I was browsing reddit mindlessly when I saw this maybe ~10 posts down from the top of r/all, and I kind of snapped:
I am not a communist. I think violent communist revolt would result in, at the very least, a period of significant loss of life and economic destruction. Successful communist revolts usually (but not always) produce brutal, authoritarian police states.
Yet it it seems to me like violent communist uprisings are fairly overtly supported by a sizable fraction of the American populace, perhaps 1-5%. When I talk to the larger fraction of the American populace that does not actively sympathize, they appear to be much, much more comfortable with this than I am. They speak as if the FBI was somehow omnipotent, or as if the internet has removed the possibility for popular revolt inside countries with strong civil liberties.
This optimism is insane. Authoritarian factions are adversaries. They are run by real people with real political ambitions who attempt to move around what you think are the tripwires. They will mask themselves even to internal supporters as “social democracy” or “alternative right” or what-ever, and take off the mask right as they are lining you up against a wall. When they do, our turtle-paced glorified three-letter bureaucracies stand a real and substantial chance of being too slow to react.
A large part of this procedure is the revolutionary alerting everyone of their pending revolution before anything actually illegal happens. Statements like the above accomplish a task in this vein: demonstrate widespread sympathy and tolerance for murder. They serve as an important coordination mechanism, and that is the job they are performing in the above post.
In the general case I think most people intuitively understand why this should make everyone nervous. If 1-5% of the United States were upvoting posts on Reddit explaining how they “unironically” support a fascist uprising and gassing all Jewish Foreign Agents, well… finish the sentence. I would at least not have to explain why this political propagandist threatening to kill a large number of people is a bad omen and why it’s a cause for concern.
So I’m asking: what can I do now to help prevent this from happening? I don’t want to wait ten years so the problem can get 10-
% worse. I don’t want to deflect by saying that the meteor has got at least 30 more years on its flight path before it kills 25% of the people in my hometown. I want to act now.
[Question] How to prevent authoritarian revolts?
I was browsing reddit mindlessly when I saw this maybe ~10 posts down from the top of r/all, and I kind of snapped:
I am not a communist. I think violent communist revolt would result in, at the very least, a period of significant loss of life and economic destruction. Successful communist revolts usually (but not always) produce brutal, authoritarian police states.
Yet it it seems to me like violent communist uprisings are fairly overtly supported by a sizable fraction of the American populace, perhaps 1-5%. When I talk to the larger fraction of the American populace that does not actively sympathize, they appear to be much, much more comfortable with this than I am. They speak as if the FBI was somehow omnipotent, or as if the internet has removed the possibility for popular revolt inside countries with strong civil liberties.
This optimism is insane. Authoritarian factions are adversaries. They are run by real people with real political ambitions who attempt to move around what you think are the tripwires. They will mask themselves even to internal supporters as “social democracy” or “alternative right” or what-ever, and take off the mask right as they are lining you up against a wall. When they do, our turtle-paced glorified three-letter bureaucracies stand a real and substantial chance of being too slow to react.
A large part of this procedure is the revolutionary alerting everyone of their pending revolution before anything actually illegal happens. Statements like the above accomplish a task in this vein: demonstrate widespread sympathy and tolerance for murder. They serve as an important coordination mechanism, and that is the job they are performing in the above post.
In the general case I think most people intuitively understand why this should make everyone nervous. If 1-5% of the United States were upvoting posts on Reddit explaining how they “unironically” support a fascist uprising and gassing all Jewish Foreign Agents, well… finish the sentence. I would at least not have to explain why this political propagandist threatening to kill a large number of people is a bad omen and why it’s a cause for concern.
So I’m asking: what can I do now to help prevent this from happening? I don’t want to wait ten years so the problem can get 10-