
FBI Files on Ray Bradbury (1959) - edward
http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/who-was-afraid-of-ray-bradbury-science-fiction-the-fbi-it-turns-out-1959.html
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bobcostas55
It blows my mind that intelligent people could still be part of the CPUSA in
the 50s. It's not like they could play the "well the USSR isn't _real_
communism!" card - for decades the CP had been a blatant Stalin worship cult,
controlled and used by the Soviets. We are talking 25 years after the
Holodomor was publicized in the West! How could they possibly rationalize this
in their minds...

This guy wrote Fahrenheit 451 ffs, how could he square the ideas in that book
with his support for that regime...

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protonfish
I think it's because Communism is such a good idea on paper that intellectuals
have a hard time admitting that it has been tested numerous times and the
results are definitive: it doesn't work.

But looking at the idea on paper now, it seems obvious what the problem is: it
requires unprecedented power to be put in the hands of a few despots with no
oversight. What could possibly go wrong?

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vidarh
No, it's because it hasn't actually been tested anywhere.

Since you believe it is such a good idea on paper, perhaps you can describe to
us what the idea actually is? Because either it will be blatantly obvious you
don't know what the idea is, or it will be blatantly obvious it does not match
any of the places you might try to claim it has been tried.

> it requires unprecedented power to be put in the hands of a few despots

A society with power put in the hands of a few despots by definition is not
communism, as a society that concentrates power with one group has class rule,
and communism by definition requires the absence of class divisions.

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danharaj
> No, it's because it hasn't actually been tested anywhere.

I think the experiments in Spain actually showed that it would work. Remember,
anarchocommunism in Spain was violently crushed by fascists... after the
Stalinists betrayed them.

Authoritarianism is authoritarianism wherever you go and its fruits are the
same.

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Kalium
Experiments show that anarchocommunism works... in small groups, in larger,
non-anarchocommunist contexts.

Which is to say it doesn't scale. At all. Rendering it pretty useless at the
kind of scale its adherents postulate it at.

~~~
danharaj
Experiments merely show that anarchocommunism attracts violence seeking to
preserve authority. That is nothing new. Violence has always been the root of
hierarchy. Whether it is the abolition of hierarchy or contention between old
and new hierarchy, violence has always been the preferred cure and preventive.

Anarchism need not be seen merely as a state of a society. Anarchism can also
be seen as a means, a method of collaborating with people. One can see
anarchism everywhere in daily life and in struggles that are not specifically
for the abolition of states. The root of the many anarchist political
ideologies is the thought that a human being is best when she freely
associates with her human beings and acts in collaboration with the world. As
a method of being, it is useful even to people who care not to get involved in
the grand affairs of the world.

Like many ideas and vegetables, the root of anarchism is perhaps its most
useful bit.

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smtucker
If your form of government, or I guess in anarchocommunisms case form of non-
government, can't protect and perpetuate itself then it isn't a very good
system at all. It seems like that you are saying that anarchocommunisms
failures aren't legitimate because they were stopped with violence and
treachery. To a lot of people it seems like the entire point of a government
is to organize ourselves into some form of hierarchy to protect ourselves
against violence and treachery so anarchocommunism having not being able to do
this is its ultimate failure.

~~~
kinghajj
First, it's a misconception that anarchists are against governance. They're
against the "state," a hierarchical form of government. They didn't have
difficulty organizing for defense/violence--in fact, a common criticism of the
Spanish anarchist movement was the appropriation of farm land by force. The
failure was due to the coordinated efforts of both capitalist democracies and
authoritarian communists to impede their efforts at maintaining their society.
Most importantly, IIRC, steel shipments from the US were halted, which reduced
their fighting ability.

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morisy
Original Article/Full file:
[https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/aug/24/ray-
bradb...](https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/aug/24/ray-bradbury-fbi-
file/)

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m0v_eax
Why are we so hostile to alternate forms of government. :( /U.S. citizen..

~~~
imglorp
It seems a natural consequence of any government: after it's installed its
primary function shifts from serving the people to be to preserving itself.

edit - If this is true, how could one design a government that naturally
trends away from self preservation as an emergent phenomena?

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AnimalMuppet
> If this is true, how could one design a government that naturally trends
> away from self preservation as an emergent phenomena?

You need something besides human beings to run the government. That's why we
have the emphasis on limited government in the US - the founders understood
human nature enough to realize that _nobody_ could be given unchecked power.

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mindslight
Yet they didn't understand systems enough to realize their models would easily
precess and we'd end up with the unchecked behemoth we have today. But people
are still blinded into believing the government is "limited", making it seem
that the current state is manifest behavior rather than overt control.

~~~
russell_h
Not completely sure why you think they didn't realize that. As a counter-
point, Thomas Jefferson once wrote:

 _And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned
from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let
them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify
them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty
must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It
is its natural manure._

~~~
mindslight
So they realized it, yet didn't attempt to design for it.

His handwavey mechanism fails to the same complexity-induced irrelevance.
People violently revolt only when they are hungry, not when they are merely
unfree.

~~~
xaqfox
I believe that history provides many counter-examples to your claim. The
American Revolution was not a peaceful coming of terms with Britain. The US
Civil War was due to more than just the South being hangry.

~~~
mindslight
You're right, and what comes to mind is that in both examples business
interests stood to significantly benefit from each upheaval. Perhaps what
makes USG so resistent against ideological competition is that it openly
courts business competition - it took a pretty short time for "web" to get a
seat at the table with finance and entertainment. Business revolutionaries are
better off subscribing to the existing power structure rather than needing to
foment revolution to thrive.

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arca_vorago
No surprise here, the Hoover FBI gathered anything and everything it could,
for reasons that are obvious to those who pay attention to this sort of thing.

If Hoover were alive and at the FBI now I bet he would be blackmailing NSA
leaders for access to their data while giddy as a schoolgirl about how much
more dirt he has on people.

