Every major country that has ever gone down the communist road has ended up a dictatorship.

Up until not too long ago, every democracy relied on slavery, disenfranchised large parts of the population, and eventually ended up a dictatorship. If you asked someone in like 1810 whether democracy could work, it'd be completely understandable if they pointed out all the horrible aspects of Greek and Roman "democracy", American planations, colonialism and the Reign of Terror, and if they assumed all of these to be inherent to democracy.

"Sure, the king isn't perfect, but he's surely better than Robespierre (who was inevitably succeded by Napoleon). And besides, great thinkers like Plato argued for a philosopher king – and that guy lived in a democracy, who would know better about all of it's evils?"

Yes, communism has failed in many respects so far.* The reasons for that are complex, include active sabotage by anti-communist states, but anyone who doesn't genuinely and critically reflect it's failures is (probably) doomed to repeat those mistakes.

Assuming those are inherent and inevitable based on less than a hundred years of history is imho short sighted.

*Some very early societies were probably kinda close to what we conceptualise as communism™ today, but applying the term is anachronistic.

I think this is semantic(definitions) confusion. Please let me explain. For example communism by definition is a stateless society. Meaning a state cannot be communist. The countries you are thinking of have all called themselves socialist not communist. Socialism does not necessitate dictatorship or democracy. It's simply economical. Socialism is an economic system that abolishes private property which marx defined as different from personal property. Personal property includes your place of living your tv your clothes all your personal shit. Private property refers to owning the means of production. So under socialism you could own your house but not a factory or Google ect.

The countries that are exploited the worst have sometimes had socialist revolts in the past. These countries are typically not functioning democracies beforehand. The USSR had a tsar. China's last emperor ended up joining the socialists once he was overthrown. Cuba had a U.S. backed dictator before Castro's popular revolution. These countries were not made into dictator ships because of socialism. You have the idea in your head because of capitalist propaganda.

Democratic socialism is just capitalism with a nice welfare state built on it. Despite the name it doesn't necessitate having democracy or socialism. Infact it's incompatible with socialism. These states are nicer then usual capitalist states but often backslide. For example Britain moving closer and closer to privatizing their healthcare.

I hope that makes some sense.

Every major country that has ever gone down the communist road ended up a dictatorship

While I don't think full-on Marxism is necessary and am in agreement on the democratic socialism, I think the reason for this is really more towards the political end of it than the economic.

If a country practicing a communist economy had a more representative/democratic political system from the start, I'd like to see how the results panned out. And I'd also like to see which came first, the dictatorship, or the communism. The former being first makes more sense than the latter.

IDK, I think there are a lot of pretentious idiots who refuse to engage in good faith discussions without any direct ties to any foreign governments. People adamantly hold on to all kinds of stupid opinions and argue fervently for them.

So it's hard to tell who the foreign operatives are if regular people are willing to spread disinformation without any kind of compensation.

That's where the psy-op is though. So much of our communication even in our local communities is done online anymore.

So just putting that uncertainty in your head of "I bet a large percentage of people we interact with are just Pooh-bear sock puppets" might be enough subtle false-flagging to heavily polarize entire societies, when we remember China excels at taking bad things and applying them "at scale."

At a time when we're deprived of and seeking community and social bonds, it's isolating, it's depressing, and it's doing a ton of potential damage.

Weird, my sensation is that everyone online agrees with me and thinks I'm very smart and overall a great guy.

They're all over, here it's called hexbear.

That and MAGA.

Start sending them vids of our hero, Tank man.

And here we've all been doing it for free all along!

The article hypothesizes a network of bot accounts that spam targets across social media with invective. So its got nothing to do with TikTok (a company run out of Hong Kong and Singapore, with an American subnet that's physically cut off from its Chinese-mainland counterpart). Even then, if you look at the actual details of the article...

When trolls disrupted an anti-communism Zoom event organized by New York-based activist Chen Pokong in January 2021, he had little doubt who was responsible. The trolls mocked participants and threatened that one victim would “die miserably.” Their conduct reminded Chen of repression by the government of China, where he spent nearly five years in prison for pro-democracy work.

He's a major contributor to US propaganda networks across the South Pacific who attracted a bunch of harassing call-ins during a Zoom meeting. He then attempted to tie the calls back to a wave of FBI arrests of Chinese residents, accused of subversive activities aimed at American institutions.

There's a certain irony in this story, because Chen Pokong himself spent two years in prison for championing anti-CCP protests in Guangzhou, following the Tienanmen protests in '89. So a guy who was once a passionate advocate for dissident expression and protest as an economics professor at Sun Yat-sen University is now a professor at Columbia University participating in mass arrests and imprisonments of US residents for dissident expression and protest.

The Chinese spam machine was operating at the same time as the Russian system back in 2016, it was hilariously ineffective because apparently the sensibilities are so different. Memes didn't land, insults are odd sounding.

What I found really interesting in this article is they've changed or adjusted, or maybe just made more visible the effective part of this campaign. Targeting Chinese ex-pats, or Chinese abroad, even ethnically Chinese people who are first or second generation citizens of Western countries.

It's a way to reach out and maintain influence through fear, nowhere is safe sort of thing.