this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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One characteristic I often hear about fascist states is that voicing opinions against the state will get you punished or possibly disappeared.
My observations is that people in the US are still free to criticize the government however they see fit.
Do you have examples to the contrary, or if not, how to you reconcile this?
Those who do not move, do not notice their chains. — Rosa Luxemburg
There’s the ongoing nationwide persecution of college students protesting genocide, for one.
How US gov’t prosecution of Uhuru activists threatens a ‘First Amendment exception’
Then there’s Julian Assange, who the US has been persecuting from afar for the last 13 years despite 1) breaking no US laws, 2) not being a US resident or citizen and 3) not having been on US soil. It does this to threaten journalists not just at home but everywhere.
Students have always been persecuted, throughout human and US history.
It was like that in the French Revolution era, it was like that in the 60s–70s, and it's like that in this era.
My point is that students being persecuted is by no means a thing unique to this era; it's because college has been and still is a place where people are encouraged to think and governments have never liked that.
How is that relevant? Political dissidents like Omali Yeshitela and journalists like Assange have also been persecuted before, but why point it out?
Honestly it sounds like you may be trying to make excuses for these attacks on student protestors by claiming that they’re an inevitable force of nature. That it’s always been this way and always will be. Nothing to see here, move along. Hopefully that’s not what you’re trying to do.
And no, the state is not persecuting students for thinking, it’s persecuting them for the same reason it’s persecuting Yeshitela and Assange: for expressing things it would rather not have expressed.
It's relevant because it seemed like you were saying that students being prosecuted for protests and other things was a recent phenomenon. I was merely saying that's not the case.
Not at all. I'm not making excuses for either party. I was merely under the impression that you were saying prosecution of students was a relatively modern phenomenon, and was stating it was not.
Both are true, honestly. Universities have often been hotbeds of alternative viewpoints, and these are largely caused by said universities naturally having cultures of free intellectual thought. Establishments throughout history have generally not liked the resulting alternative viewpoints and thus have prosecuted them. For one reason or another, for good or ill. I'm making no judgement here one way or the other.; I'm merely making a statement.