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

    • @[email protected]
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      3 months ago

      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

      • @[email protected]
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        143 months ago

        It’s extremely unconvincing to say “Sure it was horrible last time, but next time it’ll be different.” Trotskyists and ultraleftists compensate by prettying up their picture of socialism and picking more obscure (usually short-lived) experiments to uphold as the real deal. But this just gives ammunition to those who say “Socialism doesn’t work” or “Socialism is a utopian fantasy.” And lurking behind the whole conversation is Stalin, who for the average Westerner represents the unadvisability of trying to radically change the world at all. No matter how much you insist that your thing isn’t Stalinist, the specter of Stalin is still going to affect how people think about (any form of) socialism — tankies have decided that there is no getting around the problem of addressing Stalin’s legacy. That legacy, as it stands, at least in Western public opinion (they feel differently about him in other parts of the world), is largely the product of Cold War propaganda.

        That’s the gist. Then he goes on with another paragraph of whataboutism but of course not a single mention of the tens of millions of dead both, Stalin and Mao, were responsible for.

        Of course he’s also an western armchair socialist. People that actually lived in the Sowjet Union (and not in today’s Russia) draw quite a different picture.

        • @[email protected]
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          3 months ago

          The thing is, delinking socialism from Stalin also means delinking it from the Soviet Union, disavowing everything that’s been done under the name of socialism as “Stalinist.” The “socialism” that results from this procedure is defined as grassroots, bottom-up, democratic, non-bureaucratic, nonviolent, non-hierarchical… in other words, perfect. So whenever real revolutionaries (say, for example, the Naxals in India) do things imperfectly they are cast out of “socialism” and labeled “Stalinists.” This is clearly an example of respectability politics run amok. 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” (see Engels for more on this last point). [5] We believe that understanding the problems faced by Stalin and Mao helps us understand problems generic to socialism, that any successful socialism will have to face sooner or later. This is much more instructive and useful than just painting nicer and nicer pictures of socialism while the world gets worse and worse.

          this is directly preceding it. Even if I accepted your frankly hilarious black book of communism death tolls, the argument here is that the soviet union and China still greatly improved the lives of the average citizen compared to what came before while facing huge problems that you would crumble upon immediately upon encountering, like imminent war from the west that they predicted and prepared for correctly. As far as your other claim, it’s not nearly so simple as you make it out to be:

          https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/12/21/why-do-so-many-people-miss-the-soviet-union/ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ebrd-transition-survey-idUSKBN1422U2/

          edit: also, nia frome is a trans woman

          • Christian
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            93 months ago

            This essay resonates with me, thanks for sharing, the author makes her points pretty effectively. I’m not a historian and I don’t know shit, but I think even if I give the critics the concession that everything is absolute rubbish, I still think there’s no convincing argument that the beliefs are dishonest or malicious or not genuine.

            There’s so much bullshit and conflicting views about literally every historical event that I find it really hard to penetrate the context of the discussion and feel confident in anything, but I think the fact that I keep seeing people who hold “tankie” opinions dismissed as malicious propagandists pushes me very strongly towards feeling that the critics have not made any attempt to seriously engage with the ideas they’re fighting against.

            I think the realization I’m coming to now is that when part of your ideology is that people who claim belief in a specific conflicting worldview can be dismissed as bots or propagandists, finding out that those people aren’t manufactured makes it a lot harder to take everything else you’ve said seriously.

            On the other hand, the guy you’re replying to is correct that the author’s points fall completely flat and are ridiculous once you hunt down that specific paragraph and remove the context immediately before and after. Then it becomes obvious to an unbiased reader that the author actually ignored communist death tolls because it was inconvenient for her argument.

          • @[email protected]
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            53 months ago

            Stalin and Mao both killed a hell of a lot of their own people that is what they are referring to

              • @[email protected]
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                33 months ago

                Mao was responsible for the deaths of 30-50M in famine. Estimates of Stalins score from famine, execution, forced relocation, labor camps is more difficult to ascertain. Estimates range from 3 -20M. Whether you disagree with this estimate it is incredibly likely that the prior poster was referencing the 33M–70M who died in intolerable conditions not the nazis.

                The fact that you justify the state getting in the systemic murder business for any cause is a fundamental difference between our understanding of what can ever be morally acceptable.

                  • @[email protected]
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                    23 months ago

                    It sounds like ANY state of any variety anywhere in the world any time in modern history could have ended famines and you are somehow ascribing the benefits of modern farming to communism.

      • @[email protected]
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        123 months ago

        Did not know about this site. It was a nice read and their mission statement is cool. Thanks for sharing! :)

      • @[email protected]
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        143 months ago

        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.

          • @[email protected]
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            63 months ago

            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.

    • @[email protected]
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      183 months ago

      “Leftists” who are more interested in authoritarianism than leftism. At their very worst, they even ally with the far-right.

            • @[email protected]
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              23 months ago

              Not at all. They were wrong on certain things, which people like Stalin used to justify his own horrible stuff.

              • Cowbee [he/him]
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                93 months ago

                You’re linked a direct refutation on “anti-authouritarians” from Engels. Marx and Engels were criticized as “Authoritarian” by Anarchists of their era. Either Marx and Engels were Authoritarian in your eyes and thus not Leftists, or the Authoritarian argument itself is misplaced as a thought-terminating cliche as Engels points out, that avoids grappling with the Marxist theory of the State.

    • @[email protected]
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      183 months ago

      Pro-China sycophants. They’d be the ones driving the tanks at Tiananman Square.

      I’d also argue that these people only put up a facade of being leftist. I’ve never once seen a hexbear user actually make arguments for leftist policies, socialism, or communism. They just shitpost a bunch of anti-American memes and rally for the Russian and Chinese governments.

        • @[email protected]
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          23 months ago

          How do you know a tankie from a government paid shill like UniversalMonk?

          I’m not familiar with UniversalMonk. Why do you think they’re a government paid shill?

    • @[email protected]
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      3 months ago

      Apologists for authoritarian regimes that have either historically been communist or paint themselves as such currently.

      Or as far as most of .world is concerned, anyone to the left of Joe Manchin.