https://np.reddit.com/r/Christianity/comments/4za3hu/why_is_christianity_so_commonly_associated_with/

Reminder not to vote or comment over there.

Now, I'm going to avoid much of the theology involved in the thread. We're taking the politics, not the religion, for this discussion.

Anyway, I'll tackle this thread toward the bottom, where we get this wonderful piece:

What is left wing? What is right wing? Most people do not fit neatly into one idea or the other. If you look at Hitler (extreme far right) and Stalin (extreme far left), these are theoretically polar opposite extremes, yet they are practically identical to one another.

Horseshoe theory has been tackled a few times on this sub. Just because some regimes had some things in common doesn't make them identical. The USSR and Nazi Germany were polar opposites both in theory and practice, and communism and fascism (which the horseshoe commonly puts at the opposite sides) are vastly different from one another.

Further down we get this:

here is the issue. Marxism has been and will always be a completely dangerous ideology and has been seen as the enemy for a long time.

Marx was absolutely correct in his understanding that capitalism creates monopolies or oligopolies that discourage competition.

However [Karl Marx] response was to turn everything into class warfare, which leads to chaos.

Marx didn't want to turn everything into class warfare, he simply observed that human history and conflict is the result of class warfare. One fundamental goal of Marxism is to abolish class entirely, thus eliminating the conflict.

Look at places like Nicaragua, or the Soviet Union to see how this can spiral out of control.

The USSR wasn't communist, it never even claimed to be. Many people say it was state capitalist instead. I want to focus more on Nicaragua here, as I very rarely see that in criticisms of Marxism. Nicaragua is one of many countries where the US helped install a dictatorship, the Somoza dynasty, which came into power in 1927, and lasted until the 1960s. Most of the abuses in the country were carried out by the horrible people involved in that dictatorship. After a disastrous earthquake in 1972, the Sandinista National Liberation Front, or FSLN, gained a lot of power as a revolutionary party, and overthrew the dynasty in 1979, giving the Sandinista party control. The Sandinistas were a leftist party following Sandinismo, a similar ideology to other South American schools of socialist thought. At the time, the country had 1.6 billion USD in debt, 600,000+ homeless, and nearly no economy. The Sandinistas managed a campaign to bring literacy, healthcare, and equality to the country, but failed after US backed Contras ravaged the country. Nicaragua was never technically socialist or Marxist, so it's a poor critique of Marxism.

This class warfare was originally about a bottom up revolution, but has been instead stolen by the upper class and is used as a top down system of control (much like a classical pattern of a religion).

Except human history has involved the most powerful empires and dynasties controlling from the top down. Even before communism, the richest ruled over the poor and money and land increased standing.

Bottom line: Marxism only works on a small scale, such as the Kibbutz system in Israel. On a large scale it causes destabilization and chaos (just look at Venezuela recently).

Venezuela is so often used as a modern example of socialism failing by the alt-right but it drives me insane. Here's a good thread on /r/socialism, from actual socialists, on the issue.

Sweden is another example of Left Wing Marxist policies leading to violence and chaos because of concepts like "nobility" and "compassion" being taken advantage of.

Without getting into the fact that Sweden is not a place of violence and chaos, Sweden is not an example of Marxism. It is a welfare state that uses social democracy, which is not socialism nor does it derive from Marx.

And the usual Marxist response of "it wasn't correctly implemented there" falls flat because it is NEVER correctly implemented, its a Utopian FANTASY.

Most socialist nations have been destroyed by the West before they could get their feet wet. South America was full of coups from the Reagan administration that destroyed any chance of any revolutions there, and put dictatorships into power (see above on Nicaragua, though that's technically Central America). The Free Territories are my favorite example of a leftist society that worked well until being crushed by Imperialism. If communism is blamed for all these failed nations though, we must also blame capitalism for the many failed nations that used it, but I don't see people often doing that.

A little further down:

The left wants the government to control money to give to poor because they feel people don't give enough and are born into things they can't control this need help legally.

The left doesn't equal social democracy only. Communism doesn't seek to achieve this, nor does Anarchism.

Lefts push a ton of stuff on others. Health care, federal level education, taxation. Those are all things left uses governments to force.

See above.

Some content over there that included bad politics also had religion mixed in, so I chose not to include it. Deconstructing that could fall into theology a bit, which is not what this subreddit is for, and I know jack shit about theology.