapons, so he hasn't murdered people directly - but his influence has been extremely dangerous and ultimately deadly - e.g. by getting people to support Bush's wars and think that they were 'God's will'.

I would put Stalin at 10 for economics, and 1 for everything else!

As regards where I'd put other people:

Britain:

Attlee: 8

Thatcher: 2

Blair: 3

Brown: 6

Harold Wilson: 7

Macmillan (very moderate Conservative): 5


American politicians, in comparison with these

Bush: 1 on foreign policy, 2 on other things

Reagan: 2

Obama: 5-6

Sanders: 7-8

McCain: 3 at one time; goes down lower for selecting Palin

Bill Clinton: 4-5


I find it difficult to rate Israeli politicians, as generally LW politicians are often more right-wing on foreign policy than on economic issues (and much more LW on the *latter* than Dems); and also the *form* that RW attitudes take is often of a different sort than the predominant sort in Britain or America. Most American and British foreign-policy hawks are neocon-imperialists; they love some foreigners who are 'useful' to them, hate others, want to go out there and influence things at the point of a sword. A smaller number - Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, LePen, the late Enoch Powell - are xenophobic-isolationists: they are generally suspicious of foreigners and the outside world; are not interested in going off and being conquerors; but are likely to react with extreme violence to anything perceived as a possible *nearby* threat, and are often hostile to groups whom they perceive as 'enemies within' their country. Overall, Israeli far-right politicians tend to be more of the latter sort, more like Buchanan than Bush, which makes them harder to compare with a mostly-different sort of American right-winger.