I think a little clarification is needed. No. I don’t actually think everyone there is insane. I don’t care about the bans so stop trying to use that. HB enthusiasts coming here and trying to call me out achieves nothing besides proving my point
Edit: Feel free to keep trying to brigade me. It’s not going to scare me to take this down
What is a ‘tankie’?
Apologists for Chinese/Russian government.
the original origin of the term was a group british communists attacking anyone who supported the Soviet Union’s crushing of the hungarian uprising in 1956. it then morphed into a term used to attack anyone who supports the use of force and authority in general to suppress counter revolutionaries. it’s final degeneration is that it is now used to attack anyone to the left of an american democrat like facebones said.
https://redsails.org/tankies/
here is a good article about it. To be clear: this is written from the perspective of a marxist leninist, who are normally the number one target of being called a “tankie”. Still, it is very short, and redsails is a really cool website that has the footnotes with citations pop up as you read long
In theory, the things the other replies said.
In practice, anything left of the average Lemmy.world liberal/democrat.
I don’t Lemmy enough to say there are zero hexbear users who are pro China or pro wtfever people say, but I see almost none of the ridiculous shit the rest of Lemmy claim exclusively happens there. What I DO see is liberals (usually from lemmy.world if we’re swinging at instances) talking ridiculous trollish shit to hexbear users than using the silly trollish responses they get in response to justify these “all hexbears want to give America to Xi Jinping” posts.
I dunno, I ended up blocking the instance way before I knew about their reputation (like, when I first joined Lemmy) because all of the users their kept posting the most unhinged shit.
I have definitely seen blatant apologism for China/Russia from them.
FWIW, I’m much further left than your average Democrat (I consider myself a leftist/anarchist). I personally don’t consider what I’ve seen from them to be very “left”, just authoritarian.
I was sure to not be an absolutist for a reason, I’m not always cruising Lemmy. Hexbear in particular absolutely has a sense of humor sometimes that I myself am a bit old for, but judging them for that is very much more “Old man yelling at clouds” than anything. If you don’t like it, sure, but that doesn’t say A or B about them.
Maybe there’s blatant apologism, but in my experience it’s people taking whatever scraps they can find to claim “Apologism.” For example, discussing high speed rail development in China. Admiring a rail system isn’t “blatant apologism,” but most lemmy liberals would call it as such, because it was built by China. It’s like calling me a Putin apologist for discussing Dostoyevsky. Yes, I’m admiring a creation of the country or it’s culture, but I’m not saying that their current governments are the only way forward or really saying anything about governance at all.
Again, I’m not claiming you haven’t seen something “blatant” before (I could name so many one off events I’ve witnessed that don’t hold to norms,) I’m just saying that people claiming it to be this widespread norm on every leftist instance are spreading disinformation.
Sure, perhaps it’s possible that I saw an unusually high amount of apologists, but I’m saying that it happened enough times and consistently enough that it prompted me to block them before I even knew anything about them, which I think at least says something. I won’t claim to know what the majority opinion there is, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that it’s an abnormal amount.
As I mentioned, I’d be inclined to wonder what you’re considering “apologism.” The fact that you didn’t address the points I made makes me think you fall into that camp of boiling an intentionally wide array of ideas, conversation, etc down to “apologism” to take up arms against instances you don’t like. I see discussion of those countries, and examples of things that are happening there, but not one time have I seen people celebrating violence or excusing it on either hexbear or .ml.
Don’t be gaslit, Russian warcrimes enjoyers are running wild on Nazbear.
What you saw is what I saw too, and that’s just disgusting. Don’t be fooled.
I’ve seen them pulling the debatebro tactics they complain about, and feigning ignorance when you talk about their favorite dictators.
Those people aren’t acting in good faith, and are trying to manipulate you. They’re pissed that they’re being treated like pariahs and are defederated from everything, because their influence has shrunk significantly and they’ve essentially been defanged (they’re getting banned left and right, even by real lefties).
“Leftists” who are more interested in authoritarianism than leftism. At their very worst, they even ally with the far-right.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
“Authoritarianism is when people want things, not when government exerts force!”
Someone ideologically somewhere between his greatest heroes, Stalin and Mao.