General Politics Thread

Communism isn't the only ideology that lends itself to authoritarianism. Nationalism is another one, arguably more important within Russia today.

Arguably? Russia hasn't been even pretending to be communist for decades.

Russia is a right-wing authoritarian nationalist state, anyone trying to claim it's still communist is lying, deluded or stupid.

Well, I was being polite...

It's like, a real thing that tankies claim Russia is still communist in order to justify supporting their invasion of Ukraine.

Maybe don't feed into that narrative, it's not great.

I is impossible to express any opinion whatsoever without feeding someone's narrative somewhere. That is no reason not to express an opinion. Just be open to being wrong.

Most tankies I have see dosent belive russia is comunism, but does engage in idea Ukraine is a nazi infested hellhole.

If anything in narratives are about, we see how narrative of "we beat the Nazis" were used by US and now Russia to said "we are the good guys, we cant do not wrong" this feeling after vietnam and was even dash harder in afganistan, it seen Russia still cling to it.

If this is intended primarily as a response to my analysis of Marxist-Leninism authoritarianism: You're 100% correct, but it's not especially relevant to what I was saying either. I was talking about The Soviets and Marxist Leninism generally, not modern Russia.

Putin is absolutely an authoritarian, but his authoritarianism comes from a different place than someone like Lenin or Stalin or Mao. He seems to admire Stalin to some extent, but mostly as a guy who "made his country great".

He's so insistent on driving the 'nazis' out of the Ukraine one wonders if his authoritarism is actual blind spot or whether he's purposefully playing up the accusations knowing full well how hes acting.

He's so incredibly obviously playing it up. It genuinely does not make sense if that's his motivation. If your reaction to "hey, this country seems to have a problem with Nazis" is to try and conquer it and repeatedly threaten genocide, you are not actually trying to root out the Nazis. There's a billion other methods to use, literally none of which he tried.

It's the only non-horrible motivation left that he can bullshit, after the "I don't want NATO on our borders" thing crashed and burned super hard due to it being obviously not why.

There was a referendum in Russia (in 2008, I think) about who people thought was the most "influential" person in the history of the country.

It is claimed that Stalin came in first, but Putin did not like it, so the result was modified to Stalin being in third place, while the top position went to Prince Aleksandr Nevsky.

Edited by jawal on Feb 4th 2024 at 12:37:01 PM

I suspect he specifically used Nazism because he knew his actions would draw comparison to fascism. So he played that card first specifically to weaken that form of accusation. The far-right will support him, including actual card-carrying Nazis. However, by claiming he's anti-Nazi he might cause some confusion in the people who'd be opposing him.

It also plays to the narrative Russia has been instrumental in the defeat of the Nazis.

To be fair, Russia was indeed instrumental in the defeat of the Nazis.

Edited by jawal on Feb 4th 2024 at 2:44:15 PM

I'm not denying that, I'm talking about the propaganda value.

Russia invented the political disinformation playbook. If you assume everything he says is theater, you will be right more often than wrong.

Basically, the assumption under Marx and Engels was that the proletariat as a class would rise up to impose their revolution on the bourgeoisie. What they did not expect was proletariat-on-proletariat terror.

Lenin's innovation was the vanguard party, who would take control of the revolution and lead the working class to class consciousness. And what he didn't expect was that the people might not follow the vanguard party. He ultimately decided that the vanguard party would suppress those parts of the proletariat who wouldn't get with the program, at which point it morphed into a somewhat unusual (at the time) form of autocracy.

Edited by Ramidel on Feb 5th 2024 at 2:24:00 AM

Is there a name for fascism, but religiously based?

Clerical Fascism is the technical term.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Mar 25th 2024 at 10:37:38 AM

Clerical fascism is the most common term when referring to the mid-20th century "fascist era" movements. Nowadays it depends on the sect, and they usually have their own terms for themselves.

Here's a question: Does Pol Pot's variation of "Communism" have a specific name, like how the North Koreans have Juche?

And does it have any modern adherents? I mean, I'd imagine not many.

No, the Khmer Rouge identified themselves as Communists without any particular category name. And I'm pretty sure nobody is currently claiming allegiance to them, though there were a few parties that joined Cambodia's democracy that were headed by ex-KR leaders. (Anyone who used them for inspiration would probably call themselves Maoists, anyhow - he's a much better-known symbol.)