• HarryLime [any]@hexbear.netOP
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    1 day ago

    Right wingers are unable to properly confront the failures and contradictions of capitalism, nor can they abide the necessary restraints on individual businesses that the liberal state imposes in order to stabilize the capitalist system. They attribute all of this to a shadowy conspiracy of elites with purely evil motives, frequently casting this conspiracy as communist. This tendency goes at least as far back as the John Birch Society, who took it as an article of faith that Eisenhower was a communist. Essentially, anti-communism collapses into self-negation through its failures to resolve the contradictions of capitalism.

    There are Marxists who are much smarter than me and can probably explain this in more depth than I can, but that’s the basic version.

    • sexywheat [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      1 day ago

      There’s this yank I talk politics with sometimes and he is terminally conspiracy brained. For him, everything comes down to that “shadowy conspiracy of elites with purely evil motives” that you describe. He talks about the WEF, globalism, the Bilderburgs, all the greatest hits of right wing brain rot.

      He’s mentioned several times in the past that he believes that the USA was the one who imposed the “evil Communist dictatorships” abroad like North Korea. I could not figure out for the life of me how on Earth he ever reached this blatantly ahistorical conclusion.

      You might be onto something here.

      • Sleepless One
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        18 hours ago

        He’s mentioned several times in the past that he believes that the USA was the one who imposed the “evil Communist dictatorships” abroad like North Korea. I could not figure out for the life of me how on Earth he ever reached this blatantly ahistorical conclusion.

        I suppose that could be true in the sense that the US imposed themselves on the peninsula to prevent it being unified under a communist dotp, instead relegating them to the just north half of the peninsula while the burger regime turns the south half into its puppet. Even then, my last sentence was a big stretch.

    • Carl [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 day ago

      I think it might be dumber than that. I think they might be referring to our backing of dictatorships as backing communism because they think communism is when dictator. If you asked them to specify they would probably say Saudi Arabia and shit.

    • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      24 hours ago

      necessary restraints on individual businesses that the liberal state imposes in order to stabilize the capitalist system. They attribute all of this to a shadowy conspiracy

      I recently read a few pages into Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty. While most of it junk, it did contain one curious thing: that society moves according to laws independent of any individual person, and religion is used to explain this apparent external action upon society.