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Autocrat and authoritarian now means independent from the US and refusing to be vassalized.
(www.theatlantic.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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Any country that maintains independence and an oppositional character must maintain a strong state, develop a military, and engage in censorship. All 3 get lumped in the vague and clearly now useless category of authoritarian, meaning the US will attempt to destroy your country and people and its citizens will think this is helping "freedom" and "democracy" and "defense" and just what smart people do. Or they will play the ancillary role of demonization while maintaining an anti-war pretense that somehow always means materially supporting American war criminals.
Censorship is definitely a sign of authoritarianism, and a strong state might be too, depending on what you mean by it, but not necessarily? And as liberal democracy seem to be the 'goal' of states to achieve, authoritarian is not at all a useless category since it's the opposite of democracy.
Bourgeois democracy is the goal of capitalist states because it is democracy for the ruling class only. Liberal democracies have strong states and engage in censorship. They excecute, imprison, or discredit political dissidents. The difference isn't what they do but who they target and who benefits.
All AES states are democracies, they aren't liberal democracies and they don't benefit only the bourgeois. That's why say China is considered, "evil authoritarian" while the US and its "liberal democracy" are considered good by libersls like you despite the US actively engaging in genocide, proxy wars, running concentration camps on its border, sanctioning any nation that seeks independence from its hegemony, and persecuting political dissidents.