CDR: Shunning, lesbians and liberty

[Ken Brown]

Someone calling themselves James dribbled:

> You are putting ordinary dictatorships, like Pinochet's Chile or Park's
> Korea, in the same category as communist dictatorships, like Castro's Cuba
> or Mengistu's Ethiopia.  That is ridiculouys.

You really are a prat aren't you? 

So it is OK to be killed by a fascist bullet but not by a communist one?
There are a few million dead who would have been happy had they known
that before the likes of Pinochet or Franco murdered them. 

> The difference between normal dictatorships and totalitarian regimes is
> enormous, vastly greater than the difference between dictatorships and
> ordinary democracies,

What a load of shit.  When someone kicks you in the face do you ask them
which cobbler made their shiny leather boot? This is just the typical
excuse of Americans who support totalitarian dictators like Pinochet and
his fellow murderers and want to sleep easy with themselves. You pretend
to be "libertarian" and in favour of freedom but what you really mean is
freedom for you and your friends to do as they like & the rest of us get
to live with, or under, your police and your armies.  You don't give a
damn about dictators or oppressors so long as they are your dictators
pissing out.

> and the distribution of famine (excluding famines
> caused by war) illustrates that difference.
> So let us go back to the original question:  Where was there a significant
> twentieth century famine other than those caused by war or socialism?

Why include the word "socialism"?  Almost without exception, war is
almost the only thing that ever caused a prolonged famine. The flavour
of dictatorship in power at the time has very little to do with it.
 
> It is absurd to use categories that put normal dictatorships in the same
> category as totalitarian dictatorships.

This being the Reaganite definition of "totalitarian" as "people who we
don't like"? How many years did you spend in the CIA then?

Yes, there is a distinction between "ordinary" dictatorships and the
sort of utterly over-the-top government that isn't so much trying to
rule a country as destroy it. Most dictatorships try to keep their
victims at least reasonably peaceful and prosperous, if only so the
rulers can carry on stealing from them (geese, golden eggs & all that). 
But a few seem to live to destroy. Some governments become
unsupportable, they either have to be fought against or you die. Romania
under Ceaucescu, anywhere under the Nazis, Pol Pot and his friends,
Stalin's times in Russia, the Taliban right now. In places like that the
government is in fact at war with the people.

I hope whenever you Americans see on the news what is going on in
Afghanistan you remember that your government paid for their weapons and
their training, that those guys were educated in US-run schools and
guerilla warfare training camps -  all because Reagan and Bush came out
with this shit about "totalitarian" being the only bad thing &
non-communists couldn't possibly be "totalitarian". Whatever the Taliban
were, they certainly weren't communists. So in goes the CIA, and the
money, and the guns, and look what came out. 

These aren't necessarily "socialist" or claiming to be socialist. In
fact "socialism" vs. "capitalism" is redundant in this context - they
are words that describe economic systems and places like that  are
beyond economics. When the rapist is in your bedroom you don't wonder
how he earns his living. When some Nazi gauleiter is turning your home
town into a death camp there is no point asking him his opinion on Value
Added Tax (or even anonymous internet bearer transactions.)

"Ordinary" dictatorships aren't necessarily anti-socialist either.  Most
people, most of the time, get on with their own lives under constant
interference and supervision by the government. You can get shot if you
criticise the government. You get very restricted freedom as to where
you can go to school, or live, or work. In other words just a more
extreme, or more obvious, case of the kind of things that go on in  any
government. Think of almost any South or Central American statelet
between the 1880s and the 1980s. (Although Paraguay in the 19th century
& some central American places in the 20th got pretty near being death
states), or almost any Middle Eastern country now (Iran is of course a
representative democracy, the only functioning one in the Middle East).
Cuba is by any sane standards an "ordinary" dictatorship   as were
Poland and Czechoslovakia before 1989.  Ditto Serbia, or Iraq. Even
Russia actually approached it in the 1960s & 70s, they cleaned up their
act a lot. Loads of them paid lip-service to socialism, but loads of
them claimed to be capitalist as well - like your CIA-inspired regimes
in Indonesia and Pakistan and the Philippines and Chile and Guatemala
and Nicaragua and Panama that you dropped like the smelly shit they were
as soon as you don't need them to scare the Russians any more.   And
most of these places were better off as soon as you Americans stopped
trying to enforce your favourite dictators on them in the name of
"freedom". Some of them even turned themselves into reasonable
facsimiles of democracies. Except for Pakistan of course. And their
Taliban puppets that developed a life of their own in Afghanistan. 

To lump all those places together as "socialist" on the basis of which
side they took (or were coerced into taking) in the squabble over spoils
between the victors  of WW2 (that we now call the "Cold War") is to
ignore reality in favour of ideology.  When someone is oppressing you
does it really matter whether he is doing it with Czech guns bought with
Russian money or British guns bought with  US money? (apart from the
fact that US money works a lot better than Russian)

Of course, I forget, to you and your fellow so-called "libertarians"
(why, oh why are so many of you so afraid of the word "anarchist"? (Tim
May excepted of course) Maybe because you aren't really anarchists, or
even libertarians. You don't want freedom for anyone except yourself and
the rest of us can put up with your jackbooted thugs), to you and your
fellow so-called "libertarians" words like "socialism" and "capitalism"
aren't words about economics at all, you use them as words of moral
approval or disapproval, you twist language away from meaning, these
words are no longer used to describe things but just to explain how you
feel about them, for you "socialism" just means "any government I don't
like" (& therefore for some of you "any government at all" - which of
course  would  make your original contention tautological) and "freedom"
means "any state of affairs that I like". 

Empty rhetoric. I much prefer Tim's rants. At least he is honest about
all this, and he has the decency to disassociate himself from some of
the evil nonsense that your government (and my government - this is not
an anti-American rant), have perpetrated over all these years. 

Ken