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?
Maybe a naive question but is there no way to have a country that stands strong against the US and its interference without being repressive/authoritarian against your own people? What’s the point of being a socialist dictator for many years/decades if you’re not allowing the people to gain collective control of the land/resources/means of production/etc. for their own benefit?
I think the trouble is that “freedom of speech”, “freedom of expression”, etc. can be and are weaponized by colonial/hegemonic forces.
But, that said, that’s why I am not 100% supportive of this view. Possibly naïvely on my end, I think those sorts of freedoms are important not only for individuals but also as a check on state power. That said, I see how manipulative the US state department can be - and for that matter how manipulative foreign govts have been to the US - especially in recent election cycles… so I think it is a double edged sword.
That’s part of the reason I am also not a full blown anarchist/libertarian socialist. I can see the value in centralized state power when it comes to defending the state and people
Socialist countries are generally more liberating for their working classes than oppressive, hence high public support, but necessarily curb absolute freedoms such as those of capitalists.
The point is you’re making that up. Example: USSR.
The USSR reduced inequality to the lowest levels in history, redistributed the land to the peasants from the nobility and the landowners, guaranteed healthcare for everyone for free, free education to the highest level, guaranteed employment and abolished unemployment, guaranteed housing (at an average cost of 3% of monthly income), high quality public transit at affordable prices, heavily subsidized basic foodstuffs, and arguably most importantly, LITERALLY DESTROYED NAZISM saving tens of millions of lives in the process.
Did the system have mistakes? Of course it did, and you won’t find richer criticism than within communist circles, because people actually read about the topic instead of getting our information from the CIA. But despite its flaws, it was still the most liberating and anti-imperialist project in human history, it uplifted hundreds of millions from literal destitute poverty under tsarist autocracy and these people gave themselves all of this progress, importantly, without exploiting the global south.
How can you hate in 2026 the main system that has shown itself capable of facing and destroying fascism?