The Soviet system used psychiatry as a weapon by diagnosing political opponents as mentally ill in order to confine them as patients instead of trying them in court. Anyone who challenged the state such as dissidents, writers, would-be emigrants, religious believers, or human rights activists could be branded with fabricated disorders like sluggish schizophrenia. This turned normal political disagreement into supposed medical pathology and allowed the state to present dissent as insanity.
Once labeled in this way, people were placed in psychiatric hospitals where they could be held for long periods without legal protections. Harsh treatments were often used to break their resolve. The collaboration between state security organs and compliant psychiatrists created a system where political imprisonment was disguised as medical care, letting the Soviet regime suppress opposition while pretending it was addressing illness rather than silencing critics.
This sounds very familiar to the CIA’s practices with MK Ultra… although in a different way.
Goes to show, that neither system would be optimal - and that it’s better to chase the path of democratic socialist movements.
democratic socialism is just capitalism but now its toll is on 3rd world. A congolese would die lifelong in a mine so a war veteran in america get his medical bills paid. Its still wage slavery
It’s crazy to me that many people think ‘this is what communism does’ when it’s actually what authoritarianism does. You can get authoritarianism all over the spectrum, in anything from communism to fascism.
This isn’t a feature of any political ideology – rather it’s a feature of letting sociopaths gain power.
The US is trying to do this now, what with declaring the bogeyman known as antifa a mental illness AND a terrorist threat.
Part of it is that the vast majority (all?) of the communist regimes of the 20th century pretty rapidly descended into authoritarian hellscapes (Democracy/Capitalism took a few decades to catch up…). So people tend to less say “Well. The horrors that unfolded in X were a result of a misapplication of the core tenets of communism” and instead “My family literally had to flee a communist regime because we were being ethnically cleansed”
Part of it is that Democracy/Capitalism won and very much built up Communism as a bogeyman for obvious political reasons.
And the last part is that… Communism fundamentally requires a central source of power/truth. You can’t have a managed economy without folk managing it. Which, inherently, centralizes power which is one of the big first steps towards authoritarianism. Similar to how Democracy fundamentally enables populism and Capitalism oligarchy.
Imagine not falling into the Orwellian hole, not perverting language with conflations and inversions.
Imagine “communism” was still used in the original sense as coined by anarchist political philosophers, at least 5 years before Marx ignored Bakunin and usurped it, stripped the freedom aspect, and handed it over to the tankies (and all the capitalists and imperialists gladly played along).
Imagine communism like Kropotkin and Bakunin would have meant it.
Fully decentralised. Maximally mutually freedom affirming.
Imagine people were so thoroughly availed education instead of indoctrination, and thus were immunized against such perversions of language and thought. Not confusing totalitarianism for [anarcho-]communism, nor fascism for democracy, just because some deceivers intentionally mislabeled them to usurp all power for themselves.
Imagine “democracy” really meant organised by the people, not re-presented by the oligarchs.
Imagine not falling into the Orwellian hole.
Imagine undoing generations of this deeply entrenched Orwellian corruption of language and thought.
*Dreamer*
I would be interested in seeing compiled statistics of how many fell without capitalist interventions.
The CIA themselves have stated how active they were in the 20th century with corrupting, breaking down, and ultimately overthrowing communist regimes and installing dictators.
But also socialism with worker owned co-ops and only infrastructure and regulations through a central government may somewhat be a good direction to go.
The crux seems to be that all forms of government are susceptible to authoriatarians because people themselves are very susceptible to authoritarian strong men and propaganda, inherently.
Anarchist communistic projects in Catalonia (1930s), anarchist Ukraine (around 1917), etc.: “Are we a joke to you?”
I don’t know much about Ukraine but I know the one in Catalonia had roving gangs of “law enforcers” who would execute “capitalists/fascists” without trial, so I’m not sure it’s an ideal to look up to.
It sure wasn’t perfect. But it was a libertarian socialist counter-example of revolutionary socialism to what the bolsheviks were doing.
