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?
I’ve been thinking a lot of about this and my educated guess would be - rising distrust with current institutions and/or bad experience with societal failures.
If you look through history of
.mlposters they are mostly in western europe or US and there’s always a specific grievance they have like the current societal system did them dirty. Most normal people just realize that all systems are imperfect and sometimes you take an L and continue but there’s this trend of sore losers extremists in both far right and far tankie left that just have full identity capture and radicalization because of a one or few conflicts.I almost fell into these pits myself several times because being owned by a system that doesn’t give you sufficient tooling or voice to feedback on does feel really terrible. Especially these days when burying issues is so easy under automation, culture of indifference and political unseriousness.
However, imo most of these are just weak people and I don’t necessarily say this as an attack but all societies have weak links that can turn to extremism but that just means we should do a better job correcting for this.
TL;DR: trauma
Instead of guesswork related to your own personal experiences you could, you know, ask the people who self-describe as socialists. I’ll tell you my story of radicalization:
I’m a Spaniard who was enamored with the Podemos leftist party back when it spawned last decade. Then I saw the state apparatus (the police in particular) manufacture false evidence of funding of said party by Venezuela and Iran, and “leak” it to media. Then I saw state and capitalist media collude to air 1h every day of anti-podemos lawfare bullshit followed by 1h of news about Venezuela and inflation, and with this they scared the population into not voting for them, and in 2026 this party is essentially dead. Audios of the journalists and media owners conspiring, aware of the evidence being false, have surfaced. Police chiefs like Villarejo have come out in trial and in Congress declaring as much. Nobody has gone to jail.
Then I looked at Greece, where they elected an actual leftist party in the 2010s (Syriza) on the premise of abandoning austerity policy and investing in the welfare state. And I saw how the country got threatened out of the Euro and the EU by the EU authorities and the Troika, and how they weren’t allowed to enact the democratic will of the people of carrying out a debt restructuring and progressive fiscal and monetary policy.
Then I looked at France, where LFI gained majority vote last elections and all other parties conspired to keep them out of gocwenment.
I looked at Chile, where Allende won a democratic vote to enact a socialist government, and he was couped by the USA. I looked at Iran, where Mosaddeq was elected democratically to carry out socialist secular policy, and he was couped by the USA and the UK.
I realized that social democracy does not allow leftism in institutions. So I started to look for alternatives outside social democracy seeing the looming threat of fascism in the horizon.
I looked at my own country, Spain: who had fought the fascists in our civil war? The anarchists Damn, we lost. I looked to other alternatives, the ones who actually defeated fascism.
That’s when I learnt about the USSR, initially extremely skeptical, and increasingly seeing how all I knew about it had been wrong! THEY defeated Nazism and not the US. They had universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, guaranteed employment and guaranteed housing!!! Sure, it was an imperfect system, but it was one which challenged capitalism, tsarism and Nazism, and for the biggest part of the last century against all odds, defeated them.
So I’m a communist: I support the system that FEEDS THE CHILDREN AND KILLS THE NAZIS.
Did you also read about soviet genocides and gulags? Maybe you should read a bit more
The Soviets committed no genocides though? Making up genocides is a form of genocide denial because it minimizes real genocides.
And yes, there were prisons in the USSR, and for 5 years prior to/during WW2 they put more people in prison than they should have, mistakes were made. They corrected this quickly and moved on, imprisonment rates were very low after the 1950s and onwards.
You can’t be serious? Lmao I don’t even know how to reply to this level of ignorance
Maybe start here https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Genocides_in_history_(World_War_I_through_World_War_II)#Russia_and_the_Soviet_Union
“Gommunism bad!!” cites the NATOpedia article they just looked up and haven’t read
Maybe try a source not entirely comprised of cold-war brainworms? Oh wait, you can’t!
Extremely unserious that the article includes things like the Cossacks joining the tsarists in the civil war and getting their asses kicked, but makes no mention of the Brits in India.
Lmao I literally lived through this so maybe fuck off back to your Spanish tankie larping basement. What an absolute moron - sorry I even gave you a chance. Enjoy the blocklist.
I hope you get treated just like how Russia treats their disfavored peoples
I don’t hope you get treated how the west treats Palestinians
Tell me who you define as the west, because unlike you chances are I’ve already criticized it very vocally
My great aunt in yhwh’s wrath, you have been traumatised. How do you not recognise your behaviour as a trauma response?
I don’t believe that makes it any less valid, even if it is the case. Those are systemic things, which if one could be morphed by them, it’s fair to say others are too.
It completely invalidates their claims - their spirit has been completely crushed and subsumed, to the point their words could be spoken by a serf or slave defending their systems. They are projecting their own perceived weakness onto others and telling themselves they’re actually strong for breaking.