Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics

vs.

> Right-wing politics are political positions or activities that view some forms of social hierarchy or social inequality as either inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable, typically justifying this position on the basis of natural law or tradition.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_politics

Which one seems to be more favorable to enacting your statement:

> exterminates and enslaves minorities

The equality faction or the hierarchy faction?

Here is an analogy:

You can claim yourself to be a pacifist (left wing) all you want. But if your actions are aggressive and cause war (right wing), then you aren't a pacifist, even if you claim to be one.

Yes, and these are the positions Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot took. They killed people using the justification that the people they killed were standing in the way of these ideals.

The next demagogue to rack of a massive body could could come from either the left or the right.

Also, if pacifism is left-wing, then the Obama administration is certainly not left-wing or anything close to it, since he has repeatedly authorized military action. I suppose you could finesse this point by saying that neither major party in the US is left-wing by your criterion. But trying to apply this more generally, for example to claim that Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc., were not "really" left-wing, looks a lot like a "no true Scotsman" argument.

In fact, by the pacifism criterion, I'm not aware of any government or political movement that has ever been left-wing; the closest thing to it would be some religious orders, like the Amish, who really do try to be pacifists. (Some people would put the Quakers in this category, but the Quakers have always flavored their surface pacifism with a strong pragmatic streak; they sold gunpowder to Washington's army during the American Revolution, for example.) But this makes "left-wing" a basically useless term, not to mention that you would have to explain to an awful lot of people that they have been using it wrong for a long time, since most people apply the term to Stalin, as I noted above, as well as Mao, Pol Pot, etc.

Finally, if left-wing means supportive of social equality for everyone, then once again, there are hardly any true left-wingers and never have been. Take trade unions, for example: yes, they're very supportive of social equality for their members, but are they equally supportive of social equality for management? Not to mention social equality for people who are not members but would like to learn one of the trades that are unionized? In my experience, unions do a very poor job with things like apprenticeship programs, because training new members means less job security for existing members.

Similarly, central planning in economics, which is supposed to promote more economic equality, ends up giving special privileges to the planners and those who are closely connected with them (like large financial institutions); witness the huge bailouts of investment banks after the crash of 2008, while ordinary people got foreclosed on. The closest thing to true left-wingers by this criterion are left-libertarians or anarchists (which, to be fair, the Wikipedia article does mention).

I'm pretty sure that Stalin has been post-categorized into the "Left-Wing" camp as he stood for "Socialism".

That one label is about the only thing about Stalin that could be classified as "Left-Wing". There has been an enormous amount of jostling amongst all "Left-Wing" political parties (globally) since then in order to differentiate themselves from Stalin.

"Socialism" is now very different from Stalin's view of it, just as "Liberalism" has now been watered down to mean anyone who isn't on the extreme right.

Arguing left vs right is not the way to view this problem. Seeing through the emotive labels and debates, and analyzing the actual behaviour will show you that personal power is the driving motivator, not any political ideology.

According to Plato "The measure of a man is what he does with power". Most of our world leaders at the moment aren't measuring up.

I agree that terminology in this area is very, very messed up. That's largely because the terminology has been used as a tool to gain and hold power, rather than as a tool of clear communication--Stalin being an obvious example.

Didn't released documents after 1989 show that most of the West European communist parties took orders directly from Moscow/Stalin?

IIRC, it was a big shock that the reason the Italian communist party was so reasonable after WW II was because it was orders from Moscow. (Stalin wanted to split Europe in two.)

I remember that the Swedish communist party used to be staunch Stalinists until Moscow told them he was wrong. Is that where the different view of Socialism came from? :-)

(The Swedish communists (SKP/VPK/V) claim to have stopped taking orders in the 1960s and have been critics of Soviet since 1989.)

I'd also refrain from conflating the "communist" parties from Europe with "Socialism", despite the obvious, ideological connections. Times had changed, labels were still being re-used.

Similarly, if we do the obvious thing and conflate "left wing" and "socialist", and believe that socialism has an ideological character beyond simply hating the existing organization of society, then extermination, slavery, thuggery, coercion, and violence are inherently anti-socialist.

This view is also the conclusion Orwell was operating under---the utopian ideal of capital-S Socialism which he approved of was used as operating cover to assist in the seizing of power by technocratic middle classes.

This view was pretty much explicitly stated in the Goldstein treatises in 1984, which described "English Socialism" as actually a form of "oligarchical collectivism," and claimed that "The Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it does so in the name of Socialism."

Similarly, there's this bit from the supposedly ex-Trotskyist James Burnham (who Orwell rightly abuses for being a power-worshiping scumbag):

"Some apologists try to excuse Marxism by saying that it has ‘never had a chance’. This is far from the truth. Marxism and the Marxist parties have had dozens of chances. In Russia, a Marxist party took power. Within a short time it abandoned Socialism; if not in words, at any rate in the effect of its actions. In most European nations there were during the last months of the first world war and the years immediately thereafter, social crises which left a wide-open door for the Marxist parties: without exception they proved unable to take and hold power. In a large number of countries — Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Austria, England, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, France — the reformist Marxist parties have administered the governments, and have uniformly failed to introduce Socialism or make any genuine step towards Socialism... These parties have, in practice, at every historical test — and there have been many — either failed Socialism or abandoned it. This is the fact which neither the bitterest foe nor the most ardent friend of Socialism can erase. This fact does not, as some think, prove anything about the moral quality of the Socialist ideal. But it does constitute unblinkable evidence that, whatever its moral quality, Socialism is not going to come."

To be fair, it's easy to believe claims about Stalin not being a socialist are simply ego-bruised leftists invoking the No True Scotsman fallacy. I don't think this necessarily applies simply because socialism is inherently an ideology. If someone claims to be a pacifist while marauding through a public place with an assault rifle, massacring people as they go, we have no problem resolving this dissonance: the murderer's claims of pacifism are simply lies.

Of course, pacifism was never taken all that seriously to begin with, so it's safe for us to simply say "you're lying about being a pacifist." We feel a bit more constrained telling someone they're lying about their status as a Christian or a socialist.

So you mean "left wing" is anything that leads to peace and "right wing" is anything that results in war. You may want to look up "tautology" or "circular reasoning".

By that standard a successful nuclear strike is left wing, and a failed one is right wing.