Oh yeah, anarchists in Ukraine were doing fine until Bolsheviks decided there isn’t enough left unity
No, you don’t get it! The workers in Ukraine, who seized control of the means of production where somehow not class-conscious enough!
The workers can only
free themselvesbe freed by the most dedicated marxists!/s
The irony of the Makhnovist Movement is that it succeeded because of the Bolshevik Revolt in St. Petersburg and the subsequent splitting of Russian forces into the Red and White Armies.
But because Ukrainian agricultural production was so critical to the survival of pre-industrial Russia, the Reds weren’t inclined to let Ukraine exist independently any more than the Whites were.
Makhnovshchina gets to be a purist movement because it dies in infancy. Compare Ukraine to Yugoslavia, a country that embraced many of the same socialist tenants but managed to persist as an independent entity for half a century rather than half a decade, and suddenly they’re Evil Freedom-Hating Baby-Killing Communists again.
You’re never going to find half as many Tito-lovers on Lemmy as Nestor Makhno-lovers, because Tito died in his 80s while leading his country and Nestor died at 45 - alienated even from other anarchists - of tuberculosis as a penniless exile in France.
Meanwhile, the workers in all these countries vanish from view. No armchair Lemmy anarchist seems to care how Soviet-Era Ukraine prospered. Or how the Soviet collapse in 1991 brought in the corporate vultures to pick all these countries clean. We’re always and forever living in 1917, convinced a short-lived militia movement was the Secret Sauce to Real Working Anarcho-Communism, despite all historical evidence to the contrary.
You seem to make the mistake of subsuming the whole of anarchist Ukraine under Makhno. While he was vital for the civil war, he hardly was the architect of what happend in Ukraine.
The factory councils sure didn’t rely on him leading all of a sudden.
I don’t think that’s a mistake I made, because it was wrapped up long before I was born. But the Anarcho-Communists of the Ukraine failed to reconcile with their neighbors in Russia, despite having a host of overlapping priorities. There were clearly more Red Guards than Makhnovists. And so they lost to a numbers game long before a shot was fired.
Didn’t they? We saw what happened to organically constituted Workers Soviets without an armed defense in Shanghai and Paris. Makhno was pivotal in defeating the Whites when they came knocking. So his army was definitely instrumental to the movement lasting as long as it did. And there was even a generous overlap between membership of the Bolsheviks and Makhnovists, given how easily guys like Peter Arshinov changed sides.
How many Ukrainian factory councils slide effortlessly into USSR colors when Lenin came knocking?
Oh yeah man, the 1930s brought some real prosperity. But I’ve already gathered that you believe Soviet Union to be a tragically lost utopia, so you needn’t bother make up another wall of text in response.
It was bad that the Nazis invaded Ukraine, I agree. Postwar, they saw more economic growth in a decade than they’d experienced in the prior century.
Every industrial era country gets it’s golden age. The question is whether you’re allowed to enter the industrial era or you’re trapped in subsistence for the benefit of your neighbors.
Soviet governments prioritized industrialization, which is what made them rapidly improve in the postwar era.
That upsets a lot of anarchist diehards, because they are convinced the mean old Leninists simply cheated them out of an equivalent heyday
My guess is that the majority of communist regimes were killed by external countries.
Just a hunch, can’t bother to look at numbers though, but thinking about people like Sankara.
Good thing Americans didn’t ethnically cleanse in our history… Right.
Padme face
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
But thanks for showing your tankie ass. I have increasingly been assuming the shitjustworks instance is all right wing lunatics and libertarianisms. Good to know folk like you are trying to meet in the middle.
Lol I’m just saying we’re not exactly the good guys either and maybe ethnic cleansing has less to do with the governmental system in place and more to do with other aspects
Edit: Also, tankie really? Y’all motherfuckers don’t know what words mean jfc
Prrrr, shhh, let them have this. It’s been a pretty good thread, and they stand out as weird. It’s fine.
