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?
Define authoritarian in a way that excludes the US and Europe but includes any country you listed.
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.
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.