how to respond to "communism is totalitarian!" at least we have freedom to dissent with our government!!!!
Literally all the thought police stuff in socialist states is bullshit. You absolutely could dissent in the privacy of your home. It's when you started organizing and publicly attacking the socialist state that it became illegal like it is in every other country. You cannot legally organize towards the overthrow of the United States. I don't even think you can legally advocate it and I know you couldn't for a long time (see HUAC).
Except not really - the thought police is a real thing. While not literally thought police, and not as wide reaching, as sometimes people make it out to Bez it still was a terrifying and oppressive thing. There were plenty of informants and your neighbors would snitch on you too should they suspect you're doing something like thinking bad things about the gensec, or listening to western propaganda on the radio. And this thing about the privacy of your home means that you can't talk about it with your guests even. Hell, at some points of time and places watching western movies could get you a visit from the cops.
America is the most authoritarian nation in human history with the most propagandized population in human history, we've just privatized a lot of the authoritarianism. See: credit scores
The depersonalization of credit has been a disaster for the human race.
I will never stop posting about Graeber, he's the bloomer I read to feel better.
a few different approaches:
- AES countries have way lower prison populations than the US, despite NED having huge influence over people there
- then why don't you actually dissent?
- what good is merely vocal dissent? how does the gov treat people who actually try to change things?
- why would you dissent with a people's democratic dictatorship? are you a monarchist? fascist? landlord? what privilege are you trying to protect?
NED, according to one co-founder, "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA"
Economic hegemony is by far the most useful tool the empire has ever wielded. Didn't the Romans use similar tactics against neighboring cities/states when they were first establishing their control over the Italian Peninsula?
National Endowment for Democracy
(wikipedia is your friend when it comes to acronyms)
Thanks.
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I had a glance at Wiki and
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I really don't care for non first tongue acronyms which are known in a national context, but not in others.
Named entity disambiguation, the task of determining the identity of entities mentioned in text
lmao meta
a tip is to first look at the headings, e.g. in this case i think it was pretty obvious that we were talking about organizations
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"Lmao you can 'dissent' only in their terms and conditions, try not paying taxes that will be used to bomb people. Try removing and jailing a cop that was filmed shooting a 12 yo, try getting M4A passed by the senate despite 99% of people liking it. All governments are inherently authoritarian"
There, you got yourself an anarchist.
"Oh, so if millions of people protest for a basic change in policy where there exist well articulated alternatives, the government changes, right?... Right?"
Yeah, and advertising isnt? What kind of free society is it where I'm subject to propoganda 24/7
A healthy market requires an appropriate amount of circulation of information.
yeah, s/o to my comrades in the Juche Gang for figuring out exactly how much
ask them what they mean by "communism" and "totalitarian" and if they can't give definitions, don't engage
If you compare the body count for blm vs hk riots you get some quick numbers
problem is these people never see the dark side of protests, they barely even interact with the bright side. to them this sounds like reactionary fema camp bullshit
You know what is totalitarian? Having to pee in a bottle to not starve.
What else is totalitarian? Any so called democracy in which democracy ends at the shop's gate.
Dissent all you want, the moment you inconvenience the oligarchs enough your pretty little liberal democracy and marketplace of ideas gets shut down. When Greece wanted to renegotiate the sadistic neoliberal austerity regime the EU threatened them with total economic war of they didn't comply. When Bolivia re-elected the president who wanted to use the nation's natural resources for the people he was couped. In the UK Corbyn wanted to end austerity and he was brutally smeared as somehow just as bad as Hitler by the right-wing media monopoly. Even a milquetoast succdem like Bernie Sanders was pictured as some dangerous radical by the corporate-affiliated media and had the entire democratic party apparatus against him.
But yeah, you can go to a street corner and hold a sign while people driving by ignores you. That's something, I guess.
^this "totalitarianism" is a CIA buzzword to try to put Nazism/Communism together and separate from the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that we commonly call "liberal democracy." The USA voted it's way to slavery and genocide which sounds pretty fucking totalitarian to me
I´d agree, except for the part where they strawmaned Anarchism as not anti-capitalist. Like holy fuck, of course Anarchists oppose the accumulation of capital and want the abolishment of private property. I guess the commenters name is at least fitting as Lenin never had a good take on Anarchism either.
Yeah, I should've noted the anti-anarchist bent at the end there. It is /r/genzedong so my brain just filters that out at this point.
First of all I say that its dumb to paint all the different countries to attempt socialism with one brushes, get them to define Totalitarian, list their conditions that don't apply to communist states, list their conditions which do apply to liberal democracies, give them examples of Authoritarian Capitalism.
