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?
Why are they in lemmy.ml? Because they wanted to congregate somewhere and Lemmy was made by far left people and is federated so it’s probably a good choice to avoid censorship.
Why do they admire authoritarian regimes? Each may have a different reason but one common reason is because those regimes are anti-western or socialist/communist. So if you’re socialist/communist, hate a lot of aspects of the west or just like rooting for the underdog but still want a big team you can throw your support behind then those countries are the obvious choice. Of course you can be socialist, communist or anti-western without supporting authoritarian regimes, but then you basically have to admit that every time socialism/communism has been tried it has failed and you may be discomforted by the thought that there’s no powerful countries fighting for humanity and become hopeless.
Why are people socialist/communist? Usually because they see a lot of problems with capitalism, often to do with inequality, while socialism/communism promises total equality and fairness.
Why are people anti-western? I wouldn’t say the people we’re talking about are consistently anti-western, since they don’t oppose many things the modern west represents, like LGBTQ, technology, “democracy”, human rights, common law, federalism, hedonism, progressivism, etc. It seems to me they only dislike the aspects they’ve been told to dislike by western mainstream media and education, which focuses on things like the Atlantic slave trade (rather than slavery in Africa, the middle east, eastern Europe, pre-Columbian America or literally anywhere else in all of world history) and Nazi Germany (rather than Communist Russia, China, North Korea or Cuba).
Wow. Really? Technology is something that the modern West represents? Wild.
FYI, the repression of LGBTQ is RAMPANT in the West. Meanwhile, gender bending and queerness are seen all over the history of the indigenous peoples all over the world. It was the civilizations that built the West, and the West itself that spread anti-queer repression around the entire globe. The West doesn’t get to claim LGBTQ. Fuck that.
“common law” though? What? Do you mean common law generally, like, law created through precedent? Because these Western countries don’t have that: France, Germany, Spain, Italy. English Common Law is a specific historical process. In so far as they want communism, they are absolutely going to dismantle English Common Law in their home countries (UK, USA, Canada, Australia). No one outside of Common Law countries is pro-Common-Law.
And just because the US pioneered federalism doesn’t make it something the modern West represents. It’s a generic social technology that is pervasive around the world. Being OK with federalism has absolutely no bearing on whether you’re anti-Western.
As for progressivism, literally every communist country has been progressive - expanding the liberties of the masses, reducing inequality, improving governance, adapting institutions to new conditions. Like, what else is communism except literally progress?