Hahaha fair enough, literally was in another thread the other day talking about exactly this, people throwing around tankie in contexts it makes literally no sense haha.
Your #1 mistake is assuming that users on a decentralized social media instance are a monolith.
* Hexbear has entered the chat *
Lemmy/the fediverse is a decentralized social media platform. Each instance is actually quite centralized. And, like all message boards, different cultures emerge. Whether it is because they have boards on given subjects (and shitjustworks has a shocking amount of “conservative” boards) or because people of a particular vibe have their friends join the same board.
I would say it is still very much at the dot ml level but I have increasingly noticed that most of the “The real problem are people who don’t support the troops” and similar dog whistles end up from shitjustworks.
Now if there was some kind of political ideology that focuses a lot on not letting power accumulate into the hands of the few… /hj
Anarchism mentioned without mentioning anarchism?
Congratulations! You got the hint!
Ikr?
On the topic of the US declaring dissidents mentally ill, The Adrian Schoolcraft story is a pretty horrific account of what it looks like when a modern cop tries to whistleblow.
Also I don’t think you even need sociopaths to wreck a hierarchy. Hierarchy collects power at the top of it’s organizational structure, and power by it’s nature becomes an end to itself, so hierarchy ensures abuse of it’s power. Honestly calling every human a sociopath who gives in to that One Ring-style allure might actually be the same kind of medicalization that the state does to it’s dissidents, in the opposite direction, but equally obfuscating. Yes it’s a human failure, but the organizational structure very much sets up humans to fail.
Respect to Mike C Rupert too.
And yeah, beware the overly structuralist approaches.
Very well put.
I have a discussion with my wife every so often about what our own little utopian island would be like, like how the government would be, how roads would be managed, what homes would be like, etc. I brought up the other day this exact point about how if there’s a position of wealth and power at the top controlling too much, then sociopths would gravitate towards that for the same of having power and wealth, which ruins the government system. It would have to be a heavily distributed system of government, but too distributed where it would make it difficult to implement standardizations, get stuff done, etc.
Idk how that would work exactly, because then you’d also have to make sure no greedy, power hungry Trump-likes get into a position with too much power. There has to be a way, though.
But it’s mostly sociopaths that insist on that hierarchy. Something like 3% of any population are sociopaths, and they’re not ‘mentally ill’, they just have a diminished capacity to feel empathy. Because of that, they don’t understand altruism and think the only way society can function is if everyone is in their place – if there are strict rules governing everything, because in their worldview, they see others like themselves, and they would need those rules to keep themselves in check.
It’s very similar to people who think without laws against raping and pillaging, everyone would rape and pillage. They’re mostly telling on themselves, as most of us rape all we’d like, which is never.
Billionaires are often sociopaths. That’s how they became billionaires – because it’s all me, me, me.
Sociopathy is just vernacular for ASD, which is medically considered a disorder, and in my opinion it’s just as prescriptively hierarchy-brained, scapegoated, and invented as ODD which is in some ways it’s inverse. They’re just medicalizations of what I feel is more or less normal human behavior when encountering either extreme of a hierarchy - The boot that does the stomping gets assigned ASD when things don’t go well. The one to be stomped gets assigned ODD when they resist.
I really think that hierarchy creates these personality types. They’re not necessarily pre-existing mental types in a hypothetical blank state society. And I think that our belief in them as “natural” just serves to further legitimize the power structure that actually generates them. To add: I don’t think you have to be at the top or bottom of a hierarchy to exhibit the behaviors associated with these labels, existing anywhere in the hierarchy can get you hierarchy-brained. Like America’s “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”, you can learn these traits before you arrive at the social stations they’re associated with.
I should emphasize, as far as I’m aware this is largely my own opinion.
Wait wait wait… ASD as in “Autism Spectrum Disorder”?
You’re equating sociopathy with autism? Like it’s just another word for the same?
o_O
Double empathy problem turned malignant much?
