[ SECRET POST #3044 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3044 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


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02.
[Rosemary & Thyme]


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03.
[Fire Emblem: Rekka no Ken]


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04.
[A Game of Thrones, Jon Snow]


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05.
(Overlord 1)


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06.
[Asterix the Gaul]


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07.
[Repo! The Genetic Opera / Marvel's Agents of SHIELD]


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08.
[Panic! at the Disco]


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09.
[Free! Iwatobi Swim Club]


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10.
[Harry Potter]


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11.
[Darren Criss in Hedwig and the Angry Inch]


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12. [ SPOILER WARNING for Downton Abbey ]



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13.
[Steven Universe]



















Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 042 secrets from Secret Submission Post #435.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[herpymcderp]

Only they do use money. I mean, I don't have the comics right next to me, but there are several scenes where the chief has to settle a minor dispute about non-payment for services.

Like, okay, you can make an argument about communism (at least in Russia) being the intended evolution of a tribal commune culture - which is what I'd argue we're actually seeing in Asterix - but it's not communism. There is monetary exchange, there are hierarchies in the village, there is no explicit doctrine of equality, there is religion...

It's just close but no cigar.

[(Anonymous)]

It does only say undertones, not that it's explicit, and didn't Soviet communism involve monetary exchange? And hierarchy!

[herpymcderp]

Ahh, but Soviet communism wasn't really Marxist communism at all. In actual practice it was more akin to fascism than socialism, with only the surface ideals of Marxism in common, and really only as a tool to control the populace. Such was the downfall of the Red Empire.

I mean, I love talking Soviet Russia, but that's not a great example of communism as the ideal would have it.

[(Anonymous)]

That's true, but an awful lot of people don't know the difference and just think OMG COMMUNISM. Though I can't tell from the secret whether they think communism is good or bad.

[herpymcderp]

Idealist communism is a really beautiful, peaceful aspiration. I think if you want to make an argument about Asterix maybe having some values in common with that sort of romantic communism, you might have a point. Really, you could call the communist ideal just an attempt to live in an all-encompassing human tribe. It sort of does share the spirit of the (questionably historically accurate) village commune.

In reality it just tends to result in what are functionally totalitarian dictatorships.

[cushlamochree]

Ehhhhh I'd push back on this quite a bit. If when you're talking about "idealist communism" you mean anything to do with Marxism, then no, it's just not particularly beautiful or peaceful or even idealist, really. If you're talking about utopian socialism, that's a fair point, but that's very distinct from Marxism, and also has had very little effect on the world outside of a few scattered communes and intentional communities.

I'd also push back on the question of totalitarian dictatorships, in that I think that's an unfair description of most communist states outside of Maoist China and Stalinist Russia (and the Khmer Rouge, but that's kind of its own little thing of complete bugfuck insanity). Dictatorship, yes, frequently; illiberal state, almost always. But I find it hard to say that either Marxism or socialism generally has a serious problem with that kind of thing, at least not relative to other ideologies. I think it mostly ends up that way, not because of something inherent to Marxism or socialism, but because politics is fucking hard.

[herpymcderp]

Yeah I was not really talking about Marxism there, because although that might be where the Soviet ideal was derived (arguably), I don't think many other people would refer to it in those terms. I was more talking about the utopian communism/socialism that tends to get a lot of literary mention. A good example for the modern era would be the communist utopia described in Dinotopia; the every man and woman educated and empowered, everyone working for pleasure, everyone equally compensated and wanting for nothing (although to be fair, this idea also does have a place in some of the more romantic Soviet literature, it's just far from the state-approved variety of communism).

Also, I should also probably have qualified my earlier statement about totalitarianism vis a vis communism with "most of the time". And then I guess I'd have to further qualify that with the addendum: because most of the time communism isn't something countries really try at very hard unless they have aspriations of dictatorship/totalitarianism in the first place. :/

[(Anonymous)]

how the fuck do you connect russian communism to fascism, I don't even

[cushlamochree]

It's not actually that crazy. I'm not sure if this is where Herpy was coming from (and, in all fairness, I think Herpy's statement could have been worded better), but there's an argument to be made that Stalinist Russia and fascist Germany were comparable in terms of the system of government and the political organization that pertained in each - that they were both basically totalitarian states, albeit with different ideologies, one being a fascist totalitarian state, the other being a Marxist totalitarian state. So that in functional terms the two states ended up being quite similar, and they worked the same way despite their ideological differences. See EG Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism. Of course it's still a controversial idea - and only really applies to those actually existing governments, not to fascism or Marxism from an intellectual point of view - but it's an argument.

(There's also an argument to be made that Socialism in One Country is nationalist and that's fundamentally incompatible with Marxist thought, but that almost immediately gets you into the weeds of Trotskyism, and is pretty silly besides. Silly, silly Trots.)

[herpymcderp]

Yeah that's pretty much where I was going with it. My own opinion is pretty heavily influenced by where the Slavic and Germanic Studies departments at my University lay on the side of the argument comparing the two, so I have to admit I'm largely taking someone else's word for it.

However, that word is from people who did grow up the mid/tail end of the USSR. So there's that.

[cushlamochree]

Yeah. It turns out, like anything with human beings, this shit is complicated.

I would say, once you get out of the Stalinist and immediate post-Stalinist era, it becomes wayyyy less totalitarian, and I think more actually-socialist than you might expect, but still very much balancing that with essentially a somewhat corrupt one-party state.

It really is hard, though - I didn't live in Soviet Russia (or non-Soviet Russia, for that matter) so I don't have the personal experience either. And I also think it's a common thing that, when you live within a system, there are often elements of it that we don't see at all, and the lived experience is often pretty different than what it looks like on the inside. So I worry, basically, about condemning the Soviet system for things that, really, you could fairly make the same claims about our system.

[herpymcderp]

Well the trouble with any effective, facist-leaning system is that people tend to adopt it for a reason. In terms of social privileges it tends to be very, very good for a vast number of people who directly benefit, and very NOT good for a number of people who comprise the outliers.

So it goes with Russia under the Soviets; for a great many people leaving that regime was nearly impossible having lived it their entire lives, and even today you will still find people in the older generation who just don't understand the concepts involved in democracy and who would genuinely go back to the old regime if given the chance. When you have everything in your life decided and taken care of for you and you are suddenly thrown out on your own, it can be extremely hard to cope.

And yes, it is difficult to separate superficial similarities, but I don't think it's totally impossible after having lived in another culture for long enough. I think it also gets slightly easier when one has had the privilege of experiencing more than one culture over a life time. Enough practice does tend to negate the impulse of comparing cultures in terms of similarities rather than unique attributes.

[cushlamochree]

I think that's mostly fair enough. I still tend to think that's not unique to socialism or Marxism. And I mean Russia's kind of a case in point there. I mean, it's not like the post-Soviet systems have been remarkable for their commitment to democracy or good government or anything other than plutocracy.

[herpymcderp]

I mean, it's not like the post-Soviet systems have been remarkable for their commitment to democracy or good government or anything other than plutocracy

lol so much truth. Hear that, Putin?! You can't even handle it!

[herpymcderp]

I'm sorry, but there's no simple or short answer for that. I suggest doing a few years of Russian culture studies (specifically Lenin and Stalin era) to really get a good idea of the similarities.

Superficially though, they are both highly manufactured, militaristic social regimes where people were heavily influenced by massive propaganda and education reform campaigns and sentenced to prison/work camps for civil disobedience or even rumour of anti-government thought.