2rafa
9hr ago
All fair points. I don’t discount the risk of tyranny - North Korea scares me, too. But I also think a lot of our understanding of life being awful in eg the Soviet Union or Maoist China (an understanding that is generally accurate, I think) is because of the terrible ideological choices and economic system that led directly to famine, starvation, poverty, lack of material goods and squalor. Even the extreme violence of the Cultural Revolution - which was bottom-up, not top-down the way that totalitarian state-performed violence is - was part of this.
In fact, the kind of people who were really likely to be persecuted by the KGB were largely what passed for the Soviet upper and upper middle class, people “like me” if you want to take that line of argument, who worked in state administration, running large enterprises, academia, media and so on. Most average working class people had very different problems.
2rafa
12hr ago
The highest crime-related murder rates in the world tend to cap out around 100 per 100,000 per year. The Khmer Rouge murder rate was something like 7,000 per 100,000 per year.
I don’t think counting extremely destructive, ideologically motivated civil conflict as “tyranny” is particularly productive in this discussion, or else plenty of early modern European countries that don’t really count ask ‘tyrannies’ are tyrannies. A totalitarian tyranny isn’t “when you kill half of your population for being the wrong race/religion/sect/caste”, that’s far too broad and common throughout human history. Humans living in tribes before the Neolithic revolution also saw very high male death rates to murder per year in many cases, is that ‘tyranny’?
The reality is that North Korea and Eritrea both probably still have higher quality of life than Haiti right now.
2rafa
13hr ago
It just seems manifestly obvious that the failure state where enforcement melts away is vastly more common that the failure state where the entire country is, essentially, imprisoned. Anarchy and tyranny can co-exist, but anarcho-tyranny is a conservative/reactionary concept precisely because it describes a failure of liberal democracy in which protected, left-friendly groups aren’t prosecuted while unprotected ones are.
2rafa
15hr ago
Both were fine, if not justified (the latter as the narrower question).
In general, people overestimate the risk of tyranny and underestimate the risk of anarchy.
How many truly tyrannical, totalitarian states are there in the world? North Korea, obviously. Eritrea, to some extent. After that the lines get a lot more blurred. You certainly wouldn’t want to be a dissident in Iran or China, but the vast majority of the population is not really ‘enslaved by the state’ (or ‘under constant, totalitarian absolute surveillance with extreme penalties for the tiniest stepping out of line’) the way that people are in a true tyranny.
Even across the 20th century, true tyranny was rare. Neither the Gestapo nor the KGB were capable of it, for example, nor was any CCP domestic intelligence agency, certainly until very recently. In fact, the only major Marxist nation that was truly, terrifyingly totalitarian in the 1984 sense was East Germany.
By contrast, how many ungovernable shitholes are there in the world in which criminals, gangs and others run riot, with the central government hopelessly weak, corrupt or otherwise powerless to stop them? Many, many more. Half of the Sahel, Haiti and a large chunk of Central America, Papua New Guinea, big parts of Somalia and Northern Kenya, large parts of Nigeria and Niger, parts of Syria etc.
We should be much more concerned about anarchy than tyranny.
Tyranny is bad, but the argument of my comment was to suggest that - right now - the long term political consequences of mass immigration (a lower trust, poorer, more violent, more unequal and more corrupt country) outweigh the risks that this almost certainly accidental death is a sure sign of descent into tyranny. I also just replied to wandererinthewilderness in this same thread, apologies for not tagging you.
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