On lemmy.world I posted a comment on how liberals use ‘tankie’ as an invective to shut down dialogue and received tons of hateful replies. I tried to respond in a rational way to each. Someone’s said ‘get educated’ I responded ‘Im reading Norman Finkelstein’s I’ll burn that bridge when I get there’ and tried to keep it civil.
They deleted every comment I made and banned me. Proving my point, they just want to shut down dialogue. Freedom of speech doesn’t existing in those ‘totalitarian’ countries right? But in our ‘enlightened’ western countries we just delete you.
This is liberal mental space, full of “freedom of speech”. Liberalism is a cancer which leads to right extremism. And social democracy leads to liberalism. If you exclude ML from discourse, you eliminate whole left wing point of view consequently.
Unrelated, but I like your pfp.
Thank you comrade!
It’s why it’s really funny that there’s a decent amount of libs trying to pretend that Lemmy (either .ml or as a whole) is this super “tankie” thing when they’re really the opposite
Like, if the rest of the Lemmy universe was “tankie” we wouldn’t need Lemmygrad in the first place
It’s pretty funny that liberals see themselves as proponents of open debate and rational discourse, but in practice they start freaking out as soon as anybody challenges their dogmas.
Real “my girlfriend goes to another school” situation, except the girlfriend is their respect for other people
Sometimes it kind of of makes me feel really irritated in a way because like, a lot of these people who are so overly concerned over “tankies”, don’t have that energy directed at fascists or reactionaries? They seem more concerned over “tankies” than reactionaries or fascists who are in power in various places and are hurting people. Like they will make a post or whatever denouncing “tankies”, but where is that towards fascists? or reactionaries? If anything all they do is help fascists and reactionaries whether they are aware of that or not.
Go ahead liberals. Call me a tankie. See if I give one ten thousandth of a fuck. Literally such a low-tier insult. “Uhh its like… uh…you support this large cool looking machine that stopped Color Revolutions and was responsible for Liberating the Eastern Front during World War II” “Yea, I do😐” “😨”
Tankie means you approve when a communist state uses military/tanks against its own people… Not against a Nazi state. I would reconsider if you really want to wear that label with pride…
Tankie just means “any communist I don’t like” at this point. Take your McCarthyism and complete ignorance about color revolutions elsewhere.
Nice definition of tankie! Got that from wish?
At what point does being clowned on by an entire instance spur self-reflection?
Look what people wrote as replies to my comment, look how the upvote downvote numbers are, think.
My key takeaway from this post is: people on lemmygrad say they are interested in discussion and all those other instances are oh so bad, because they block them or doenvote them or call them tankies, which people on lemmygrad interpret as slur.
At the same time, you get down voted to oblivion, when you even write the definition of tankies to someone, who calls himself one. People who are pride to be a tankies onLemmygrad: cherished People who criticise this in anyway: laught at.
And simultaneously everyone who calls anyone else except him self a tankie no matter the context is automatically a liberal, when Servers defederate them, they are all facists or love fascists
People making strawman arguments when I say in a discussion that I don’t agree with Stalin (“ohhh so capitalism is sooo much better” - no, its not, and I didn’t say that, I can disagree with capitalism and stlinism at the same time, go figure)
And people defending (literal) tankies get upvoted, people who don’t get down voted.
This server has lost one of the strongest tools in material dialectic: (self-) critical thinking
I really hoped I would find interesting debates here, but this is a circlejerk
At what point will self reflection kick in? At what point t people in an echo chamber realise its one?
If you don’t send tanks into hungary, the nazis will do pogroms and construct concentration camps there. Not sending tanks is inhumanly cruel.
Mathematician 1: 1+1=2 Mathematician 2: 1+1=2
Debatebro: Muh echo chamber!
Yeah, cause stating “tankie” means “every communist I don’t like” is the only truth and like saying 1+1 =2
Also comparing societal questions to mathematical ones is totally unconcerning
/kappa
What is your opinion on the standing rock protests and the Kentucky state massacre
Also the 1956 Hungarian coup attempt that the epithet “tankies” comes from was literally full of nazis lmao
The nazis aren’t our people.
And everyone who don’t likes Stalin is a Nazi
/kappa
That’s correct, specifically a state that uses tanks against its people in revolt.
However, people on Reddit (and on Lemmy now) basically use it to refer to any leftist they have a disagreement with.
Well saying tankies support using tanks against civilians gets you down voted on lemmygrad.
No tankies here though, all just libs propaganda
/kappa
It’s also happens when liberals talk about foreign policy. The reduce critics of US foreign policy and NATO “America bad.” Which is exactly as reductive as the hyperbolic critique they’re trying to make.
