GarbageShoot , 4 hours ago

I’m pretty sure all those ancient societies didn’t have universal human rights and civil liberties. The concept of rights doesn’t really begin until the 1600s afaik

What in the world are you talking about? Most societies throughout history had rights for their citizens.

study.com/…/significance-of-citizenship-in-ancien…

and universal rights until the 1800s at the earliest

See my screed about America. Universal how?

There are non liberal societies right now, they’re all dictatorships with no freedoms, hence my statement

But this flatly isn’t true. Let’s pick a country that both of us probably hate: Saudi Arabia. There are lots of backwards laws and abuses, but cops still typically need a warrant to search your house and aren’t allowed to just go in and beat you to death. There are cases where they do anyway, but so it goes in most states. This black-and-white view where people are free in liberal states and there are “no freedoms” in other states is unserious.

It’s also worth pointing out, and this might go a little way to explaining your argument with someone else in this thread, that the magical way neoliberals talk about “dictatorship” doesn’t make any sense. A government might nominally operate in an autocratic way, where one dude’s word is law, but it cannot subsist on one dude’s authority. That autocrat’s authority is dependent on some class of people who interests he serves creating the material basis for him to keep ruling (Saudi Arabia is a good example, since it is an absolute monarchy that serves the capitalist class). Thus, any so-called dictatorship is really the rule of that class and not of that individual, even if it nominally goes through the decrees of the individual. Likewise, if one class is fundamentally in power, it is no less of a dictatorship if the nominal system is more open, because the real power hasn’t changed.