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?
Communists are authoritarians because that’s what communism is, like by definition; it’s hard-left but also authoritarian. That’s literally what separates lib-left from auth-left, the same obviously being for lib-right and auth-right (I’m just going off of the standard four-quadrant political compass, which probably has its own deep, foundational issues).
I have friends who are self proclaimed “tankies”, and talking to them a lot about it, my best understanding of the way they put it is basically:
You need an Iron Fist® to fix anything, and an Iron Fist® to keep it that way.
I also think that .ml probably has a percentage of people from those locations, and most people, period, tend to think their way is the best way. Which is also fairly hard to prove because history keeps being altered and destroyed and humans only live for like 60-90 years and we don’t have a very advanced intergenerational memory. Or maybe we do but just don’t know how to learn very well from it when all it seems to scream is “BREED, EAT, SLEEP, STINKY, TRIBE, SCARY, RUN, FIGHT, SAFE, LOVE”. It’s like some people’s own evolutionary biology tells them to prevent others from learning history to establish dominance and power.
Hard to say whether or not we’ll make it. The solution-path definitely has a lot of construction and destruction.
Thats also why old people think the young people’s culture is wrong. Thats not how they grew up, and they were born and made it old/successful enough to reproduce, so its a system that works so why would they change it with their new music and hairstyles? Theyre gonna get us all killed man.