Calling the 1989 incidence in Beijing the Tianenmen Square Massacre is like calling the 2021 incidence in Washington D.C. The Freedom Plaza Killings where the Democratic Party ruthlessly slaughtered innocent civilians after a peaceful protest, with the exception that the protesters in 2021 were more reasonable and less violent than the rioters in Beijing. Especially for the fact that when Washington decided to send the military in, the Jan 6 rioters, did not decide to stay and try to block the US military from entering the Capitol or Plaza.

I won’t be surprised to eventually see an actual equivalent type (demands from pro-palestine protesters for educational reforms) of protest happening in the US with far higher causalties as a result.

I mean we both know I’m talking about specific acts of political violence

Yes, which was my point. These definitions always have some implicit carve out exception to allow the kind of political violence that the person giving them agrees with to “not count”.

To be clear what makes it authoritarian is when it’s the state/government/leadership that is using acts of violence against citizens with political ideas that would threaten their power.

This would include collecting taxes, enforcing national borders, enforcing private property, all gun control measures, suppressing domestic terrorists and militias, implementing a particular voting system and then enforcing the result, conscription, and indeed, enforcing the concept of “citizen” vs “non-citizens” in the first place. But, again, you’ve cut out an expectation for political violence you agree with already.

And tankies get the name specifically from either defending or denying that specifically the Soviet Union used violence to suppress attempts to leave their union.

And here’s yet another post-hoc definition of tankie that does not actually line up with how anybody uses the term. Or are you willing for me to ping you to chime in every time someone calls me a tankie for something that has nothing to do with the USSR keeping Soviets in the union (incidently, there isn’t a country on earth that will willing let parts of it leave.)

and hexbear has decided accusing people of being anti-trans is their move, but those are simply strawmen, and really poorly constructed ones at that.

Sounds like you’re a transphobe who got called out.

when it’s the state/government/leadership that is using acts of violence

So when a corporation uses or sponsors acts of violence it’s not authoritarianism? I guess Coca-Cola-funded fascist death squads are just smol bean libertarians fighting the oppressive tankie socialists!

You can’t even get your talking points in order. The main people on lemmy.ml are anti-capitalist, they would accuse those who would censor them of being anti-communist.

And tankies get the name specifically from either defending or denying that specifically the Soviet Union used violence to suppress attempts to leave their union.

I fucking knew it, Lincoln was a soviet plant all along, fucking tankies.

.world is full of them.

The answer is that most didn’t seek independence originally. The referendum on the preservation of the USSR, shortly before its dissolution, wanted it to persist. in looking at Soviet Nostalgia, most say they were better off under Socialism than Capitalism and say the dissolution was a bad thing.

If you keep going with Blackshirts and Reds, it gets to the events surrounding its dissolution, such as the botched coup attempt, liberalization in order to try to make up for spending so many resources on the Cold War, and more, though not a full picture. If you genuinely want to know more after you finish Blackshirts, I recommend Parenti’s 1986 lecture, which is even more entertaining because Parenti is a fantastic and passionate speaker. I’d throw on Do Publicly Owned, Planned Economies Work? as an additional articls, around 30 minutes to read, going over the merits of the Soviet Economy and why it was dissolved.

All of that is well and good, but not enough to say that the Soviets were the good side. It’s also necessary to truly look at how disgustingly evil the United States is, and for that I recommend the podcast Blowback. If you listen to Blowback, there will be nothing but hatred and disgust of the highest order for the United States, from lying about WMDs to thoroughly destroy Iraq, to dropping more bombs on Korea than in the entire Pacific Front of World War 2, to countless war crimes intentionally done to make populations suffer and no longer support their governments just to make it stop.

For the same reasons California or Texas keep entertaining independence ballot initiatives every 4 years; internal politics.

Bit of a cheap pivot, isn’t that? Not all nationalist movements are good, many are highly reactionary, even fascist in nature. On the whole, Soviet foreign policy was cleary in the interests of the working class, from helping Cuban workers liberate themselves from the fascist Batista regime, to helping Algeria throw off the colonizing French, to helping Palestinians resisting genocide, to assisting China with throwing off the Nationalists and Imperialist Japan.

China, Russia and the US are all authoritarian states and none of them are your friends

I guess it would be hard to be friends with a country, it’s quite big… with lots of people.

Jokes aside, this is the equivalent of sticking your head in the sand. You’re more concerned with sounding like a good person rather than investigating the truth. Using the word authoritarian, just like how many liberals use the word totalitarian or tankie, is just a way to generate self-flattering, psuedo-intellectual discussions based on pure idealism.

deleted by creator

Everyone I Don’t Like is Authoritarian: A Guide to Online Political Discourse

The term authoritarianism is utterly meaningless because all governments rely on coercion to maintain their authority. The state is fundamentally an instrument that’s used by the ruling class to maintain its dominance. The whole notion that political systems can be neatly categorized into authoritarian or democratic binaries is deeply infantile.

The reality is that every government derives its authority from its monopoly on legal violence. The ability to enforce laws, suppress dissent, and maintain order is derived from control over police, military, and judicial systems. Whether a government is labelled authoritarian or democratic, the fundamental basis of its power lies here. Therefore, the only meaningful questions to ask are which class interests it represents, and to what extent can it be held accountable to them.

What ultimately matters is which class controls the institutions of state violence. In capitalist democracies, the government represent the interests of the economic elites who fund political campaigns, own media outlets, and control key industries. Western public lacks the mechanisms necessary to hold the government to account, and the ruling class is disconnected from the broader population. That’s precisely what’s driving political discontent all across western sphere today. Meanwhile, in so-called authoritarian regimes, the ruling party serves the working class as seen in countries like China, Cuba, or Vietnam. Hence why there is widespread public trust in these government and they enjoy broad support from the masses.

No problem. There are many on Lemmy.world for sure who use it that way, same with Reddit.

Hitler proudly claimed to have “stolen Socialism from the Marxists,” meanwhile the Soviets and Nazis hated each other. The Soviets held to Marxism and worked to uplift the Proletariat, while the Nazis held to an incoherent ideology only explainable by what it served, wealthy Capitalists.

Again, calling things “fascism” that don’t meet the definition just obfuscates what you’re trying to talk about.