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What happened?
Everybody was free-dom fighting!
Technicals fast as lightning!
Prigo was dis-GUISING!
Old Bash doesn’t seem to be ballin today
Super embarrassing when HTS militants clap your RUSF ‘advisors’ and flex the looted AK-105s tricked out with western optics on Telegram, your Frogfoots and Hinds are smoking wrecks/busy in Ukraine instead of propping up your proxy dictatorship, and SAA et al run away so fast that warehouses of ATGMs get left behind intact.
And then there’s Wagner in Mali…
The Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)
Uh no thanks. It’s hard to be sympathetic towards any official side of that war because they’re all major assholes. Why do they only have socialists and islamists in those areas? Why hasn’t liberalism and freedom taken root in the Near East?
the fuck is wrong with socialism here?
To such a simple question I can offer a simple answer: Everything.
The real answer is not that simple of course. There’s some good ideas in socialism.
I can’t speak for others, but I’ve seen nothing but death and hate under the banner of socialism: USSR, China, Venezuela, etc, the list goes on. What most non-crazy people seem to mean by “socialism” is liberalism with a strong social safety net and public services (e.g. Nordic countries, “Democratic socialists” like Bernie Sanders, etc), which is a separate thing altogether.
Here’s the issue. Capitalist nations are afraid of socialism spreading, so they do everything they can to destroy them. The only ones who have every survived this pressure are authoritarian dictatorships who have isolated themselves from western influence. This creates a situation (that the media, being capitalist, spreads) where socialism always ends up as authoritarian. That doesn’t have to be the case, but it does when anything else is destroyed. It’s ignorant to think that this is the fault of socialism and not circumstances.
Whether socialism results in authoritarianism because of the ideology or circumstances is irrelevant, the fact is that socialism generally ends in authoritarianism. It turns out that it takes a lot of force to transition a country from capitalism to socialism, so it’s not surprising that this transition attracts authoritarians.
And yeah, it probably doesn’t have anything to do with socialism itself, but on that transition. We see the same for other radical transitions. The problem isn’t necessarily what you’re transitioning to, but the process of transition and who is involved. Most countries in the world aren’t socialist, so transitioning to socialism will be a radical change and will attract the worst kinds of leaders. So it’s fair to criticize socialism precisely because a radical transition to it is highly likely to be fraught with authoritarianism.
Even transitions to liberalism runs that risk, but transitioning to liberalism has had a much better track record than transitioning to socialism.
That said, country-wide forms of socialism (arguably “pure” socialism) where capitalism is eradicated naturally come with a distillation of power in the government to control the flow of goods, and that concentration of power is what attracts authoritarians and is what’s being opposed here. So socialism has a built-in problem that lends itself to authoritarianism. Yes, I know there are theoretical anarchist forms of socialism, but they usually have a transition period from an authoritarian system (big counter is libertarian socialism, but that’s pretty “pie in the sky” IMO, as much as I respect Noam Chomsky).
Whether socialism results in authoritarianism because of the ideology or circumstances is irrelevant, the fact is that socialism generally ends in authoritarianism. It turns out that it takes a lot of force to transition a country from capitalism to socialism, so it’s not surprising that this transition attracts authoritarians.
The reason is because capitalists oppose it. If the world was ruled by Fascists you’d be saying we should try anything else because anyone opposed to Fascists gets undermined. It’s a fault of capitalism, not socialism.
There have been many elected socialist democracies, but the West undermined them. We can have socialist countries without any issues. It just requires capitalists in the rest of the world not overthrowing them.
There have been many elected socialist democracies, but the West undermined them
We’re getting into very biased reporting territory.
Let’s take Venezuela as an example. Here’s the events as I understand them:
- Hugo Chavez takes power in 1999
- Venezuela becomes rich from oil (prices increased in early 2000s) and spends a ton on populist social programs (presumably to stay in power; corruption is rampant
- Rapid inflation and widespread shortages starting in 2010 due to over-reliance on imported goods and exported oil (oil prices started dropping in 2007) and no spending cuts after revenue shortfalls
- Maduro takes over in 2013 and is even more heavy handed and doesn’t ease spending or improve anything economically
- Protests and unrest, which the government violently repressed, especially in 2015 when oil prices fell dramatically
- Sanctions due to human rights violations started in 2014-ish but really picked up steam from 2017-2019, which deepened the problems they already had, especially since the government refused to cut spending
Western sanctions only became a thing years (more like a decade) after they were already in crisis. The crisis wasn’t caused by western countries, it was caused by mismanagement and corruption. Venezuela was held as a model for socialism under Chavez, but things only worked because of oil money.
