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.
“Authoritarianism” is just when the government leadership disagrees with me, ideologically. Nobody who supports the current state thinks their government is authoritarian, because it isn’t asking them to do anything they wouldn’t be doing anyway.
Meanwhile, an “insurgency” is just a group of people acting against government leadership’s intended policies. So much of the modern policy state exists to confront the contradiction between an individual pursuing their own interests and a state system that insists some share of the population to suffer in order for the rest to prosper.
If you ask liberals whether they oppose “authoritarianism” you’ll get an enthusiastic “Yes!” But then you tell them “better go out there and start doing crimes” and they’ll recoil in horror, because they don’t see a benefit to violating rules they fundamentally support.
They did this 40 years ago, under Reagan, with the “War on Crime” bullshit. And before that under Nixon with the “War on Drugs”. And before that under Eisenhower with the… checks notes… ah, yes, “War on Illegal Immigration”. Damn that sounds familiar for some reason.