this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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Reading this really troubles me. I don’t like the implication that using lemmy is pushing authoritarian ideology.
If I was born 50 yrs earlier I would literally have been put in the gas chamber. I tick several qualifiers for it.
Yes, it might sound worrisome, but I dont think you are pushing authoritarian ideology by using Lemmy. The code itself is fine. The code is not authoritarian. The server which hosts your account is also not authoritarian.
Lemmy is, right now, the best alternative for a reddit-like platform. It is something created for the users, by the users. By using lemmy, you are not enriching the wallets of the shareholders. By using something like reddit, you provide content and a select few get to buy a new yacht.
Also, plenty of people are contributing code to lemmy. It is no longer just these 2. The code is also Open-Source. Anyone can fork it and create a new version of lemmy, with compatibility with the current version of lemmy. By using lemmy, you are allowing the possibility that, at any time in the future, someone else comes and says "I have some ideas to improve lemmy, let's do this on my own terms", forks it and continues the work without massively spliting the community.
I really enjoyed reading your explanation. Thank you very much.
This calms me down quite a bit. :) have a good day.
I have openly wondered if now, thanks to the wider adoption outside of the tankosphere, would be a good time for a cornerstone fork to put these concerns to bed. It would be nothing more than a signaling that the proverbial hands have changed, but it would certainly soothe these kinds of concerns.
I don't think comparing communism with fasism, at least when it comes to exterminating ethnic minorities is accurate. this is an opinion shared by academics, including coauthors of "The Black Book of Communism" (the book which claims communism killed 80M-100M people, though the upper end of the range is the one which has more attention. this number is disputed, again also by coauthors)
I could explain why I believe you shouldn't do this in my own words, but I will use the words of Nicolas Werth, one of the three main coauthors who distanced themselves from the book:
and
Another quote I will give is from Amir Weiner an American historian and associate professor of Soviet history at Stanford University who wrote:
I sourced these quotes from Wikipedia: "The Black Book of Communism", references 19 and 14.
My point isn't to say the Soviet Union, or other states which had or have Marxist-Leninist governments are without critique, but that comparing them to the III Reich, at the very least diminishes the crimes committed by Nazis and makes analysis of the aforementioned States more muddy.
Authoritarianism is bad regardless of the ideology behind it and leads to people with reasonable beliefs (communism could help people that capitalism harms) doing unreasonable things (denying active genocides being carried out by governments that have historically been pro-communism because... cognitive dissonance?) like the subject of this post.
I'm not attempting to argue communism is not bad in my comment, I believe this is even more true if you believe communism is bad.
I am strictly saying comparing Nazism and communism does not give a full picture, which is, AFAIK, something that experts in Soviet history, some of which I quoted, agree with.
What I'm trying to say is that comparing the two you risk either reducing the weight of crimes committed by Nazis, which are worse than those committed in any communist state, I hope you'll agree and also risk loosing the detail distinguishing the two.
I would elaborate further, but I want to make this comment shorter to make what I'm saying a bit more accessible.
I think you mean 80 years. Unless there were genociding gas chambers in 1973 I haven't heard about.
(And I would have been put in one too, just not in 1973.)
Haui@discuss.tchncs.de: >If I was born 50 yrs earlier
FlyingSquid: >I think you mean 80 years
You presume to know his/her age?
Actually, I just misread.
Yeah, that happened to me once too.
OK maybe twice.😋