The longer you wear the mask of a troll, the more your face comes to conform to that visage.
Stranger
Yes, but we’ve moved from doing that to snatching people off the streets with masked “law enforcement”. The situation is getting worse.
Where do you think that “murdering the enemies of the state” process starts?
Godwin himself said comparing Trump to Hitler is appropriate.
{GOLF CLAP} 
You can’t axiomatically stick an equals (=) sign between “authoritarian” and “communist.” It usually works that way, because people don’t naturally share, except and unless they are sure everyone else is, but it isn’t necessary.
There are several democratic countries that have freely chosen socialism, with isn’t exactly communism, but it’s a similar idea: “from each, according to his ability; to each, according to his need”; (an anathema in the US). The government has to collect and redistribute when it’s happening on a national scale, but it can still be a freely chosen system.
For that matter, “democracy” & “capitalism” are not axiomatically partners, just because they go together here (for the time being, anyway).
I agree. I would go so far as to say that communism got unlucky in that it ended up with initial adapters like Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong, while capitalism, at least as it’s currently practiced in the developed western nations and the US in particular, got lucky in that initial adapters included people like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
Authoritarian regimes get ‘strongman’ rulers, who by the very nature of the way they rule, surround themselves with yes-men (and women) and only see and hear what they want to. As a result they never take note of negative feedback that might cause them to change the course of bad behavior that is negatively affecting their state, and eventually will lead to their fall from power. So Communism, as practiced, didn’t get ‘unlucky’ with its rulers, it got the exact rulers that regimes such as them attract. This is why authoritarian rule never works (in the sense that it leads to good living and prosperity for anybody but its ruling class, and then only temporarily), and it never lasts (although unfortunately it can take years of its people suffering or wars to unseat the authoritarians).
I’m pretty sure the “reasoning” process was “Russia = good”, “the USSR flag is Russian”, “therefore the USSR was good”.
Funny thing is I’ve seen leftists do the same thing from the opposite direction and insist that modern Russia is a bastion of socialism. For some people “Russia” is a symbol and they refuse to engage with the reality behind it.
It’s inevitable in practice because any attempt at entirely reshaping a society according to an ideology will either end up authoritarian or fail when people who disagree with the vision refuse to go along. Democratic socialism can work because it allows room for the existence of dissenters, full-on Communism has no such room.
It’s less about the economic side of things than about Communism’s utopian goal of remaking all of society according to a unanimous ideological vision. Any such utopian scheme will end up either a failure or an authoritarian state.
ISTM, and I am only musing, that the whole “better dead than red!” crowd saw the fall of Communism/Soviet Union back then with Gobachev and Walesa, and said “Yay! We won! Sooooooo, we need a new enemy now.” Consequently they turned inward. With Murdoch and Gingrich leading the way, they focused their attention on making the Democratic party “the enemy”. (Not just the opposition, a very important distinction.)
That said, I don’t really see voters/supporters as having the cognitive firepower to parse a authoritarian vs. democracy debate. Instead, for them, it’s about “who am I against!” rather than “what am I in favor of!” Currently, they don’t really really want to see capitalist democracy go away, but they are happy that their perceived enemies (Democrats/Liberals/Feminists/Immigrants…need I go on?) get beat up. Classic cut off nose to spite face behavior.
What I meant was that, AFAIK, communism doesn’t require an authoritarian form of government. There’s no reason, in principle, that one can’t have a nation with a democratically elected government that runs the economy on a system of communism rather than capitalism. The Soviet Union never had that, and yes, it’s true when they got someone predisposed to such democratic reforms (Gorbachev), they decided (unfairly IMHO) that he sucked and got rid of him. But that all has to do with the authoritarian aspects of the Soviet system, not the communism.
Plus, how many of this subculture have ever even known what “Communism” actually is? I mean it’s always been a consistent pattern with these people that they condemned things as Communist/socialism/woke/whatever without any justification other than either they didn’t like it or their opponents supported it. They’ve never even cared about logical consistency, much less whether what they were calling “Communist” had anything to do with actual Communism.
“Communism” was just their version of screaming “witchcraft” or “heresy” when looking for someone to persecute. It’s all about us versus them, as you say; they never needed to actually understand it for that.
I agree. What’s changed now is who they see as us and who they say as them. In the old days it did break down by economic system, even if the rubes didn’t understand the details of the systems involved. Now the MAGAs tend to think that those rulers who are authoritarian, and the people who support them, are “us” while those who are democratically elected, and the people who support them, are “them”. That’s why they like Putin, the Arab monarchs, Netanyahu, and even to a certain extent the Kims of North Korea*, but hate democratically elected leaders that oppose authoritarianism.
*. To the extent it doesn’t apply, such as with Xi Jinping and the Ayatollah, it’s a matter of “they hate us so we hate them”.
I’m admittedly not a scholar of the writings and theories of Karl Marx, so I’m not really qualified to say for sure, but it’s an interesting question. Certainly Communism as practiced was very different from true Marxism. Yet, if I recall from dimly remembered History classes, Marx called for an overthrow of the elite class by the Proletariat (working) class, followed by a ‘dictatorship of the Proletariat’, at least until a true communist, classless society could evolve. Marx apparently thought that the Proletariat, having been subjugated and exploited for years, therefore knowing how bad it was, would act as a ‘benevolent dictatorship’. But in practice it becomes a case of ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’. I think it’s an ideology based on altruistic beliefs, but by its nature is ripe for exploitation and corruption.
It get’s a little far afield for this thread, but I do have. a hypothesis regarding the “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” problem.
I think that what almost always happens with class warfare is that the proletariat almost always aim at the wrong target. Even when they aim at the correct target, they only do so for a short period of time and then go back to aiming at the wrong targets. There’s a few examples where they got rid of the actual oppressors, such as during the French and Russian revolutions. But mostly what happens is that the owners of the means of production manage to successfully get the proletariat to blame educated professional / the intellectual elite / those who managed to get rich by their own efforts, as well as various marginalized minorities. As such the proletariat end up right back where they started because those people (the intellectual elite and marginalized minorities) aren’t the ones who are actually oppressing them. The power really does rest with the proletariat. But it doesn’t matter how powerful one’s weapon is if it’s aimed in the wrong direction.
Did you actually read the thread before replying or just stop at post 6? Because 1) You’re linking about the exact same point @crowmanyclouds linked to in literally the very next post 2) which again is irrelevant because we’re not comparing TFG to Hitler, we’re comparing ICE to the NKVD, or in @crowmanyclouds case ICE to The Final Solution and 3) murdering enemies of the (single party) state was the entire reason the NKVD was created while ICE, to repeat myself yet again, shitty as it is has operated since 2003, including under several Democratic administrations. So, you know, you might want to actually familiarize yourself with how the process of murdering ‘enemies of the state’ actually happens with either states that do that in general or the NKVD in particular. Because to repeat myself yet again, you’re not doing the rest of anti-MAGA crowd any favors by agreeing to the preposterous statement that there is little difference between ICE and the NKVD.
Or you know, you could have just kept reading to post 8, where I already pointed all of this out.
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Yes, I read the entire thread.
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I disagree with your interpretation. Deal with it.
So, you felt the need to link to the exact same thing as was linked to in the post below the only post you responded to was because…
Not interested in engaging with you on this.
I didn’t compare ICE to The Final Solution. I compared one fascist regime to another one.
Yes, you did:
And how many people do you think will actually ever come back alive from there?