this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024
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Is killing Nazis authoritarian? If so is every "authoritarian" measure equal?
A government ordering the killing of any group (political, ethnic, etc) abandoning due process for the individuals is authoritarian.
This is a really weird interpretation of authoritarianism.... authoritarian regimes often enforce their authority through 'due' process.
I think the point op is making is that liberal democracies defer authority to capital and enforces it on their behalf. There's a temptation to consider liberalism to be less authoritarian because of this deferral but it's mostly just a slight-of-hand
Well said.
Another very illustrative example of this kind of deferral and obfuscation played by liberal democracies with their use of authoritarianism is the continued use of literal slave labor specifically in the US, which is even enshrined in the constitution. The sleight-of-hand (sleight-of-tongue?) comes from shifting the term slavery into euphemisms for prison labor. A slave population of "prisoners," the vast majority of whom are People of Color, mostly black people, as is the slavery tradition, who are actually pipelined from their schools to prison, and criminalized for engaging in the only means they have of economic independence. The authoritarian slave drivers will tell the general populace they are "bad people, felons" and deserve to be sequestered away from society to live solitary lives doing hard labor for no pay (2 cents an hour doesn't count as pay.)
There is nothing more "authoritarian" than having actual slaves, which is the major reason the prison-industrial complex exists in the US and has more prisoners (read: slaves) than any other country in the world both in absolute numbers and per capita by a ridiculously large margin. That is capitalist-style authoritarianism.
Right on.
I think lemmy is filled with a lot of people who (maybe) understand this in fewer words. Case-in-point: there are plenty here who are acknowledging this dynamic played out through landlords and ownership of private property.
Making the leap from understanding that type of authority to the authority utilized by AES countries takes some time for some. Similar in the way reactionaries interpret Foucault's description of institutionalized power as inherently negative, power exercised by the state isn't inherently bad, either, especially when the alternative is allowing capitalists to claim it for themselves.
Pointing out that suppressive authority exists even in the liberal democracies that nominally espouse 'freedom' is a good first step but far from the last. The Tienanmen square thing is.... well it definitely gets in the way of that conversation. It's a bit of a socialist's Godwin's Law.