Earnest answers on the definition of a Tankie (as per the thread topic), bringing up their viewpoints or talking about the authoritarianism they promote were removed and users banned.
Source: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/17428405
Modlog: https://photon.lemmy.world/modlog?user=10894797
Source: https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/21457702
Modlog: https://photon.lemmy.world/modlog?user=66486
Source https://lemmings.world/comment/18733315
Modlog https://photon.lemmy.world/modlog?user=16964962
Join the lemmy.ml boycott today and help foster a better Lemmy-verse! No more posts, comments (except to counter their propaganda ofc!) or upvotes on any comms on the Lemmy.ml instance! To make this easy you can do an instance block at Settings > Block Tab > Scroll to bottom > Input “lemmy.ml” and apply
And consider donating to individual instances instead.
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@Afata@lemmings.world @Jean_le_Flambeur@discuss.tchncs.de @florencia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
@the_mighty_kracken@lemmy.world in response to your comment, it was not a mod, it was head lemmy.ml instance admin themselves that removed all those comments. This is what tankies do, be sure to check the megathread for even more documentation.
Next time, you must answer with “a racist slur against third world leftists”, because that’s what tankies like.
Similarly, if you’re wondering why some people think when you say “spooky” is problematic is because online tankies tried to frame online anarchists who read Stirner as “racists”, for the “nice spooks nerd” meme (the online far-right also helped them, because redshirts often act as useful idiots to the brownshirts).
I guess the mighty kracken got as good of an answer as they could have.
It’s notable that Lemmy’s code of conduct referenced in the rule given as the removal reason says “Please be kind and courteous. There’s no need to be mean or rude.” Dessalines calling someone a coward for directly answering OP’s question without even resorting to a personal attack is fully against that (and other parts of the code). Being immune from the rules and taking action against others merely for expressing an undesirable take is a glaring example of power abuse. I’ve been a mod in big communities, and I would undoubtedly ask that a staff member like this is removed if it happened on my watch.
They are using a tankie interpretation of their code of conduct.
Right: us good, you bad, and then they say ‘because’ and make something up.
Tankies are conservatives.
A “2 state situation” if you will….
-“post the video coward”
-post the video
-got removed and banned anyway
No money for tankie devs!
Tankies: it’s a disparaging term used by libs to discredit actual communists!
Also tankies: check out this video on tankie.tube
I cannot grasp their relationship to the word, and I think they can’t either. They even removed the comment explaining exactly where the term originated and how it’s used today. Wild. Does that mean we can scare off tankies with etymology?
It’s correct in the sense of the word, but not from where it comes. It was first used to distinguish communist party members who spoke out in defense of the Soviet use of tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring.
But it’s nitpicking - the same group of people also were behind the Tienanmen Square massacre.
I wonder if your response would fly in that thread.
I’m guessing not.
I agree; it’s the same with the US fascists that say it’s hate speech if you call them Nazis.
I silently switched to sh.itjust.works a while ago. When I signed up I wanted to be on the dev server, but the views of the devs are more or less completely incompatible with my own.
Also I hate censorship… bitch.
Yeah, the big issue is that the dev has admitted anything donated towards Lemmy’s development will also go towards running .ml. They don’t segregate the donation funds at all, which is a massive ethical conflict. It’s a large part of why so many people jumped ship to piefed instead, so they can feel better about donating to development without supporting a blatant tankie.
Lemmy is a deliberate prop platform and the more I am here the more that appears to be true generally.
I find a lot of joy in seeing the overt and deliberate attempts to sway opinion. I have a background in that field (observational and analysis, not application) and the accounts that are likely state actors follow a playbook.
Find them yourself and outline the way their messages flow and go and you can find the pattern. It’s fun. Also scary seeing others take the bait.
Reciprocal Determinism can be hijacked hard.
Lemmy is a deliberate prop platform and the more I am here the more that appears to be true generally.
Piefed is always available!
You rite
Noice!
I don’t get why are people OK with Lemmy as a product when the dev/mod is asshole like this. It boggles my mind when there are SW projects dismissed as trash (and people are hated for using those) because the dev is homophobic, xenophobic or far right, but when it’s tankie/marxist/stalinist, it’s somehow OK to still use the software?
I’m so glad there’s alternative, either piefed or mbin.
EDIT: I might be biased a little bit as my country experienced four decades of socialist “experiment”, twenty years of those being active Soviet occupation…
This is an interesting thought experiment. Let’s say someone develops a miracle pill that kills cancer, but they’re a stout open Nazi. You have stage 4 Reddit, err, cancer. Do you take it?
