[ExI] communism/authoritarianism

[Darin Sunley]

At this point, I'm becoming more and more sympathetic to the idea of a
strong constitutional hereditary monarch, with a behavioral norm of
decisively and publicly crushing ursurpers.

In a dysfunctional, divided democracy like the US appears to be currently
enjoying, we have a permanent ongoing cold civil war [with occasional
flashes of heat] as both major tribes unceasingly maneuver in the plausible
hope of attaining power for a few years at a time, until the wheel turns
again. This is /far/ more damaging to the lives of normal people than one
side simply decisively owning the government would be.

I don't even really care if a future American king would be a member of my
political tribe at this point. A decent king can rule reasonably justly
over badly divided factions [see the Ottoman Empire for one good example,
not to mention the Romans], as long as the factions are effectively and
permanently disabused of the hope of eventually crushing their tribal
enemies. A hereditary king of a particular tribe is incentivized to refrain
from crushing the other tribes under his rule, in a way that a president or
senate majority leader is not.

On Fri, Sep 18, 2020 at 1:20 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 18, 2020 at 6:53 PM Anton Sherwood <bronto at pobox.com> wrote:
> > (Wow, was it really only yesterday?
> >   I feel like I've put off this reply for a week.)
> >
> > > On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 3:22 PM William Flynn Wallace wrote:
> > >> Today a column by Walter Williams, a conservative economist I
> > >> follow, features the total deaths of people under communism.  Truly
> > >> horrible.
> > >>
> > >> However, I got to looking at the countries involved and wondered if
> > >> you also factored in the deaths under authoritarian but not
> > >> communist governments, like the Nazis, if communism would not come
> > >> up with communism as the main culprit, but authoritarian
> > >> governments.  [...]
> >
> > I saw an interesting claim once: that the USSR punished officers who
> > refused to carry out "atrocities" but Germany did not.
> >
> > (I think this was in one of the essays in a collection published by the
> > Future of Freedom Foundation, «The Failure of America's Foreign Wars».)
> >
> > ("Atrocities" was the word used by that writer; is there a difference
> > between "atrocities" and "war crimes"?)
>
> My understanding is that many of the atrocities carried out by the
> Soviets were legal processes. For instance, the Katyn Massacre was, to
> my knowledge, carried out with a specific process and the Soviet
> officials doing the butchering were legally sanctioned. But the Nazis,
> on the whole, tended to cover this up and usually stuff was done with
> a wink and a nod. This is why you don't have much in the way of
> official documents, especially from the topmost folks including Hitler
> ordering this or that. (Hitler was also famous for getting his
> underlings to do the stuff without his express sanction -- so he could
> explain away failures, it seems.)
>
> > On 2020-9-17 10:17, Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat wrote:
> > > Were those governments really communist though? I mean I would
> > > state socialist and from an economics perspective it's centralized
> > > planning that's their key feature. I feel it's a misnomer to call
> > > them communist, though at this point it's kind of like trying to
> > > rescue the term 'liberal.'  [...]
> >
> > Fine, but we can still contrast tyrants who TOTALLY ILLEGITIMATELY call
> > themselves Communists with those who don't.
>
> Of course.
>
> Regards,
>
> Dan
>   Sample my Kindle books via:
> http://www.amazon.com/Dan-Ust/e/B00J6HPX8M/
>
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