Comment on This is why Americans hate Socialism.
SethTaylor@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Communism is the honeydew of left-wing ideologies. Stop trying to work it into every post about free healthcare, income inequality, human rights and so on. Stop trying to normalize. It’s literally banned in multiple countries for legitimate reasons. It’s been used to oppress millions of people. If you support it you clearly don’t understand it. And people who put it next to socialism are clearly trying to smear socialism. Seriously.
Socialism and communism are not the same thing and American right wingers in particular keep trying to make it look like they are because it helps them win elections. Trump’s new thing is “Democrats are communists”. Think about it. He’s calling democratic socialists communists. Grasp the nuance and use it to your advantage. Stop upvoting this type of stuff. You’re digging yourselves into a hole.
Anyway… I wish I could be telling this to OP, but that is a Twitter screenshot there, I think, and I sure as fuck am not going there.
Objection@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
Communism is the goal of socialism. The original democratic socialists, people like Eduard Bernstein, called it that because the idea was that communism could be achieved through gradually reforming existing political systems. It became more and more obvious that this was just a pretense, with things like the betrayal of the Second International and the demsoc support of WWI, and now we’re at a point where the pretense is often dropped entirely.
Communism has never been used to oppress anyone because it’s never existed as a system (not counting primitive communism). There have only been socialist states that claim to be working towards communism. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was not called The Union of Soviet Communist Republics.
FlyingCircus@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Also, it hasn’t been used to oppress millions of people because it straight up hasn’t. The history of socialism that Americans and other Westerners have been taught is filled with lies, exaggerations, and missing context.