Maybe we’re already doing so with plenty of other pills/products and we don’t even know it?
Just a slight correction, tankieism/stalinism aren’t synonymous with Marxism. They deviate heavily from Marx’s own ideas
Yes, indeed they
arearen’t equal. Just as nazism != fascism.Edit: clarification
Huh? Are you equating Marxism with authoritarian ideologies like Stalinism, Maoism?
I meant they are not equal, just as nazis and fascists are not equal.
I avoid buying products/services Chinese and Russian companies as well. But I got downvoted to hell saying that.
Adoption is a feature you can’t design.
Sad but true.
you know that there are different Lemmy instances right?
Of course, but that doesn’t change the fact, that lemmy itself (as a SW) is developed by this human trash.
The lack of depth from these guys is amazing. The CEO or President never services the latrines. If my income relied on something like Lemmy, the minimum would be aliased accounts for management, but the far better solution is to delegate and not get involved. This is elementary politics.
tankies really hate talking critically about their worldviews lol
fascies will usually admit they’re fascies when they’re alone - is this just the same?
I was curious about the references by one of the tankie respondents in the second screenshot, Nia Frome’s “essay”, Tankies.
I honestly shouldn’t be surprised considering I am on Lemmy, a MOG regular, but that is one fucking wild piece of gibberish.
Frome starts off strong:
We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the bourgeois politicians who are typically put forward as role models (Washington? Jefferson? JFK? Jimmy Carter?), and that they haven’t been judged according to the same standard as those bourgeois politicians.
…
To defend someone from an unfair attack you don’t have to deify them, you just have to notice that they’re being unfairly attacked. This is unquestionably the case for Stalin and Mao, who have been unjustly demonized more than any other heads of state in history.
There is a beautiful irony to the mumbling about world communism and global liberation movements and the author’s America-centrism with selecting US presidents as proposed role models. Has the author ever considered that people in other countries may have their own take on why a particularly well renowned leader is respected?
We move on to some more world salad about the achievements of “socialism”:
Those accomplishments include raising standards of living, achieving unprecedented income equality, massive gains in women’s rights and the position of women vis-a-vis men, defeating the Nazis, raising life expectancy, ending illiteracy, putting an end to periodic famines, inspiring and providing material aid to decolonizing movements (e.g. Vietnam, China, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Indonesia), which scared the West into conceding civil rights and the welfare state.
The USSR collaborated with Nazi Germany before they attacked them. Frome is claiming that all good movements in the world are due to Stalin and Mao!
These are the gains that are so important to insist on, against the CIA/Trotskyist/ultraleft consensus that the Soviet Union was basically an evil empire and Stalin a deranged butcher.
More gibberish about “DIA conspiracy!” and “Stalin did nothing wrong!”
Tankies believe that this failure of solidarity, along with the utopian ideas that the revolution can win without any kind of serious conflict or without party discipline, are more significant problems for the left than is “authoritarianism”
“serious conflict” and “without party discipline”, what Frome meant to say was “mass scale murder” and “rejection of democracy”. The fellow should start working in corporate PR.
Tankies are those people who think the millions of communists who fought and died for socialism in the twentieth century weren’t evil, dupes, or wasting their time, but people to whom we owe a great deal and who can still teach us a lot.
Oh, they definitely can teach us a lot. More specifically, how to not end up getting killed.
I get a lot of pushback for calling tankies degenerates and roaches.
If Frome’s comically regressive polemics are not an example of degeneracy, then what is?
I am not talking about degenerate as a generic insult or terms like “degenerate gambler”, but the dictionary definition of the term:
“having very low moral standards of behaviour”
Is it unreasonable to claim that Frome’s “arguments” (not only the justification and attempts at white-washing of Stalin’s atrocities, but the implicit demand that we must all sacrifice ourselves in the name of Frome’s interpretation of communism) are fundamentally at odds with being human?
Post this to !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com
I would, but since I didn’t personally have any of these actions taken against me I can’t because it’s against the first comm rule
Tht whole thread was pretty good
OK, I Am not going to defend Dessalines (for obvious reasons) but equating communism with the liking the tianeam square massacre is in fact complete bullshit. Those are two completely different things. Is it worth deleting? Absolutely not, but being a communist doesn’t mean you like what happened there and liking what happened there doesn’t necessarily mean you are a communist.
Remember, when communist is said on .ml it means Marxist-Leninist/tankie. Everywhere else, people tend to differentiate between ancoms, leftcoms and tankies.