I’m happy to discuss other countries as well.
America.
Radical liberal George Washington and his gang of discovery daddies overthrow the just and fair and healthy rule of the king
Now you know none of that is true, but that’s how you sound defending capitalism. All the death and destruction capitalism caused but they try to sell you on socialism being much worse. Which it is not, Capitalism has absolutely caused far more harm.
How about Guatemala.
Democratically elected leftist president who enacted a minimum wage and was going to redistribute land owned by The United Fruit Company to the people, since they owned most of the nation’s land.
Couped with the support of the CIA and replaced by a dictator who went on to lead a genocide of the native people.
For more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America
What most non-crazy people seem to mean by “socialism” is liberalism with a strong social safety net and public services (e.g. Nordic countries, “Democratic socialists” like Bernie Sanders, etc), which is a separate thing altogether.
Exactly, and specifically for this thread this is not quite the same socialism what Bashar al-Assad has been going for.
It’s funny how many of them seem to like national socialism
Can’t imagine why the Middle East doesn’t trust liberals, it’s a real goddamn mystery.
Injects oil directly into his veins
Liberalism and its “freedom” hasn’t taken root because:
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Liberals fucked the whole region in the first place.
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Shareholder profits are not going to inspire the masses to take up arms and fight.
Liberalism cannot provide a better future for anyone, so the people turn towards the groups who try to provide a change.
Extremely funny you say this in this situation since there is a group here fighting for freedom and democracy but they’re stinky reds, so you’ll hate them.
I liked the image I saw a few days back. Conservatives will play to your base needs (food/water, shelter, family), while Liberals/Socialists expect selflessness and assume all your needs are already met, including self-fulfilment.
Especially in the poorer and war torn regions of the world, the former is magnitudes more appealing. If non-extremist groups want to have a chance, they need to cover the bases first.
That’s a good elevator speech, can I borrow it? Christmas dinner with my mom’s side of the family is coming up quick.
Of course, lemme look for the original.
E: can’t find it anymore. It speaks about the top and bottom three layers of Maslow’s pyramid and how liberals expect transcendence and selflessness, while conservatives falsely promise the bottom three layers and act like the rest don’t matter.
Extremely funny you say this in this situation since there is a group here fighting for freedom and democracy but they’re stinky reds, so you’ll hate them.
The other things you said can be accepted as opinions, but here I’ll have to correct you: In this conflict, Bashar al-Assad is the socialist (Ba’athist), and the group “fighting for freedom and democracy”, as you put it, is Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham. They are a far-right islamist religious fundamentalist terrorist organization.
So essentially nobody in Syria is fighting for any sensible definition of democracy or freedom.
I was talking about AANES, not the “socialist” Assad or the clearly religious authoritarian groups in the area.
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I don’t think people are expressing sympathy.
Ask iran and iraq what happend to their Democratically elected leaders. Oh yeah, the west are massive gaslighters and couped many Democraticlly elected leader over fears of “communism” aka new age colonialism style resource extraction. The militants aren’t the cause their the symptom.
Yeah, Iran’s last democratically elected leader was Mohammed Mosaddegh, who upheld the most watered down and benign version of social democracy you can think of. He publicly opposed communism and really should’ve been an ally or at least a friend of the west.
CIA was out of their fucking minds when they fucked that one up.
There’s absolutely no reason iran isn’t our friend and Saudi Arabia (where literal wahabism is from which is a plague to the west but a bigger plague to the Muslims around the world with rich degenerate sheiks come over to tell us “authentic islam”) buttt mosaddegh nationalised oil, and to west, it never mattered about morals, human rights. It was about who could extract the most native resources and give to some white asshole nepo baby
