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.
I would be interested in seeing compiled statistics of how many fell without capitalist interventions.
The CIA themselves have stated how active they were in the 20th century with corrupting, breaking down, and ultimately overthrowing communist regimes and installing dictators.
But also socialism with worker owned co-ops and only infrastructure and regulations through a central government may somewhat be a good direction to go.
The crux seems to be that all forms of government are susceptible to authoriatarians because people themselves are very susceptible to authoritarian strong men and propaganda, inherently.
Yes. All forms of governance are prone to corruption. It is just the nature of who would say “Hmmm. Being responsible for an entire people? Count me in!”. But some models are more prone to different kinds of corruption, as I said above.
As for “capitalist intervention”? Many of the “great examples” folk have brought up (you know, lasted for five minutes before getting destroyed by neighboring states) don’t have that excuse. But, regardless, it again gets back to the inherent strengths and weaknesses of each model.
When you have one that fundamentally centralizes Power? Getting a compromised individual into that position gets accelerated because now they already have all the power they need.
It is similar to what we are seeing with Democracies around the world. They are INCREDIBLY susceptible to tech oligarchs and state sponsored attacks to more or less manufacture a populist candidate using social media. And then, once that is in place, said populist (and their handlers) begins to rapidly dismantle all the checks and balances that were meant to decentralize power. The US is an obvious example but also look at the various nations facebook et al have destroyed.