While I agree with you and I strongly dislike non sequitur usage of terms like socialist and communist (was very annoying hearing that when I lived in the US), I can’t help but wonder what does it mean to be a communist?
In a sense I am strong supporter of communism (even though I would never refer to myself as such), but I am honestly incapable articulating how to get there.
I’ll preface this explanation by acknowledging my biases: I consider myself something between a democratic socialist and an anarchist.
Communism is worker ownership of the means of production. That means that rather than individuals owning companies and having total authority over them, the workers would own their companies collectively. That’s the entire idea, but it’s vague and there are many ways it can be interpreted and many different ways people have proposed to implement it, which is why you’ll see so many different versions of communism and a lot of arguing and infighting between communists/socialists.
The version of communism that people who grew up in the US are familiar with is a twisted and distorted view of a very authoritarian and centralized version of communism established by the Bolsheviks after the Russian revolution. It’s important for people to understand that not only is this not the only version of communism, it’s an extremely controversial one that fractured the movement and created many of the different factions that exist in leftist spaces today.
Now a note and some definitions:
The common understanding today is that communism and socialism are just more and less extreme versions of the same thing, but the terms were coined for a different reason. Communism was originally stated to be the ideal end-goal to be strived towards, a classless, stateless society in which resources are distributed by need and labor is distributed according to ability, while socialism was stated to be a transitional state between capitalism and communism.
AES - Actually existing (or once existed) socialist states such as the USSR or China. It is heavily debated which states actually qualify as AES.
Private property - Best understood as “absentee ownership,” or claiming ownership of tools and resources that you hire others to use/develop/maintain in order to make a profit. Things like factories and office buildings that are owned by an individual rather than collectively by the workers count as private property, things like your house or your toothbrush do not.
Pluralism - The existence of competing parties with opposing views being represented in the same government.
Liberal democracy - A form of representative democracy that includes separation of powers, different branches of government acting as checks and balances to one another, and an emphasis on individual liberties (including private property, which anti-capitalists argue is not a right and is actually corrosive to the liberty of working people).
Hierarchy - An organized system in which people are subordinated to one another, meaning certain people - chosen or otherwise - can exercise authority over others.
This is already getting too long, so I’ll try to simplify it down and generalize it into just 3 different schools of thought, but note that they all share the belief that private property should be abolished, that workers are entitled to what they produce, and should collectively organize the distribution of those resources according to need, usually by creating social services and infrastructure. What they disagree on is how this is accomplished.
First are the Marxist-Leninists, who typically critically support AES states such as the USSR, China, Cuba, and sometimes even North Korea in the extreme cases. They argue that a centralized authority such as the state is necessary to defend socialism against capitalists so that communism can eventually be achieved, and that since the state is a public institution then if the state owns all industry it counts as collective ownership. They also oppose pluralism and liberal democracy, favoring a one-party government with a structured internal hierarchy in which only party members vote and the existing members approve new membership. They are criticized by the other factions for being authoritarian, are often called tankies, and tend to prefer revolution through armed struggle over reform.
Second are the Democratic Socialists, who are less likely to support AES states on the grounds that they are too authoritarian and do not adequately represent the workers enough to be considered true communism, Though they tend to have more nuanced opinions on some of the AES states. They argue for more egalitarian, decentralized, and democratic means of organizing production and distribution of resources, and support political pluralism. In practice this is typically envisioned as similar to a liberal democracy but where the state owns all industry (no private property), can be either representative or directly democratic, and prefer a flatter hierarchy with greater accountability. They are criticized by MLs as being naive or capitalist collaborators, called liberals as an insult (and they often do take it as one), and are criticized by anarchists also as being naive or statists. They tend to prefer reform through union organizing and collective bargaining over revolution.
Finally there are the Anarchists, who oppose hierarchy entirely. They make a distinction between a state and a government, arguing that states are inherently hierarchical and authoritarian, and that government can be done without the subordination of people to any other. Some argue that even direct democracy creates a “tyranny of the majority,” preferring some form of consensus-based decision making. Anarchists typically believe governments should look like loose, voluntary confederations of worker collectives - with no internal or external hierarchies - organizing production and distribution of resources collectively through direct democratic or consensus-based governance. They favor a library or gift economy in which people’s needs are provided for by collectively organized social services and infrastructure. They are criticized as being too idealistic. They tend to prefer revolution through rank-and-file union organizing, direct action, and mutual aid over reform.
Like you, I would would probably also fall somewhere in the “between a democratic socialist and an anarchist” range.
Thanks for the right-up. I am aware of these points. I am from Eastern Europe, so I have an interest in the 20th century history of Europe and the Cold War between russia and the US (and the broader history of decolonization).
