MarxMadness

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Bit idea: get Star Trek libs to be anti-imperialist by citing the Prime Directive (hexbear.net)
submitted 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) by MarxMadness@hexbear.net to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net
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For the uninitiated:

The Prime Directive, also known as Starfleet General Order 1, the Non-Interference Directive, or the principle of non-interference, was the embodiment of one of Starfleet's most important ethical principles: noninterference with other cultures and civilizations. At its core was the philosophical concept that covered personnel should refrain from interfering in the natural, unassisted, development of societies, even if such interference was well-intentioned. The Prime Directive was viewed as so fundamental to Starfleet that officers swore to uphold the Prime Directive, even at the cost of their own life or the lives of their crew.

The fundamental idea is that you can have the best of intentions but still fuck things up, so you shouldn't intervene even if you think you have good reason. This strikes me as the best counterargument to what constantly sucks liberals into imperialist adventures -- the tempting idea that "someone has to do something," or "if we stand by and watch bad things happen, doesn't that make us complicit?"

The Prime Directive has a simple answer to that: it's likely you're going to make things worse, and what right do you have to intervene, anyway? The Star Trek libs in your life will have to recognize this principle, and the closer you look at U.S. foreign policy, the more sense it makes. It's also a natural lead-in to talking about how often the government lies to manufacture consent for wars.

And what are they going to do, say "that's a fictional story and the real world is different"? These are the folks who are comparing Lev Parnas to Neville Longbottom or some shit.

Hello and welcome to Deep Space Nine. in c/movies@hexbear.net
Best sources that debunk the Black Book of Communism and do a similar breakdown for the victims of capitalism using the same logic? in c/history@hexbear.net
[–] MarxMadness@hexbear.net 1 points 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism#Criticism

[T]wo of the book's main contributors (Jean-Louis Margolin and Nicolas Werth) as well as Karel Bartosek publicly disassociated themselves from Stéphane Courtois' statements in the introduction and criticized his editorial conduct. Margolin and Werth felt that Courtois was "obsessed" with arriving at a total of 100 million killed which resulted in "sloppy and biased scholarship", faulted him for exaggerating death tolls in specific countries and rejected the comparison between Communism and Nazism...

Margolin likened Courtois's effort to "militant political activity, indeed, that of a prosecutor amassing charges in the service of a cause, that of a global condemnation of the Communist phenomenon as an essentially criminal phenomenon." Historians Jean-Jacques Becker and J. Arch Getty criticized Courtois for failing to draw a distinction between victims of neglect and famine and victims of "intentional murder"...

Noam Chomsky criticized the book and its reception as one-sided by outlining economist Amartya Sen's research on hunger. While India's democratic institutions prevented famines, its excess of mortality over China—potentially attributable to the latter's more equal distribution of medical and other resources—was nonetheless close to 4 million per year for non-famine years. Chomsky argued that "supposing we now apply the methodology of the Black Book" to India, "the democratic capitalist 'experiment' has caused more deaths than in the entire history of [...] Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, and tens of millions more since, in India alone."

Chapter 5 of Blackshirts and Reds is another great debunking (although it's focused on the USSR), but it's much harder for people to write off Wikipedia as a source.