this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024
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But it's the tankies that are authoritarian...
If you think authoritarianism exists on a single side of the political spectrum, you're likely brainwashed.
Is killing Nazis authoritarian? If so is every "authoritarian" measure equal?
A government ordering the killing of any group (political, ethnic, etc) abandoning due process for the individuals is authoritarian.
That doesn't answer the question though. If a government ordered the killing of Nazis that would be very different than a government enforcing the eviction of someone displaying a flag in solidarity with people being genocided by Nazis.
You do realize how those two things are different right?
Yes it absolutely does. Your question was "Is killing Nazis authoritarian?"
Okay so is it?
Those aren't mutually exclusive to define authoritarianism. I wouldn't expect someone from hexbear to come with a good faith debate though.
Okay lets back this up a step, I made a comment pointing out the authoritarian nature of capitalism which allows the shit like what happened in the OP.
You come in trying to both sides this shit.
So are you defending landlords? Because this is obviously fucked up and the landlord in question (and all other landlords imo) should be dispossessed of their property which would be an "authoritarian" measure.
Plenty of instances of communists doing the same shit. Please refer to my original post.
Authoritarianism is not tied to political ideology. Authoritarianism takes advantage of whatever the political environment is. To think one environment doesn't allow for authoritarianism while the other does is extremely naive. This isn't a "both sides" argument, this is an argument that you incorrectly associate authoritarianism with only capitalism.
I don't know how else I can explain this to you, so this will be my last response.
Please spare me this nonsense go read a book.
This is one of my favorites, I highly recommend it
Yo know even the BBC journalists that were there said there was no massacre right?
lol, is this the comment that made some midwest.social mod go buck wild banning you from every comm they could? This is where you (checks modlog notes) were "denying a massacre"? Mod who did that: please make sure to ban not only other users who mention what the BBC says, but also that you remove any posts that link CBS News and the New York Times for their tankie propaganda massacre-denialism!
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/there-was-no-tiananmen-square-massacre/
https://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/13/world/turmoil-china-tiananmen-crackdown-student-s-account-questioned-major-points.html
There it is, @ringwraithfish^ !
Come on.
And there were many soldiers who were also killed as well, the first of which were not even armed but were lynched. There was absolutely fighting in the streets in the surrounding area, and no one denies that people did die. But it was a mutually armed struggle, not a massacre. Calling it a massacre distorts the reality and paints a distorted picture that is beneficial to the west and especially the current anti-China narrative.
The fighting I mentioned above was also heavily instigated and pushed to happen by westerners with a vested interest in harming China who were there to rile up protesters and encourage them to do violence, but then left in helicopters when fighting did start. Some of these instigators have openly admitted this and now live happily in the US. It was not a "massacre."
Come on.
Then post articles that say that and not articles that refute your own point. Otherwise you're just being pedantic that no one was killed within the square itself.
It was not. a. massacre. It is not at all pedantic to point this fact out. Especially when people, following a blatantly propagandist narrative line, incorrectly call it that.
My choosing those two sources specifically among the thousands of others that was to point out how ridiculous it is to ban someone for "denying a massacre" when even mainstream western news sources (in addition to the BBC as was mentioned in the comment that caught that user the ban lol), including one of the most famous mouthpieces for the U.S. government's foreign policy, likewise "deny" that it was a massacre and likewise would have been banned according to the silly mod's standards. Those articles did not at all refute my point, they clearly made it, as should be obvious to anyone able to follow this thread.
There it is!
There wat is?
This is liberalism at its purest: absolutely no ideology or investigation, just a smug one liner and an unchecked source. You haven't read this book at all, otherwise you wouldn't be surprised by him saying there was no massacre in tiananmen square - Vijay states the same in the book, and speculates the army didn't fire a single shot to retake it from protestors.
You are an absolutely fucking useless being who radiates pure ignorance.
Here comes the hexbear hoard!
To do what? Read your sources for you?
This is a really weird interpretation of authoritarianism.... authoritarian regimes often enforce their authority through 'due' process.
I think the point op is making is that liberal democracies defer authority to capital and enforces it on their behalf. There's a temptation to consider liberalism to be less authoritarian because of this deferral but it's mostly just a slight-of-hand
Well said.
Another very illustrative example of this kind of deferral and obfuscation played by liberal democracies with their use of authoritarianism is the continued use of literal slave labor specifically in the US, which is even enshrined in the constitution. The sleight-of-hand (sleight-of-tongue?) comes from shifting the term slavery into euphemisms for prison labor. A slave population of "prisoners," the vast majority of whom are People of Color, mostly black people, as is the slavery tradition, who are actually pipelined from their schools to prison, and criminalized for engaging in the only means they have of economic independence. The authoritarian slave drivers will tell the general populace they are "bad people, felons" and deserve to be sequestered away from society to live solitary lives doing hard labor for no pay (2 cents an hour doesn't count as pay.)
There is nothing more "authoritarian" than having actual slaves, which is the major reason the prison-industrial complex exists in the US and has more prisoners (read: slaves) than any other country in the world both in absolute numbers and per capita by a ridiculously large margin. That is capitalist-style authoritarianism.
Right on.
I think lemmy is filled with a lot of people who (maybe) understand this in fewer words. Case-in-point: there are plenty here who are acknowledging this dynamic played out through landlords and ownership of private property.
Making the leap from understanding that type of authority to the authority utilized by AES countries takes some time for some. Similar in the way reactionaries interpret Foucault's description of institutionalized power as inherently negative, power exercised by the state isn't inherently bad, either, especially when the alternative is allowing capitalists to claim it for themselves.
Pointing out that suppressive authority exists even in the liberal democracies that nominally espouse 'freedom' is a good first step but far from the last. The Tienanmen square thing is.... well it definitely gets in the way of that conversation. It's a bit of a socialist's Godwin's Law.