One of the biggest topics of these days is that of mods in lemmy.ml banning and censoring people because they’re Tankies. This has had a rather sizeable discussion of people agreeing and even arguing for defederating ml. I’m sure a lot of people are arguing from good intentions, but there’s also bad faith actors among them, as I will try to show in this post. The original post was based on the moderation history of the ml instance so I respond in a similar fashion.
I browsed through the discussion for a while, and stumbled upon a comment of someone who had created an instance in response, namely de_ml@lemmy.blahaj.zone The original post in about the moderation in ml has to do with the Tiananmen Square Massacre, so I decided to make a few posts in this new instance about other historical facts which are less discussed, but that we should remember too, namely the Bengal Famine and the US support of fascism in Spain.
Initially these posts were well received and had some upvoted, but after a while I got a notification that one of them had been banned. To my surprise, I looked at the mod log of the instance and found this. So, both posts being about historical atrocities committed by capitalist countries were either banned or locked, and I had been banned from the community altogether for the reason “commie?”
I checked through the admin’s history of comments and found this.
Is this admin, who censors posts that talk about historical grievances committed by capitalism, who pins “fuck Tankies” to the instance, really a person without an agenda trying to protect a community from a supposed malignant moderation, or is it someone with an agenda trying to call everyone to the left of centrism a Tankie?
We should, in my opinion, be careful with accusing and polarising one of the biggest communities in Lemmy away, which is full of non-political content, and really examine what’s going on and what agenda there is behind it.
I’m not Russian
If you see “Russians” as a continuous evil people over time I have bad news for you: you’re racist. Comparing a contemporary russian, to a russian from the 1970s, to a russian from 1915 is absurd, the social changes experienced in 1 century have turned upside down the Russian society and what “being Russian” means, in multiple occasions. If you’re Ukrainian, it makes sense that in the context of a war you’ve been polarised to hate Russians as a people and I can’t blame you for it, if you’re not Ukrainian you’re just racist and speaking from nationalism and hate and not from actual facts.
That’s not how racism works. Racism is prejudice+power, so only the dominant force in the area can be racist, it’s a systemic form of prejudice. For instance in America white people control everything and only white people can be racist, if any other race holds bigoted opinions they’re prejudiced. For China that would be Han Chinese (I think they’re still the dominant race in China anyway) or for Japan it would be the Yamato Japanese.
This is what they teach in sociology classes. You may disagree but you’ll have to take it up with Big Sociology because I didn’t invent it.
Unless the guy above is a minority in Russia, your point kinda doesn’t work for the instance. I suspect they don’t live in a Russian-majority country
He very well may live in russia, but in any case him talking about the russian state’s actions is hardly systemic oppression of russians.
He’s explicitly using the word “Russians”, and referring to them as people who murdered, killed and raped. If you read through the comments again you’ll see I agree with criticism towards the russian government and engage in it myself.
Is it racism if you’re objecting to a group of people that use racism to justify every horrible thing they’ve done over the last 2 centuries to the people around them?
You obviously have a bigger axe to grind than the people you’re accusing of racism.
Criticise the former Russian Empire for being imperialist. Criticise the current Russian government for being imperialist. Don’t call Russians rapists and murderers. Makes sense or it doesn’t? I criticise heavily the US government for its actions and I don’t go around calling Americans murderers and colonialists.
Being Russian has never changed throughout my country’s history. We have been murdered and abused the same from the empire to the USSR to current Russia. The behavior has been same and consistent and far surpasses the context of current wars, so you can’t blame Ukrainian and Georgian people’s refusal to be re-invaded by Russia one more time and wanting to do nothing with them on “being polarized” by the war.