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.
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.