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?
Imagine defending a state that set an arbitrary number of human lives to end for ideological reasons. Repugnant
And before you start on it I don’t believe any state should have the right to execute its citizens.
That wasn’t what happened, though. The soviets had discovered in the 1930s that not only was there a plot against the soviet state from within, but also severe corruption and remnants of the former ruling classes and their sympathizers in place. The soviets had set up means of internal investigation, and by and large managed to kick out corrupt officials from government. They found many guilty of treason, corruption, and other serious crimes, but the number of found guilty and sentenced to death exceeded their estimates, and hence it was called off.
The death penalty should be abolished, sure. However, socialist states, and especially the soviet union, are in a constant state of siege and infiltration. They weren’t killing random people willy-nilly.
Then why did you say that’s what happened? I quoted you exactly. Any state that plans to execute 70,000 of its own citizens I’m not going to support. Creating a arbitrary maximum shows a complete disregard for human life. It’s simply unacceptable.
That’s the problem. When the state has the right to execute people they can make the law what they need it to be in order to “legally” execute anyone they wish. The state is the law.
The state finding 700,000 people guilty kinda exemplifies the issue even if they didn’t carry out the sentences.
You claimed things like “it was done purely for ideology” and other bits I didn’t say, so I added context. There wasn’t a plan to execute the maximum limit, nor was the limit arbitrary. Further, the purges were popularly supported by the populace, because terrorism, infiltration, and assassinations were prevelant, including people like Kirov who were close to the top. The soviet system was democratic, the state was not above society.