One of the best things we can do to promote leftist principles is explain that dictatorships do not always take the form of one single person exercising total rule over a country.
It also helps to point out that this idea is complete ahistorical nonsense in of itself. You can't have a society where one person has unilateral control over everything and everyone else goes along with it or dies, because that person still needs someone to actually pull the trigger at the end of the day, and someone to supply the trigger-puller with guns/ammo/transportation, and the supply chains for all of that, and so on. Pointing out that Stalin could not singlehandedly hold the entire Soviet Union in the grips of terror without the majority of society backing him up quickly makes a lot of anticom propaganda fall apart, because it gives agency to the people in those societies and makes it clear that the majority of them were happy with their regimes.
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I still get the occasional :brainworms: moment. Deprograming by yourself is tough.
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It also helps to point out that this idea is complete ahistorical nonsense in of itself. You can't have a society where one person has unilateral control over everything and everyone else goes along with it or dies, because that person still needs someone to actually pull the trigger at the end of the day, and someone to supply the trigger-puller with guns/ammo/transportation, and the supply chains for all of that, and so on. Pointing out that Stalin could not singlehandedly hold the entire Soviet Union in the grips of terror without the majority of society backing him up quickly makes a lot of anticom propaganda fall apart, because it gives agency to the people in those societies and makes it clear that the majority of them were happy with their regimes.