Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]

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Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2020

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  • Yes that’s correct. Libs will defend this with, “The communists were trying to overthrow the democratic government!” But the reality is, the German government had collapsed at the end of WWI and it was an open question what they’d end up with when the dust settled. The communists wanted to set up a state where the political power of the right and the bourgeoisie would have been subordinated, and the SPD sent in the freicorps to destroy them, in order to defend a fledgling system they created where they would have “no choice” but to form a coalition with the bourgeois parties and enact austerity policies to “maintain the coalition.” They set up the system where their hands would be tied, and did so while being violently hostile to the only other possible coalition partner, who could’ve allowed them to do something other than austerity.

    This was, of course, after they spent WWI supporting the war effort and betraying the Basel manifesto and the second international, which before the war called for socialists to work against their own governments in the event of a great war. German entry into WWI was expedited by the SPD voting in favor of war credits and the declaration of war. They completely betrayed their principles and the proletariat because it would have been bad for their careers.

    So I find it very appropriate that libs today project onto them and glamorize them.
















  • The thing is there’s kind of an inherent problem between trying to make informed policy decisions and trying to represent the popular will, especially when people are uninformed. This is especially a problem when it comes to foreign policy, where’s it’s completely impossible for the average person to be sufficiently informed about every country in the world. Politicians generally aren’t that knowledgeable either, because that’s generally not what they’re selected for. Adding on to that the fact that foreign policy arrangements generally outlive the terms of politicians, and there’s strong incentives to defer decisions to “experts,” who are generally unelected and unaccountable. At that point any concept of “interpreting” the popular will or “acting as people would want if they were as informed as we are” is pretty much just a pretense. In many cases, it’s pretty much impossible to determine what the average person would think if they were informed about a situation because they simply don’t think about such things at all. However, especially in the US today, “deferring to the experts” essentially means blind trust in the people who lied us into Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Tbh I don’t really know if there is a clean solution to that. But that’s one of the issues that direct democracy would encounter: how do you make informed, stable arrangements with other countries? Is every person expected to be informed about every country?