Many people on lemmy.ml deeply respect and admire authoritarian governments and organizations.
Iran, China, North Korea, Soviet Union…
The West has many flaws. But our flaws are nothing compared to these guys.
Iran hangs homosexuals. Iran shot 30,000 people in less than than 2 weeks. The Soviet Union had to build a fucking Iron wall to prevent people from escaping. The Soviets lied about the Chernobyl nuclear explosion. China censors the internet. China wants to eliminate Islam. North Korea is a totalitarian hellscape. Watching anime is a crime.
Why is lemmy.ml so fascinated with authoritarians?
The mistake you’re making is thinking that criticising other authoritarian regimes means supporting the one you live in.
It’s not a zero sum game.
OP’s post literally says “our flaws are nothing compared to these guys”, it’s not the commenter above who brought the west up.
Also, that’s not what “zero sum game” means, you’re maybe thinking false dichotomy?
It is a valid point, though. Some people don’t even realize they’re in it. Like frogs in a pot of water, they’ve been boiled and are unaware.
I think a lot of Americans are under the assumption that post-Trump we just go back to freedomtm. And I hope that’s the case, but I’m skeptical.
I keep hearing equally unrealistic things that hinge on magical one-off situations. “What if he has a stroke?” or “The Dems will win and it will all change.” It won’t. They’re not going to self-regulate any more than they did in the past.
In order to get close to freedom we’d at bare minimum have to go back to before Reagan.
No, the mistake I’m making is pretending any person using the word ‘authoritarian’ has thought for two seconds about the word or what it means. Hence why I’m trying to encourage those to think beyond the propaganda and instead actually dive into the philosophy it’s trying to obscure.
Authoritarianism, also known as ‘any two or more humans living together,’ is a meaningless buzzword invented in the 1940s to try to differentiate American and Fascist societies to get Americans on board with fighting their ideological clones across the Atlantic.
It has no static definition that meaningfully separates any society from any other society.
“Authoritarian regimes are actually just regimes, actually!”
What a stupid take to protect the fascists lol.
Still not seeing any meaningful difference posted besides your tautological reasoning. All government is inherently authoritarian. That is how government inherently works and is defined. It can’t not be.
Saying some governments are magically different because they are isn’t anything logical. It’s repeating 1940s era propaganda made exclusively to make Americans feel like they weren’t so bad.
Oh, “everyone’s bad so I can side with who I want”. What a thought.
No, quite the opposite. I would encourage you to learn how to read one day.
Authortiarianism is a made up concept to separate the American public, who during the 1940s very much wanted to side with Nazi Germany and did not want to enter the war, and the ‘Axis of Evil;’ so that the American Military Industrial complex, against the wishes of its people and despite having the exact same ideology as the average fascist, could enter the war and make one of the largest transfers of wealth from poor to rich in world history happen.
It has no actual definition that excludes any government. Meaning it’s a meaningless distinction when you cut through the propaganda Nothing an ‘authoritarian government’ has ever been accused of doing is exclusive to them; and by a prima facie reading of the term gives you the difference between lower case a anarchism and actual society – i.e. nothing useful when discussing the merits of ways to run a society, just the fact a society exists.
Cuba is a democracy. China is a democracy. There’s plenty of propaganda that says otherwise because they do not do their government in English and Americans are the least linguistically capable peoples in the history of the world so it’s difficult for you people to check anything. Because learning spanish is just too difficult. There’s plenty of differences in how those democracies function compared to ‘liberal western democracy’ or US democracy. None of them are more ‘authoritarian’ than the others.
Cuba is a democracy.
So black is white and white is black.
Blocked.