this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2025
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If you'd actually read my post, you'd know my point wasn't about it being used "incorrectly".
Defeating the Nazis was an act of political violence, freeing slaves was an act of political violence, over throwing the feudal system was an act of political believe, driving out colonial empires is an act of political violence, enforcing property rights is an act of political violence, ceasing the means of production is an act of political violence.
See? This is exactly, exactly what I was talking about.
I mean we both know I’m talking about specific acts of political violence, but you are right in that I should have clarified.
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.
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. When I was on .ml I also frequently saw defense or denial of China using violence that way such as the infamous Tiananmen Square Massacre.
People from lemmy.ml love to shout that people who want them defederated are “capitalist” 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.
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.
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".
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 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.)
Sounds like you're a transphobe who got called out.
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.
Until Coca-Cola is its a government, no, that’s not authoritarianism. That doesn’t mean it’s good. Things can be bad without being authoritarianism.
Yeah you’re right I was caught between two phrasings and I mixed them up. I edited it to fix it. Thanks for pointing out my mistake!
Which was more authoritarian: slavery or freeing the slaves? Slaveowners were not the government, therefore, according to you, nothing they did could be considered authoritarian, right?
It seems pretty arbitrary to single out one single heirarchy and say that only that heirarchy is capable of being authoritarian.
Idk what you think we’re arguing about but I’m curious where this is going.
It seems pretty clear to me that applying the definition I gave previously of “authoritarian violence” as “state-perpetrated violence against citizens with ideas the state finds threatening”, slavery could be considered “authoritarian violence” but “freeing the slaves” couldn’t.
If you are specifically talking about the US Civil War, I do think that counts as “authoritarian violence” to the extent that the war was about stopping a group of citizens from rebelling against the government.
To be clear, I’m going off of the Wikipedia definition which defines “authoritarianism” as:
I read that as pretty specifically applying to governments, but I could see how you could apply the idea to describe things like anti-union efforts.
What? How? The state did not order people to own slaves, and the slavers could free their slaves at will. It seems pretty clear to me that the opposite is true, that private citizens were operating in way that most reasonable people would call authoritarian, but by your definition cannot be called authoritarian because it's only authoritarian when the state does it.
I suppose you could argue that the state failing to prevent individuals from performing authoritarian acts is a form of authoritarianism, but at that point the definition starts to break down. Is it possible for a state to be authoritarian through inaction? Suppose, for example, interracial relationships are technically legal, but every time one happens or is even suspected, a lynch mob strings someone up on a tree, and the government fails to prosecute.
If the state can be authoritarian through inaction, then at that point it becomes rather unclear what authoritarianism even means. You define it as, "state-perpetrated violence against citizens with ideas the state finds threatening." But if those people pose a genuine threat to others, then doesn't the state have an obligation to stop them in order to not be authoritarian, just as they do with the lynch mob in the previous example? And for that matter, isn't it authoritarian for the US to allow Coca-Cola to fund death squads, in the original example?
I don't think the term "authoritarian" defined in this way is useful or holds up under scrutiny.
Bwah bwah bwah what about coca cola, what about Gaza, what about south America, what about Iraq bwah bwah
The problem with tankies like yourself is that they can't recognise that the CCP is evil, Ukraine was not full of nazis needing to be invaded and not everything is western propaganda.
The US is a fucked up evil empire, Europe has a violent colonialist past and is still doing bad shit around the world, but your Communist Utopias are just misery spreading machines on everything they touch.
Do, uh, do you know which country it was that invaded Ukraine?
Yes, Russia
I fucking knew it, Lincoln was a soviet plant all along, fucking tankies.