this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2025
623 points (97.8% liked)

Today I Learned

26015 readers
1139 users here now

What did you learn today? Share it with us!

We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.

** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**



Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.



Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.

If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.

For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.



Partnered Communities

You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.

Community Moderation

For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

The Soviet system used psychiatry as a weapon by diagnosing political opponents as mentally ill in order to confine them as patients instead of trying them in court. Anyone who challenged the state such as dissidents, writers, would-be emigrants, religious believers, or human rights activists could be branded with fabricated disorders like sluggish schizophrenia. This turned normal political disagreement into supposed medical pathology and allowed the state to present dissent as insanity.

Once labeled in this way, people were placed in psychiatric hospitals where they could be held for long periods without legal protections. Harsh treatments were often used to break their resolve. The collaboration between state security organs and compliant psychiatrists created a system where political imprisonment was disguised as medical care, letting the Soviet regime suppress opposition while pretending it was addressing illness rather than silencing critics.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] LillyPip@lemmy.ca 78 points 1 day ago (40 children)

It’s crazy to me that many people think ‘this is what communism does’ when it’s actually what authoritarianism does. You can get authoritarianism all over the spectrum, in anything from communism to fascism.

This isn’t a feature of any political ideology – rather it’s a feature of letting sociopaths gain power.

The US is trying to do this now, what with declaring the bogeyman known as antifa a mental illness AND a terrorist threat.

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 28 points 1 day ago (20 children)

Part of it is that the vast majority (all?) of the communist regimes of the 20th century pretty rapidly descended into authoritarian hellscapes (Democracy/Capitalism took a few decades to catch up...). So people tend to less say "Well. The horrors that unfolded in X were a result of a misapplication of the core tenets of communism" and instead "My family literally had to flee a communist regime because we were being ethnically cleansed"

Part of it is that Democracy/Capitalism won and very much built up Communism as a bogeyman for obvious political reasons.

And the last part is that... Communism fundamentally requires a central source of power/truth. You can't have a managed economy without folk managing it. Which, inherently, centralizes power which is one of the big first steps towards authoritarianism. Similar to how Democracy fundamentally enables populism and Capitalism oligarchy.

[–] Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 23 points 1 day ago (9 children)

Anarchist communistic projects in Catalonia (1930s), anarchist Ukraine (around 1917), etc.: "Are we a joke to you?"

[–] yucandu@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I don't know much about Ukraine but I know the one in Catalonia had roving gangs of "law enforcers" who would execute "capitalists/fascists" without trial, so I'm not sure it's an ideal to look up to.

[–] Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It sure wasn't perfect. But it was a libertarian socialist counter-example of revolutionary socialism to what the bolsheviks were doing.

load more comments (7 replies)
load more comments (17 replies)
load more comments (36 replies)