Can "left/right" be applied to pre-French Revolution figures and movements?

[flypanam]

did you really bump a 10 year old thread to share this boring tweeet?

Yup. There’s not a thread for boring old tweets so wanted to put it somewhere.

 

[platinumsage]

Surely Moses was at least a little bit left wing?

 

[Flavour]

My opinion, if it's not good enough to warrant its own thread, it doesn't deserve giving a 10 year old thread a bump and sending us all on a bumpy ride along the wet, cobbled roads of memory lane on a bicycle whose tires are in need of a bit of air and whose handlebars shake in such a manner as to cause arthritis paranoia. But that's just me

 

[Shechemite]

Surely Moses was at least a little bit left wing?

His attitude towards women wasn’t great

So yes I guess he was

 

[Shechemite]

Alexander the Great. Killed a lot of people but did a lot for mixed-marriage.

 

[JimW]

Wang Mang, on the one hand, hidebound Confucian and magical thinker, on the other hand redistributed the land a bit, though after some natural disasters and the Yellow River changing course, it was the peasants did for him in the end. Beware the Red Eyebrows.

 

[AmateurAgitator]

I hear the Gracchi brothers were basically Roman socialists but I don't know much about them tbh. Heard about them for the first time in an online chat I had with a comrade from Romania on facebook yesterday.

 

[platinumsage]

His attitude towards women wasn’t great

So yes I guess he was

Moses wasn't exactly an anti-zionist though was he? That has to count against him.

 

[Serene]

The French Revolution was left-wing.

 

[Shechemite]

What about pirates?

 

[Doodler]

According to Wikipedia, Mazdak the 6th century Zoroastrian priest believed:

God had originally placed the means of subsistence on earth so that people should divide them among themselves equally, but the strong had coerced the weak, seeking domination and causing the contemporary inequality. This in turn empowered the "Five Demons" that turned men from Righteousness—these were Envy, Wrath, Vengeance, Need and Greed. To prevail over these evils, justice had to be restored and everybody should share excess possessions with his fellow men. Mazdak allegedly planned to achieve this by making all wealth common or by re-distributing the excess...

Mazdak encouraged his followers to:

enjoy the pleasures of life and satisfy their appetite in the highest degree with regard to eating and drinking in the spirit of equality, to aim at good deeds; to abstain from shedding blood and inflicting harm on others; and to practise hospitality without reservation.

He seems like a pretty good character and as you would guess he was killed when the nobility and priesthood became alarmed at all this dangerous talk.

 

[BristolEcho]

What about pirates?

Forget Colston, Blackbeard is the hero Bristol needs a statue of

"It’s not a box-ticking exercise, but if Blackbeard was filling out a modern day socio-political diversity form, he would pass with flying colours."

www.google.com

Read this the other day.

 

[brogdale]

that's a very unurban attitude

Indeed.

Have to say that I was just about to bump a very auld Black Flag thread to pose a question but, on reflection, I think I'll try it out here.

So, following on from reading a fascinating account of the Battle of Bosenden Wood, I decided to re-read Hobsbawm & Rude's history of the Swing Riots (Captain Swing) and was interested to see this reference to "black flags" being raised in 1830 along with the republican tricolour:



Now, with the usual caveats regarding Wiki, it looks like 1830 is a very early example of the black flag being employed as such a radical emblem, pre-dating the cited examples by some 40 or 50 years :



Be interested to hear any views on this from Urbz with greater historical knowledge than myself; might this require some editing of the wiki entry?