this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2024
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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?
Can't imagine why the Middle East doesn't trust liberals, it's a real goddamn mystery.
Injects oil directly into his veins
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
Liberalism and its "freedom" hasn't taken root because:
Liberals fucked the whole region in the first place.
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.
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.
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.
the fuck is wrong with socialism here?
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.
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
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).
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.
We're getting into very biased reporting territory.
Let's take Venezuela as an example. Here's the events as I understand them:
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
Arévalo wasn't socialist, he was actually anti-communist and generally pro-capitalist. He had way more overlap with FDR than Stalin or Castro.
That wasn't "capitalists keeping the socialists down," it was cronyism and FUD from United Fruit Company, which Eisenhower bought into.
Hence why I said leftist, yes. It was an example of what happens to any leftist government, including but not limited to socialists.
Anyone who goes against the interests of capitalists is scary to them. They say (similar to what you said) that they must always fail. If this were true, they wouldn't be so scared.
It's important to take the broader context into account. This happened at the start of the Cold War, so anything that looked remotely connected to the USSR was suspect. Árbenz legalized a communist party, and that seems to be what pushed Eisenhower over the edge.
It had nothing to do with the actual ideology of the Guatamalan government, but suspected ties to USSR. At the time, "communism" meant "USSR," and anyone that was sympathetic to communism in any form was suspected of being in league with the USSR.
If the Guatamalan Revolution happened just 10 years or so later, the US probably would've been an ally instead of an enemy of someone like Árbenz.
The justification doesn't really matter. The point is this is the situation the makes "all socialist countries are bad" a belief people hold. It's wrong. It's "the only socialist countries who could survive capitalist intervention also did bad things. The ones that didn't last are forgotten and we can't know how they'd fare."
The reason why the Cold War was happening at all was because the US shoved themselves into a role of preventing "communism," which extended to any leftist government, from spreading. They needed to ensure socialism couldn't achieve its goals, because if it could then other capitalist countries would see the benefits and follow suit. Obviously the owner class in capitalist nations couldn't let that happen. You can even see it even within the US with the dismantling of leftist policy.
Socialism isn't bad. It's what capitalists forced socialism to be in order to survive that's bad. Capitalists are the issue with socialism. To use it as an argument for capitalism seems pretty fucked up. It also ignores all the harm done by capitalism. This mostly happens outside of the rich countries though, so most of us don't interact with it.
That's an unfair assessment. The USSR also placed itself into the role of defeating "capitalism" and intervened in a number of countries to encourage socialist/communist revolutions. The actual ideologies here aren't particularly important, what is important is who has the most influence in those regions. The US didn't particularly care what government was in power, provided it was more friendly to western countries than the USSR.
By the Cold War, the US was already more socialist than much of the world. We had just passed the New Deal, unions were quite common, and 34% of Americans were in a union in 1954, and we still have most of those institutions (though union membership fell to around 20% by the fall of the USSR and 10% today).
The opposition here wasn't ideological, that was just how it was sold (the whole "red scare"). The opposition to socialism was to prevent further expansion of influence by the USSR. If the opposition was purely on ideological lines, surely politicians would have eradicated socialist institutions like Social Security and Medicare, but they instead expanded them (source is about SS expansions).
Blame whatever you want, but the facts remain that socialist countries by and large have been bad for the people living under them, whereas capitalist countries with a mix of socialist institutions have been good for people living under them. Those are the facts available to me, and until I see evidence that pure socialism is actually a net positive, I'll continue to believe that it's not.
Most of those harms have little if anything to do with capitalism itself. Capitalism is only an economy policy, not a political ideology, whereas socialism covers both. Most of the evils "under capitalism" can largely be tied to authoritarianism of some variety, and to me that's the main issue w/ socialism as it tends to exist. The problems don't necessarily come from the economic system, they come from the political systems in place.
Lol reread your comment and tell me you aren't at least slightly influenced by propaganda.
You're literally giving a pass, an asterix to something you just don't wanna agree to.
If socialism has only existed for a short time, and really only considered during the cold war then has it really ever been actually tried since outside powers kneecap it at every turn?
Then I wanna ask, how many died from the introduction of capitalism/destruction of imperial European powers? We have no record of it but I'd bet my britches it's a lot of people
It's impossible to escape, and I imagine you are also quite influenced by propaganda. The best I can do is look for multiple sources for information and avoid the worst offenders.
No, I'm just saying the situation in Guatamala is completely different because they weren't even socialist, and the elected President was openly capitalist. Eisenhower was an idiot here and gave in to United Fruit Company.
The context in the past 100 years was the USSR, which was the main rival and enemy of the US, so it absolutely makes sense for the US to attempt to stop any expansion by the USSR, and vice versa. Most of the interventions by the US into countries going through a socialist revolution were actually proxy wars w/ the USSR, like Korea and Vietnam. I don't think it would particularly matter if the USSR was socialist/communist or fascist, the they would butt heads over any expansion. Both the US and the USSR wanted to be the top superpower, and that's what all the interventionism was about.
Look at socialist revolutions after the fall of the USSR, there are far fewer, and those that happen have little if any opposition by western powers. Why is that? The USSR doesn't exist, and China doesn't seem particularly interested in backing socialist/communist revolutions, so they're generally left to resolve themselves. One significant counter example is the revolution in Nepal, but China also opposed that regime change, so it has little to do with socialism and more to do with how friendly the new regime would be to our (or China's) interests.
The proper answer to this would have to be in percents, not absolute numbers, because populations at the time were much lower. But yeah, I don't have a good figure for this.
One especially tricky part of this is that casualties of capitalism are much harder to associate with any particular group because capitalism is largely decentralized, whereas socialism/communism tends to be centralized. A failure under socialism/communism is much easier to assign a cause to than a failure under capitalism. The clearest examples are slavery in the Americas, but that actually started under mercantilism and was quickly abolished in the northern colonies after getting independence (i.e. the areas with higher development).
That said, liberalism and capitalism together have done wonders to improve the lives of the average person. There's a good reason why China has pivoted from socialism/communism to capitalism in recent decades, and it's because it works. Socialism seems to work best when paired with a capitalist system, such as in most developed economies (i.e. a robust social safety net, support for unions, etc).
I don't think people are expressing sympathy.