I think most people here on this forum are smart enough to realise that the idea of a clean-cut left-right spectrum is not in fact very helpful, and is the cause of much pointless debating on the definitions of terms, as well as a convenient source for attacking people through the 'guilt by association' route.

Mr. Brevik has been labelled frequently as being "extreme right". And in the post above, Louis calls the fascists "extreme right". And yet, Mr. Brevik was not by any stretch of the imagination a fascist, or a neo-Nazi for that matter.

Brevik was of the vienna school of thought, he championed laissez-faire economics, not the corporatism/national socialism of the fascist movements. In fact its clearly the opposite. He wasn't less or more extreme than the fascists in this respect, he was something completely different (got to emphasise that).

He certainly wasn't a neo-Nazi. He was banned from Stormfront for not being anti-semitic enough. The alliance between the NSDAP fanboys and those that focus on immigration as a more contemporary issue was always going to be an uneasy one. It's about the Muslims now and not the Jews, but some people just can't let go. This leads to weirdness when the far-left jumps into bed with radical Islamists and has them doing Nazi salutes towards Jewish protesters at their rallies. I always found the ways these particular issues got conflated into grander ideologies to be interesting.

tbh the only thing we can say that the so called "far-right" has in common is that they don't like immigrants. But this is just one issue and doesn't justify any sort of attempt at creating a single left-right spectrum when there are so many dimensions to things. When the BNP are placed to the left of Labour on the economy, you start to realise just how meaningless and unhelpful a single spectrum is (I believe this is what PVC was getting at when he called the Nazi's left wing and Adrian thought he was trolling him).

And as Louis pointed out, even just using the issue of immigration for left-right divides is unhelpful, since the centre-right has always supported immigration for economic reasons, and of late the centre-left supported it for cultural reasons.

So maybe we need to stop labelling so much.