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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.
In reality, despite what the dictionary says, "authoritarian" means, "organized group we don't like".
Censorship is ubiquitous it just comes in different forms. The most powerful and insidipus is the kind you don't even think it censorship. For example, will you lose your job for standing up for Palestine? Will you get paid to be a journalist if you are too critical of the ruling class? When the electronic commons is actually controlled by private corporations, do you really have online speech protections? Is sinophobia the only reason TikTok is getting threatened with a ban? Whose voices are heard at city council meetings? Who gets the ear of politicians?
These are all forms of censorship, but most of them are treated as normal, even righteous and justified.
States that fight for independence rapidly find that the global monopolistic empire automatically dominates all media narratives and funds NGOs to undermine their projects. Do you expect them to let that expand and destroy their country? Censorship is an expression of authority, but does that mean it is always wrong or particularly bad? Forcing out invaders is also an expression of authority, as is organizing defense, social programs, literacy campaigns.
The strong states are usually just doing the functions of private industry in "non-authoritarian" countries but in a way that better serves the people and are resilient to US interference.
Liberal democracy is the most effective producer of genocide in history and is really just rule by the capitalist class that pretends to be of the masses. States seeking independence from the US must eschew it by definition, as they will otherwise be coerced into the US-dominated order.
Liberal democracies are, in reality, the most authoritarian countries. They impose the interests of the capitalist ruling class based on military and financial power with little regard for the horrors it inflicts. But you are correct about how the term is used, what it means despite its definition - "this is what we do and it is good, the system we don't like is bad".
I dont have time to look for it right now but maybe somebody else will recall that study that shows something like 20% of public favored policy becoming law vs IIRC ~60% of corporate favored policy.
Yes I think it's this one: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B
Smarmy liberal defenders of capital tried to do a media push to criticize it but the authors defended it well.