boatiechat:

shituationist:

redmensch:

it’s always fascinating to me that americans see the soviet union as “totalitarian” but not the US (which, for instance, has since ~2007 had more people incarcerated than the gulag at its height both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population), but the fact that the general public isn’t freaked out about the j20 protestors facing up to sixty years in prison literally just for wearing black at a protest (“conspiracy”) which involved property damage is ……… unbelievable

the cuban communist party comes under fire from liberal human rights organizations for their arrest and release of anti-communist activists. while that obviously offends our liberal sensitivities, it’s not like arrest and detention without trial are somehow not a thing here, and indefinite detention without trial is literally legal if the person being detained is an immigrant, because of the PATRIOT act.

the totalitarian features of our society go unnoticed probably mostly because there’s no single entity you can point to as responsible. in the ussr, it was the soviet communist party sending people like yegor letov to psych wards, but in the usa, the responsibility for wrongful institutionalization (to continue the same analogy) is way more spread out. of course, there usually is one thing in particular to blame, which is
the totalitarian nature of capital

as a social relation with
determinative

power, but you have to cut through web after web of spectacle to figure that shit out.

It’s also harder to pinpoint in the US because it comes into full effect against vulnerable minorities the general population has been brainwashed into thinking are a threat and / or undeserving of basic human rights.

With a few exceptions (probably somewhere), that happens in all tolalitarian states everywhere. Whether you were an ‘enemy of the revolution’ under Stalin, a ‘race enemy’ under a fascist government, a ‘radicalizing element’ in the war on terror, targets are pretty much always isolated and presented as an unacceptable threat to life as we know it to justify violece against them.