I guess I was referring to the more philosophical question around what it means to look for a classless, stateless society in the present day.
What needs to be done? What is the next step?
I almost feel like we need a new global revolutionary movement (truly global and without the excesses of 20th century revolutionary movements), but I am not sure how (if?) we’ll get there.
One thing I do know is that communism (in the common usage of the term, not the ideas behind communism) has been discredited by the USSR, Mao and others.
While I agree that a global revolutionary movement is needed, I think it’s important to focus on what’s actionable for you. Think global but act local. Organizing with people in your community helps to build a foundation on which a global revolutionary movement could one day launch from, and in the meantime it will improve your life and your community. Anything helps, so to decide on a direction you should consider what your community needs and what you are capable of. You could run for office, form a union, engage in direct action, or participate in mutual aid. It all counts for something.
Agreed. One should never underestimate the impact of small actions. I would argue I do contribute in my own way.
I was thinking about more about what a future global movement would look like.
To be a communist is to believe in a system that will only ever work if humans are subtracted from it.
In other words, hopeless ideal.
On one hand I agree with you, we are very, very far away from from implementing it. To the point where “hopeless ideal” is a fair description of communism.
But on the other, to me it seems clear that all of known history is in a way a path towards the ideals of communism. Marx clearly was on to something, it is not by chance that his ideas had an enormous impact on human history. A completely hopeless, “alien” ideal does not take the world by storm.
The 20th century attempts at implementing communism were a disastrous failure, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be further attempts (perhaps ones that build upon new knowledge and the mistakes of the past). This is even relevant considering the current rise of an oligarchical, corrupt techno-feudalist global regime.
Really? Because everything you’ve just said can be applied to Fascism, albeit by entirely different paths traveled.
Has Fascism not taken the world by storm? Is Fascism not entirely hopeless? I can argue just as easily that Fascism simply hasn’t ever been implemented correctly, despite us having seen its disastrous results numerous times.
Edit: I wouldn’t, mind you, but I can. I’m opposed to both Fascism and Communism.
That’s a very fair point.
That being said, I don’t think Marx would have approved of the attempts at implementing communism in the 20th century.
Plus, I would argue it’s fair to say Marx heart was in the right place, the same cannot be said of the foundational elements of fascism.
I am also opposed to communism as it was implemented, but I do think the goal for a stateless, classless society is worth considering (at least on philosophical level).
Not at all. Some humans, absolutely yes. But not even remotely all. Plenty of us just want to be able to have a decent standard of living and just live our lives. Honestly if we as a general society simply discouraged and punished sociopathy it would go a long way to fixing things even. As opposed to worshiping it as we do today.
Any and every individual human being can be corrupted by power. You cannot remove enough human beings because everyone will be corrupted when faced with the same power over others.
Thinking otherwise is foolish, and the reason we are where we are today.
No they won’t. You definitely. That’s easy enough to tell because of your projection. Though I will commend you for at least having a round about Freudian sense of self-awareness.
No one claimed that power doesn’t corrupt. You’re just building a straw man. By the way, how’s that going for you? Of course, power tends to corrupt. That is well understood and there are concrete ways to address that. Whole philosophies. Were there a critical mass of the public willing to. keeping power small, local, granular and answerable for one.
The problem lies with the fact that, anyone who would seek power. Generally should never have power. Because they then take that power abuse it and use it. To secure the position so they can make sure that only other people like themselves who shouldn’t have it are the ones able to get it.
Serious question. If power wasn’t something to be won or claimed. If it was something gifted to you by your friends and neighbors. And limited to just your friends and neighbors only for a very limited time span. You know friends and neighbors, right? The people who know where you sleep and could strangle you in it, if you cross them. Do you honestly think they would all still rush to screw each other over still.
Basic accountability is like magic.
So you’re saying that this system of power can only be held up by those that don’t seek power? And you don’t see that as hopeless? All while trying to suggest that you simply wouldn’t become corrupt.
Yes I’m sure this is a worthwhile conversation, and definitely a good use of my time.
People thought pushing back against the divine right of kings was hopeless. Remind me what happened with that. You might be wasting your time. But not with this conversation. You can waste your time being hopeless all you want. That’s what they want. What they don’t want is us to realize that we far outnumber them. That this learned helplessness is useless. It’s absolutely an uphill battle, but it’s not remotely hopeless.
Nobody but the wealthy likes the current people in charge of government. Not Republican voters, not Democrat voters, not Third Party voters. All we have to do is decide that we’re done. And people are closer to that now than they have been for 100 years.
