This was an assignment for my American Politics class that I ended up putting a lot of valuable thought into. I figured I'd share it here. Below you will find the final wrap up entry, which I'm using here as a sort of TLDR, as well as links to sections of the whole project. I highly reccomend you read the full thing, as the final entry doesn't cover most of what is discussed. For those of you who will wonder what book I keep refering to, it is Timothy Snyder's "On Tyranny". A tiny and exceptionally good volume that I would reccomend to literally everyone ever.
The format for the main entries is: citation + timestamp, 1 paragraph summary, my thoughts, next entry.
I feel it is not enough to merely keep the powerful in check and overthrow them when necessary. Instead, it is my duty to strive for the destruction of power itself. It is with that aim that I create the theoretical framework for Nadrdakti.
Nadrdakti is a governmental system designed to avoid the problems I have seen in our Capitalist society, and those systems that have come before, or tried to replace it. Communism has failed us in one way, Capitalism in the other. So it goes for Representative Democracy and Authoritarianism as well. Seeing what has failed, and what has succeeded for each is vital to the creation of a healthy new system. This project, although not a definitive answer by any measure, has been of great value.
This has allowed me to better understand and sympathize with those who support Trump and his methods. Fighting against a faceless other is never a good idea. Trying to combat a group who's motives and lives you know nothing about is exactly what allows atrocities to happen.
At the beginning I felt that there was a potential for this project to push me in a more politically moderate direction, but if anything, this has encouraged my radical ideas. Although this has in one way tempered my radical tendencies, by making me very aware of how easy it would be for my radical movement to go wrong.
Snyder's book has been invaluable in this, especially his chapter on paramilitaries. At about the third chapter I stopped reading it as a guide to counter the far right, and started reading it as a guide to prevent my own potential movement from becoming the ones who commit atrocities.
One of my main goals in life is to study prior revolutions, both social and violent, in order to attempt to determine what strategies are best for overthrowing tyranny and implementing meaningful, systemic change. This has opened my eyes to the fact that both my anarchic-socialist end of the pond, and Trump's nationalist-capitalist group, are trying to implement the same strategies for creating change in this morbidly slow system.
What I want to determine now, is how to keep the revolutions that try to bring an end to oppression from becoming the ones that bring about a new age of oppression. I used to think that having a definite goal and structure for the new government might be enough, but now I'm not so sure.
I believe that the far right's worries that Christians will be hunted in the streets is patently ridiculous. Most of my fellow revolutionaries are Christian themselves, and even I, and actual Devil Worshiper, don't want anything of the sort. Nevertheless, this doesn't mean that a radical, leftist overturning of our current system couldn't go horribly wrong in other ways. I am convinced that if the anti-capitalist movement I envision is to succeed, then every revolutionary must take extreme care to ensure that it does not stray from its egalitarian vision.
"The price of Liberty is eternal vigilance" indeed.