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?