Originally posted by Scribble
I'm just going to keep saying it until you understand it: using violence to stifle political dissent is authoritarianism. Antifa are authoritarians. They may be somewhat decentralised, yes, but there is such a thing as the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' — decentralised; still authoritarian.I think your naivety shows that you still see 'communism' just as a set of ideological principles. Yes, I'm quite aware and well-versed in leftist ideology, for I was once an anarchist teen, with communist sympathies. I read Marx, Engels, yaddah yaddah. Sartre, etc. They all want to create their wonderful, anti-authoritarian utopia.
But reality and history has shown what communism is in practice. So I don't care about detailed distinctions between different kinds of communism. I use the term to identify the authoritarian far-left, which, in practice, is a pretty good way of using it, as it describes something real, not a Marxist hippie's hashish dream.
Also, yeah, I would take fascism over communism any day. Look at the fascist dictatorships: most fell incredibly quickly, with the exception of Franco's regime in Spain. However, all of the countries got over it. Countries subject to communist dictatorships are still living in its shadow. So yeah, I'd take a short-lived fascist dictatorship over the never-ending hell of communism. (FYI, communism has a much, much higher death toll than fascism, like so much higher it's not even funny)
I think we are not going to find common ground on the authoritarian issue, so the last thing that I will say on that is that I believe anti-authoritarian groups and societies will have to use violence at times to ensure greater freedom for the man, when other groups are threatening this. For example the rebellion in Vichy France was not authoritarian, even though they violently fought a dissenting (actually authoritarian) political movement.
I think even if you believe that all real world nations inspired by Marxism were authoritarian, I would still say that it is unfair to apply what you believe to be a truth you have found about Communism to everyone that falls under the ideological banner of it, and likely does not have sympathies for Stalinism or Maoism in particular.
I have to say that saying I would take fascism over communism is a somewhat shocking statement to me. But I guess it is a sign of the times. The fascist governments you are likely thinking about did fall relatively fast I suppose, but not before creating one of the largest human catastrophes on a world spanning scale. Which did somewhat dampen taste for outright fascist thought for a while (although para-fascist dictatorships like Peron, Pinochet, Pol Pot, the Brazilian military regime, and many more, continued to exist for a long time often with US backing).
The death toll of communism is contentious, especially if one applies the way it is applied to capitalist societies which have insanely high death tolls as well then, but I don't think most people nowadays would deny that the big communist states were unjust (although I think it would be hard to say that the post-Stalin soviet union was particularly more unjust than capitalist Russia). And saying these states were hell is perhaps overstating it, they had huge issues, particularly with surveillance (though were are much worse surveilled nowadays by the United States), but there were also things that worked better than they did in the west. Contemporary critique of real world communism is very much clouded by Western propaganda, but even as someone living in the West, the competition that an existing communist system created actually made it so that Western Democracies had to provide much more for its own citizens, and we've seen the devastation that capitalist hegemony after the fall of the soviet union has brought to the people living in the west.