Many people on lemmy.ml deeply respect and admire authoritarian governments and organizations.

Iran, China, North Korea, Soviet Union…

The West has many flaws. But our flaws are nothing compared to these guys.

Iran hangs homosexuals. Iran shot 30,000 people in less than than 2 weeks. The Soviet Union had to build a fucking Iron wall to prevent people from escaping. The Soviets lied about the Chernobyl nuclear explosion. China censors the internet. China wants to eliminate Islam. North Korea is a totalitarian hellscape. Watching anime is a crime.

Why is lemmy.ml so fascinated with authoritarians?

  • Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1211·
    1 month ago

    I’ve been thinking a lot of about this and my educated guess would be - rising distrust with current institutions and/or bad experience with societal failures.

    If you look through history of .ml posters they are mostly in western europe or US and there’s always a specific grievance they have like the current societal system did them dirty. Most normal people just realize that all systems are imperfect and sometimes you take an L and continue but there’s this trend of sore losers extremists in both far right and far tankie left that just have full identity capture and radicalization because of a one or few conflicts.

    I almost fell into these pits myself several times because being owned by a system that doesn’t give you sufficient tooling or voice to feedback on does feel really terrible. Especially these days when burying issues is so easy under automation, culture of indifference and political unseriousness.

    However, imo most of these are just weak people and I don’t necessarily say this as an attack but all societies have weak links that can turn to extremism but that just means we should do a better job correcting for this.

    TL;DR: trauma

    • Simon_Shitewood@lemmy.ml
      92·
      1 month ago

      Most normal people just realize that all systems are imperfect and sometimes you take an L and continue

      I almost fell into these pits myself several times because being owned by a system that doesn’t give you sufficient tooling or voice to feedback on does feel really terrible

      My great aunt in yhwh’s wrath, you have been traumatised. How do you not recognise your behaviour as a trauma response?

      • FatherPeanut@pawb.social
        32·
        1 month ago

        I don’t believe that makes it any less valid, even if it is the case. Those are systemic things, which if one could be morphed by them, it’s fair to say others are too.

        • Simon_Shitewood@lemmy.ml
          7·
          1 month ago

          It completely invalidates their claims - their spirit has been completely crushed and subsumed, to the point their words could be spoken by a serf or slave defending their systems. They are projecting their own perceived weakness onto others and telling themselves they’re actually strong for breaking.