cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/16246531
I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy’s massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It’s been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let’s say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they’re what’s colloquially referred to as tankies. This wouldn’t be much of an issue if they didn’t regularly abuse their admin/mod status to censor and silence people who dissent with their political beliefs and for example, post things critical of China, Russia, the USSR, socialism, …
As an example, there was a thread today about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. When I was reading it, there were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some whataboutist/denialist replies critical of the USA and the west. In terms of votes, the posts critical of China were definitely getting the most support.
I posted a comment in this thread linking to “https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs” (WARNING: graphical content), which describes aspects of the atrocities that aren’t widely known even in the West, and supporting evidence. My comment was promptly removed for violating the “Be nice and civil” rule. When I looked back at the thread, I noticed that all posts critical of China had been removed while the whataboutist and denialist comments were left in place.
This is what the modlog of the instance looks like:
Definitely a trend there wouldn’t you say?
When I called them out on their one sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml that I had ever participated in.
Proof:
So many of you will now probably think something like: “So what, it’s the fediverse, you can use another instance.”
The problem with this reasoning is that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml, and they’re not so easy to replace. I mean, in terms of content and engagement lemmy is already a pretty small place as it is. So it’s rather pointless sitting for example in /c/linux@some.random.other.instance.world where there’s nobody to discuss anything with.
I’m not sure if there’s a solution here, but I’d like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.
Just to weigh in here with a bit of political nuance — “tankies” are certainly defined by their leftist politics, but moreso by their apologist defense of regimes that more or less transparently use socialist or communist maxims as a cover for state capitalism or straight out autocracy.
Tankies may be the loudest voices to claim themselves Marxist or socialist, but please don’t mistake them as actually representing those ideologies truthfully or completely. Personally, I see tankies as more indebted to a cold war-style school of Soviet dogma transplanted to current autocracies. Marx and Trotsky would have rolled their eyes at either.
Unfortunately they take the mic and poison the conversation. Imo they hold back progressive adoption/discussion.
I don’t disagree, therefore the attempt to disentangle the actual ideologies from the totalitarian stans who got stuck on '80s propaganda.
This is why it’s so frustrating, because tankies being overrepresented in online leftist spaces is one of the things which harms the acceptance of leftist ideals more than most of their imperialist windmills.
People aren’t scared away from socialism by economic democracy, egalitarianism or radical direct action. They are scared away by confrontational and aggressive tankies defending tyrants, who seem to care more about relitigating random cold war drama than lifting up workers.
that state capitalism was able to grow the poorest country in the world into one of the richest without relying on destroying the third world to do so.
that sounds like a step up to me.
Whether you’re talking about Russia or China here, both of those countries have massive resources, both natural and in terms of population. I’d argue that they didn’t have to look for (other) third world countries to ruin; they had plenty of area and people of their own to turn to.
Also, a Lemmy ML user charging into the comments to defend state capitalism in oppressive regimes kinda proves my point.
But can they hit the dismount back to communism?
You have a sales pitch that works for the poorest countries, what do you have for the wealthiest?
redistribution of wealth works for every country
also they are already fucking wealthy
I don’t want to spiral this out of control, but I do think you might be interested in Why do Marxists fail to Bring the “Worker’s Paradise?” as well as Why Public Property? The former is a critical examination of why states guided by Marxism haven’t been worker utopias from the perspective of a Marxist-Leninist, the latter is an exploration of why Marx believed Socialism to overtake Capitalism. It isn’t a moral argument, rather, as markets consolidate into monopolist syndicates devoid of competition, they make themselves ripe for public ownership and central planning.
What is Socialism? is also good, it goes over the various arguments between different strains of Marxism over what can be considered Socialist, but at this point I think I’ve recommended far more than enough articles. Really, the first one about “Worker’s Paradises” is the one I think you’d find the most interesting.
Sure, those [Medium posts all by the same author that I’ve never heard of] look interesting enough at a glance — but I’ll admit to only skimming them, and I’m not going to go any further down one random, person’s online ruminations. Thanks for the offer, though.
I tend to recommend their posts because they are written in modern lingo and in the last decade, so there’s specifically modern analysis there. I recommend Marx, Engels, etc. frequently as well, but a lot of their writing is several times longer and as such several times less likely to be read by people I recommend them to, perhaps with the exception of Engels’ The Principles of Communism, which is a great and to-the-point intro to Marxism.
Feel free to DM me if you have any questions!
The Hexbear and .ml instances aren’t really tankies/communists, IMHO. Some of them, sure, but mostly it’s just a facade for their propaganda.
They’re not truly communists, but wouldn’t they still be truly tankies then? Especially in the most literal sense of denying that the Tiananmen Square massacre even took place (or that anyone died from it, or that… whatever other BS interpretation the particular
magattanky you may read it from chooses to subscribe to)?I think they’re paid to spread disinformation (or run LLMs that spread it) that makes “the West” look bad and their authoritarian leaders (CCP, Kremlin) look good.
So if someone mentions Tiananmen Square they delete it or lie about it, or say “what about Mk ultra,” but not because they actually believe in anything other than getting paid.
Never underestimate the utility of a useful idiot, who will do it for free ™.
Though I will add that the West also does a fantastic job, at making itself look bad:-). In large part by actually being thus:-).
Though also the West tends to be fairly open about that - e.g. here’s a segment from the Wikipedia page for Christopher Columbus:
So our sins tend to be on full public view - Donald Trump’s suing anyone who criticizes him in order to shut them up notwithstanding - while in contrast, try saying something like “the Tiananmen Square massacre happened”, and see how fast you get banned from Lemmy.ml. They are not the same! (the badness of The West that acknowledges errors yet does nothing whatsoever to counteract them, vs. tankies who don’t even seem to be aware of the simplest of basic facts!)
Anyway, be advised that we must stop this conversation here - the last time I even so much as questioned whether Dessalines was receiving money from the Chinese government (as someone said, which I included an exact URL to iirc) or the Russian one, to develop the Lemmy codebase (nothing necessarily nefarious there by itself - grants should be sought out, no?), my comments were removed. In fact, I only have 3 comments removed across the entire Fediverse for the past 10 months that I’ve had this account, and all 3 were removed for talking negatively about Lemmy.ml. i.e. this conversation is not on lemm.ee that welcomes a diversity of ideas - we are at risk right now of being removed just for what we’ve said so far. So, I guess, if you want to criticize them further, don’t spend too much time typing it all out I suppose:-).