this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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All governments are inherently authoritarian by their nature, but there's a scale and I think in most people's minds there's a line.
The line is probably drawn where people are prosecuted or even killed when they publicly criticise the ruling regime, where you have to "escape" to simply leave, where there's a culture of fear that your neighbour or friends or even family could report you for disagreeing with the government. More often than not there's no way for the public to change the government through democratic means.
Ok, but if that's the case, why are we drawing a line at a nation's internal population and disregarding their external policies? The USA killed three million people in the War in Iraq, including Iraqis who were very critical of the American presence. The USA has assassinated Latin American presidents for speaking out against the USA and replaced them with more America-friendly dictators. And yet everyone who talks about authoritarianism doesn't include western nations in their discussion, they instead make up a cartoon idea of what countries outside the west are like. Your definition of what is or isn't tankie/authoritarian has some kind of nationalist bias built into it.
Every time someone describes what authoritarianism is, it makes me think that America and the EU are the worst perpetrators of this behavior, but they mainly export all their violence rather than use the worst of it domestically. Domestically they use private sector means to distribute violence, such as poverty, prisons, and the facilitation of ambient racism.
This reminds me of the dividing line that liberals use, which is when they say things like "that dictator killed HIS OWN PEOPLE." As if killing people externally is more excusable crime?
And even with lib logic, the US kills its own people who speak out against the government.
See Fred Hampton, the suspicious number of Ferguson protest leaders who have since died in strange ways, etc.
Unless there’s a certain criteria which determines who are your own people…
Because authoritarianism is about the internal control of its own populace, not how a nation state acts against other nation states.
The illegal invasion of Iraq wasn't authoritarianism. And I'm not going to start defending the actions of any nation that assassinates other leaders to try and get them under their influence.
I think there's very few western nations that fit that line I described in an earlier comment. That's not to say none have authoritarian traits, the UK is always criticised for being a bit too much of a surveillance state, for example.
Obviously killing people externally or internally is bad, but it's more shocking in the same way that a parent murders their own child.
If invasions, sanctions, assassinations, and complete immiseration of other nations isn't authoritarian then what is it? Why are we arbitrarily deciding there's a distinction with how a country's internal and external policies? These things inform one another. If a nation like America is doing far worse things than authoritarianism, except externally, why can't we say that's what it is?
That makes no sense. Joseph Biden is not my dad and my shared nationality with him means nothing because he represents an economic class at war with my own. Was Hitler the father of German Jews? What the fuck are you talking about
I literally just said above. Why are you arguing about the definition of it? It's like you're trying to fit western nations under the term because you don't like them to try to make a point.
Yeah they do fit the definition, because the distinction between external and international policy you're making is arbitrary and meaningless. I'm a communist. My nation is the working class.
No they don't fit the definition, it's not meaningless or arbitrary. I don't know why you're arguing this, it's not like I'm defending the actions of western nations here, or even labelled any particular countries as being authoritarian.
No idea what the point of saying this is, but just to provide some useless and irrelevant facts to this discussion, the telescopic ladder I have is 3 metres long.
I've got an easier one for you that should help you to understand. The policy of colonies regarding the population within its borders counts as "internal", don't they? What shall we say for the colonial occupation of Afghanistan? Shall we call this liberal?
Come to think of it, what do you think of non-citizen permanent residents, because America sure likes killing those within its borders and treating the rest quite brutally.
I'm not American and have no issue criticising them on their actions through history. I don't even know why you're bringing them up though? I just talked about what people define as an authoritarian state and you've gone off on some anti US tangent.
There was disagreement over if the US fits the label
I don't know if there is such a thing as a perfectly free, truly democratic society wherein everyone is capable of existing free of oppression lol, but I think there's definitely a spectrum of authoritarian policy and sentiment, often correlated with nationalist and fascist fervor.
I may, as a person of color, experience more oppression in a country where I do not fit the standard vision of what a citizen looks like, and less in a country wherein which I do meet that criteria. That's usually more an issue with nationalist rhetoric than systems of governance - unless that nationalism is codified and enforced by the government, which is the case in many governments that I would consider "more authoritarian." America is one that has tended towards that, historically. Certainly, though, there are others that have also instituted systems explicitly designed to oppress.
I'd say, in general, I have many rights and privileges in current-day America that a truly authoritarian government wouldn't allow. And that's not to say that I think America is the greatest, or even good lmao. We're constantly on the verge of disenfranchisement, and the fact that we're constantly fighting for things that should be just baseline isn't exactly a good look. But, in all, I'm allowed to openly state my thoughts in the court of public opinion, I'm able to vote to elect a representative, able to practice religion as I'd like, etc.
For sure, the validity of all of that is affected deeply by the corruption of capital in those arenas, but there's something to be said about the power to openly share ideas and influence fellow citizens without active censorship. Keeping in mind things like COINTELPRO and Fred Hampton, etc, I obviously can't say in good conscience that the government has never censored it's citizens, but the purported adherence to the first amendment and being "the land of the free" at least makes them work for it.
Sorry for the novel lol. It's a complicated subject and there's a lot of nuance to try and tease out