There has been outrage after a small town in eastern Germany banned the installation of new Holocaust memorial plaques that mark the last known residence or workplace of Jews and other victims of the genocide.

Crossposted from https://thebrainbin.org/m/[email protected]/t/1945027

A small town in eastern Germany banned the installation of new Holocaust memorial plaques that mark the last known residence or workplace of Jews and other victims of the genocide.

The motion was proposed by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU)…

  • Edie [it/it/its/its/itself, she/her/her/hers/herself]@lemmy.ml
    21·
    9 days ago

    Do you not see the contradiction there?

    no

      We are sometimes inclined, I think unwisely, to treat democracy and dictatorship as two mutually exclusive terms, when in actual fact they may often represent two aspects of the same system of government. For example, if we turn to the Encyclopedia Britannica, to the article dealing with “Democracy,” we read: “Democracy is that form of government in which the people rules itself, either directly, as in the small city-states of Greece, or through representatives.”
      But the same writer goes on to say this: “All the people in the city-state did not have the right to participate in government, but only those who were citizens, in the legal and original sense. Outside this charmed circle of the privileged were the slaves, who had no voice whatever in the making of the laws under which they toiled. They had no political and hardly any civil rights; they were not ‘people.’ Thus the democracy of the Greek city-state was in the strict sense no democracy at all.”
      The Greek city-state has been cited time and again by historians as the birthplace of democracy. And yet, on reading the Encyclopedia Britannica, we find that in fact this was a democracy only for a “charmed circle of the privileged,” while the slaves, who did the work of the community, “had no voice whatever in the making of the laws under which they toiled.”
      The classical example of democracy was, then, a democracy only for certain people. For others, for those who did the hard work of the community, it was a dictatorship. At the very birthplace of democracy itself we find that democracy and dictatorship went hand in hand as two aspects of the same political system. To refer to the “democracy” of the Greek city-state without saying for whom this democracy existed is misleading. To describe the democracy of the Greek city-state without pointing out that it could only exist as a result of the toil of the slaves who “had no political and hardly any civil rights” falsifies the real history of the origin of democracy.
      Democracy, then, from its origin, has not precluded the simultaneous existence of dictatorship. The essential question which must be asked, when social systems appear to include elements both of democracy and dictatorship, is, “for whom is there democracy?” and “over whom is there a dictatorship?”

    —Pat Sloan, in the Introduction to Soviet Democracy

    • modem_down@thebrainbin.orgOP
      112·
      9 days ago

      Cheers, but that doesn’t resolve the contradiction.

      “for whom is there democracy?” and “over whom is there a dictatorship?”

      Case 1: Sloan’s example

      Athenian citizens had democracy; non-citizens didn’t.

      Two separate groups: no contradiction. (Partial suffrage, as opp. universal suffrage.)

      Case 2: OurToothbrush

      “a proletarian democracy under dictatorship of the proletariat”.

      Same group (“proletarians”), so there is contradiction.

      • ghost_laptop@lemmy.ml
        14·
        9 days ago

        no, in the dictatorship of the proletariat the majority of people, this means the working class, imposes a dictatorship upon the bourgeoisie, the minority group that lives by stealing other people’s work.

          • ghost_laptop@lemmy.ml
            13·
            9 days ago

            didn’t you just read about it? it’s a democracy for us, its a dictatorship for you nazi trash. we’ll be ruling over the oppressors. of course you disagree with that because you’re a fascist.

                • modem_down@thebrainbin.orgOP
                  112·
                  9 days ago

                  Me: You’re scraping the bottom of Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement. You: You dumb ass gringo.

                  I rest my case.

                  • Sherad@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
                    3·
                    9 days ago

                    Considering how you’re replying to people like this over those actually refuting your arguments/attempting to help you learn things you refuse to hear, I think you’re the one doing the majority of scraping in these threads.

              • davel@lemmy.mlEnglish
                10·
                9 days ago

                Ridiculous. Go back to Reddit. Capitalist “democracies” are objectively not democratic, but you claim they are without evidence, and also without defining your term: democracy. Athens had slaves, like the US used to, and still does under the 14th amendment, yet you call them democracies. Clean your room.

        • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml
          11·
          9 days ago

          Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.

          Somehow always remind me when people mention Athenian democracy

      • davel@lemmy.mlEnglish
        121·
        9 days ago

        There basically has never yet been a democracy for all residents of a state. The purpose of the state is to impose the will of the ruling class upon the other classes.

        Bourgeois democracy is a democracy for the bourgeoisie, to the exclusion of the proletariat.

        Proletarian democracy is a democracy for the proletariat, to the exclusion of the bourgeoisie.

        Until capitalism/imperialism has been nearly universally phased out, there will be competing economic classes. Once capitalism is gone, there will only be one economic class, the proletariat, allowing democracy to finally be for everyone. That’s what Marxists mean by a “stateless” society: one that is classless.

        Previously:

        The US government was never not captured by the bourgeoisie, because the US was born of a bourgeois revolution[1]. The wealthy, white, male, land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority”. It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (at least those not disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote. BBC: [Princeton & Northwestern] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

        The game is rigged. The election cycle’s pomp and circumstance is to divert your energy and attention from the fact that it’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.

        As you have already chosen to remain ignorant by blocking me, this is for the peanut gallery.

      • ttayh@lemmy.zip
        9·
        9 days ago

        The athenian citizens had a democracy under the male-citizen dictatorship. You are just using a different definition of dictatorship than the one that is used for “dictatorship of the proletariat”