this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
909 points (95.5% liked)
Atheist Memes
5578 readers
7 users here now
About
A community for the most based memes from atheists, agnostics, antitheists, and skeptics.
Rules
-
No Pro-Religious or Anti-Atheist Content.
-
No Unrelated Content. All posts must be memes related to the topic of atheism and/or religion.
-
No bigotry.
-
Attack ideas not people.
-
Spammers and trolls will be instantly banned no exceptions.
-
No False Reporting
-
NSFW posts must be marked as such.
Resources
International Suicide Hotlines
Non Religious Organizations
Freedom From Religion Foundation
Ex-theist Communities
Other Similar Communities
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I agree: it’s stupid of them to criticize communism, because communism is precisely as authoritarian a regime as their religious utopia.
Every Communist that isn't authoritarian would like to disagree with you. Anarchists are not Marxist-Lenninists for example
It doesn’t really matter—it’s inherent to the system. It’s built on a violent overthrow of the current system, followed by a single-party “transitional” government that never actually transitions and violently suppressed all opposition. Every communist movement that has ever taken over a nation state has devolved into an authoritarian dictatorship. Communists-lite like to call that a big, but it’s pretty clear to me and most other people that it’s a feature.
How about Chile, for example? They had a left-wing front consisting of socialists and communists that came to power without any violence through a purely democratic process, was fairly popular with electorate, and then got forcefully overthrown by CIA-backed military junta in 1973 (cause surprise-surprise: a socialist/communist state in South America was not in US's interests, and it was a cold war era).
There is nothing inherent about transitional government or even violent overthrow of a current system, communism in its purest form is only about creating the economy that distributes wealth according to people's needs. It doesn't automatically describe the means to get there, and what was conducted in 20th century was an attempt to implement one of the ways mapped by 19th-20th century thinkers.
Some communists will say the general direction was right, but the implementation wrong; some others will say the approach itself was wrong and we need to start building communist society in an entirely different way. Both will be communists.