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Notes -
Do communist governments and institutions have a unique tendency to suppress dissent? I definitely get that feeling based on my observations of the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, North Korea, combined with my observations of Leftist organizations. So I am tempted to ask what, if anything, is inherent in communism which results in this type of behavior. (Ok, I admit that this is just a little boo-outgroup. I hate Leftists with a passion and I like the idea that there is something inherent in their thinking which leads to repression.)
That being said, it occurs to me that there is a threshold question. Perhaps all governments and institutions have a tendency to suppress dissent and there are a few exceptions, e,g, the United States, which combine (relatively) free markets with (relatively) free speech.
I'm spitballing a bit here, but my guess is that to some extent it's a matter of valuing individualism versus valuing collectivism. Perhaps people, institutions, and governments who value collectivism are more comfortable with the idea of suppressing dissent just as they are more comfortable with the idea of forcibly transferring wealth for some perceived greater good.
You always have to consider the contingent historical circumstances that these nations develop under because revolutions never begin as a clean slate. It happens within a context.
If you take China as a popular example, almost nobody talks into account the fact that China has always had an authoritarian / autocratic streak since its inception. When you combine its unique history with the conditions under Mao Zedong, it doesn’t require a unique ideological causal factor to explain. This is why phrases like “Socialism with Chinese characteristics,” is so well know in area studies of the region. It’s a syncretism between the two and you can’t divorce one from the other. Just like Zen Buddhism with Capitalism in Japan or Confucianism with Korea.
In the west we suppress dissenting voices as well. The spectrum of acceptable opinion within the MSM for instance is extraordinarily narrow. It isn’t narrow because someone throws you in a concentration camp. It’s narrow for other reasons. We don’t call it censorship, we call it “content moderation.” In the same way the term “propaganda” fell out of favor after the Second World War and has since been referred to as the “public relations industry.”
Bruce Schneier has also done an interesting analysis that turns politics into an analysis of information systems and in particular the structure of information flows, which are what’s important to these systems. One thing he notes is that democracies take the form of what he calls “common political knowledge,” and it details the power that transparency of information has. Authoritarian societies take common political knowledge and turn it into “contested political knowledge,” such that institutional divisions become less well understood and rules are often very fuzzy. This has several security benefits that you often see applied in IR studies, that explains why regimes will almost always favor security over prosperity whenever there is a conflict between the two.
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