Friendly text block and two audio theory links incoming:

The thing about the terms aurhoritarianism and authoritarian is, they aren’t terms that describe a meaninfgul distinction. Like “terrorist” before it, “authoritarian” is just the latest rhetorical cudgel used to draw an arbitrary distinction between Our violence, (justified, righteous, at worst regrettable but necessary) and Their violence (unjustifiable, irredeemable, the result of some shared societal moral defect). This applies both to traditional violence, as you can see with how the western press has been framing the war in Ukraine, and to social violence, such as with western coverage on points of friction such as protests in rival countries. In every case, the same actions will be framed differently. Not only are exceptions carved out for certain kinds of explicit violence, but implicit violence is made invisible. It’s very easy to find a million threads online about China Bad posted under a photo of several tanks not running over a guy (or a clip shortened to imply they did), but not as easy to find discussions about all the recordings of US police just straight up running over protestors in 2020(explicit), and nobidy would venture any optimistic guesses as to the healthcare they may or may not have recieved afterwards (implicit).

When the US incinerates a million people half the world away, displaces thirty million more, poisons their land, water and DNA for generations with DU shells, that’s spreading democracy, or at worst a tragic mishap that could have been handled better. When Russia, (and to be clear, I have zero love for the Russian Federation, they are a ghoul state, but if they’re a ghoul state then the US is the vampire that bit them) when they respond to 8 years of shelling and Azov death squads operating with impunity in a majority-Russian province where people’s own language has been made illegal…it is now immediately genocidal to interrupt these actual processes of genocide. The only explanation I’ve heard for this is that “Putin is trying to kill every single Ukranaian, for reasons unclear.” Because to them, only people on our side have depth. Anyone on the other side is a Terrorist, Authoritarian, Commie, Tankie, Traitor, Looter Thug RussianChinese AgentBot. Whatever term can be used to justify reducing human beings to caricatures on which to project your own worst impulses instead of trying to understand. A Marvel capeshit villain. There’s a reason the saying exists about scratched liberals, they’re already primed to accept fascist answers to the questions raised by the holes in their understanding of the world. The process of shutting out any alternative answers begins with simple, thought-terminating epithets than can be brandished with empty confidence.

Ultimately all violence is authoritarian, even defensive violence, because state authority is violence. Unlike liberals though, we’re materialists, which means we don’t content ourselves with shallow grandstanding moral denunciations. We can admit that most violence (barring consensual violence like sparring or bdsm) is ugly, corrosive and undesirable, while also sometimes being necessary to stop greater suffering. Liberals, who are capitalists and champion an ultraviolent capitalist world order, are backed into the corner of supposedly being the enlightened, noviolent intellectual successors of MLK and Ghandi (or at least the sanitized image they’ve created of them) while literally supporting Nazis who do Nazi shit, and they have normalized reconciling this contradiction by way of assuring themselves and each other that anyone pointing out their hypocrisy is either naive, a kid trying to be trendy, or secretly an agent of Them.