Am I misunderstanding what you’re saying? You say this is largely your own opinion, that these are the same, or that others say they’re the same?
These are very much not the same. Dangerous to conflate.
Unless also having narcissistic personality disorder or other cluster B stuff, autistics are typically more empathetic. It just doesn’t show the same way.
And yeah, as for hierarchy creating… Asperger history’s as nasty as the rest of the Nazi stuff manipulating people, in ways both intentional and unintentional. Lots of manipulations and “externalities”.
Maybe he meant ASPD (Antisocial Personality Disorder)?
It’s not, though. There are extremes in all human thought patterns, and some have extreme low empathy (sociopaths), whilst others have extreme high empathy (which can also be detrimental).
All humans are somewhere on that curve, but when we give people with very low empathy a lot of power, very bad things happen.
My point was that these extremes aren’t necessarily ‘mental illness’ – they’re natural extremes, but giving them a lot of power is absolutely detrimental to society, because they can’t understand how the rest of us work, and they need to inflict their unnecessary and unconventional rules on the rest of us.
Well I suppose the fact that I disagree is entirely besides the point, as either way we can trust that a critical mass of people will abuse a power hierarchy. It doesn’t really matter if, as I think, the hierarchy created them or if, as you think, they already exist and are merely drawn to it. A hierarchy will abuse it’s power.
Chicken and egg feedback loop.
I love your opinion, it makes much more sense to me.
Strong disagree on sociopathy being linked to a hierarchy.
The reality is that pretty much EVERY system of governance (that is meant to scale beyond five people in a field) needs a hierarchy of some form. Its the Whitest Kids U Know gag on anarchy where you quickly find out that there are people better suited to certain jobs and you need some degree of a social safety net to allow them to keep all of you alive (n that case, keeping a nuclear power plant from melting down… and then making t-shirts).
It is why there are basically no flat Democracies. You inherently end up in some form of a Democratic Republic where The People elect representatives who can then (theoretically) spend all day educating themselves on important issues and figuring out how to make an educated vote that represents the will of their constituents.
The core concept is just the reality of needing special skills and knowledge to make many decisions. There can be arguments that the people in charge of Directing The Military are still equal to the custodial staff keeping the streets clean but… moving on.
Where sociopathy comes into play is that those roles tend to inherently attract power mad people (there is a DIFFERENT WKUK gag on this…). But hierarchical systems are a natural knock on from just having to have a socioeconomic system that scales.
“Authoritarianism” is just when the government leadership disagrees with me, ideologically. Nobody who supports the current state thinks their government is authoritarian, because it isn’t asking them to do anything they wouldn’t be doing anyway.
Meanwhile, an “insurgency” is just a group of people acting against government leadership’s intended policies. So much of the modern policy state exists to confront the contradiction between an individual pursuing their own interests and a state system that insists some share of the population to suffer in order for the rest to prosper.
If you ask liberals whether they oppose “authoritarianism” you’ll get an enthusiastic “Yes!” But then you tell them “better go out there and start doing crimes” and they’ll recoil in horror, because they don’t see a benefit to violating rules they fundamentally support.
They did this 40 years ago, under Reagan, with the “War on Crime” bullshit. And before that under Nixon with the “War on Drugs”. And before that under Eisenhower with the… checks notes… ah, yes, “War on Illegal Immigration”. Damn that sounds familiar for some reason.
Yes. That is why I am staunchly liberal. Keep your hands off my fuckin rights which in turn means keep your hands off my fuckin neighbors rights. Given the most perfect benevolent leader the state will either corrupt or kill them, so we should rally against corruption AND the rich.
Edit: because words are hard
Authoritarianism is authoritarianism, no matter the flavor. If there is hierarchy in an organization, it is essentially inevitable that ultimately, one day, it will terrorize it’s members. The spectre of collected abused power is more patient than the vigilance of active membership can ever persistently be.