A lot of this comes from the community from the streamer whose name starts with the v and who used to go by Irish Lassie. His community is especially toxic when it comes to using the term tankie as a pejorative.
And they don’t even keep the smear to people that support the Bolsheviks. They’ve been saying that about Noam Chomsky and Jeremy corbyn and basically anyone that has been critical of NATO in the last few years.
A lot of this comes from the community from the streamer whose name starts with the v and who used to go by Irish Lassie. His community is especially toxic when it comes to using the term tankie as a pejorative.
And they don’t even keep the smear to people that support the Bolsheviks. They’ve been saying that about Noam Chomsky and Jeremy corbyn and basically anyone that has been critical of NATO in the last few years.
Imagine calling fucking Chomsky a tankie XD
XD
The polish virus spreads! Yes! Hahaha! Yes!
As Hakim or Yugopnik (I can’t remember exactly) said, “tankie” is the new “commie”
Yugopnik I think from memory. He was saying how libs can’t say “commie” because its such a dated word and nobody takes it seriously (except some conservatives who still say it unironically which is actually hilarious😂). It’s too much associated with redscare era propaganda. Tankie doesn’t carry this baggage but has exactly the same function.
Also Hakim, in his newest video.
ah cool didn’t realise
Liberals are incapable of intelligent conversation with others, especially those of opposing viewpoints. They’ve been trained to desire and maintain the status quo (Capital), even in the face of creeping fascism, and will parrot insults at anyone who doesn’t tow the line. ‘Tankie’ is just the newest term.
It’s just western red scare paranoia with a millennial twist. I hadn’t peeked at those communities before, but I’ll make sure they’re given a wide berth now.
Wow you’re not using liberal the american way are you? What is your definition of the world liberal?
Edit: Downvoting me for asking a question is so reddit of you, feels like home <3
I mean liberalism in the sense of support for things like private property, liberal ‘western’ democracy and an exploitative, laissez-faire approach to market economies. I am American; perhaps I’m just not understanding the varied meaning of the word?
Sorry for the long comment, hope this clarification helps. If others disagree with my explanation, feel free to clarify or call out any wrong ideas. I’m a new Liberal convert so I’m still working through these details.
In essence, the “left” are socialists, the “right” are fascists (Glossing over some details here). Fascism is authoritarian capitalism, but Liberalism is capitalism that’s not fascism. Liberalism is theoretically to the left of the political spectrum, but it’s a compromise to the capitalists.
Our problem with Liberals is they seem completely incapable of having a real conversation about how the world works, and how to make change. As well, they demonize anyone that doesn’t share their viewpoint.
For example: “Woke” is kind of a fake word now, it means whatever conservatives want it to mean, but it comes from a real place. Initially being woke meant that you see the injustices that are institutionalized in the world, and seek to better yourself after learning that information. This is a good thing and lead to more people understanding the contradictions of our wold. But Liberals kinda turned into “I’m better than you because I went ‘woke’”, “If you aren’t woke, then leave my circle of friends”, “Anything that isn’t woke isn’t worth talking about”. This perpetuates the culture war that the conservatives are winning, because in the end, who wants to side with the assholes who push their own out at any sign of disobedience? The fascists are playing open arms to everyone the left excludes, perpetuating the growing movement of right authoritarianism.
I was a liberal for a long time, but always felt out of place because although the conservatives made up a lot of bullshit about liberals, they touched on some real things that also irritated me. Instead of moving to the right, I was educated and looked at the source of some of these things. That led me to find where the real problems of the world were, opened my eyes to those that were in charge, causing these problems in the first place. That lead me to socialism, communism, etc. and now I think I’m more on the ‘left’ than I have ever been.
This turned into the longest thing I’ve written in ages.
You gave quite a good explanation, and there are just two big points I want to add to it. Sorry if I get basic with it or seem condescending, but I’m also writing with new people in mind. The first point is that liberal capitalism is capitalism that is not yet fascist, and the second point is that for anyone living in one of the many places the west exploits, it already is fascist. Because of how writing this shook out, I’ve tried to make these points in the opposite order, because it’s easier to follow that way.
Nothing is static, everything is a process. A mountain is the process of plate tectonics, an animal is the process of cellular life, and a capitalist economy is the process of accumulation. It outcompeted and replaced feudalism, a more primitive form of accumulation. Every form of social organization has inherent contradictions, inherent tension points where the interests of one group pull against the interest of another. Peasant vs landlord, yeoman farmer vs slave, industrial worker vs factory owner. These roles are defined by their relationships to the means of production and to each other, and when conditions make those relationships untenable, they break, and a new dynamic arises. For example, when the conditions of defeat in the Civil War but also a paltry reconstruction effort by the US made chattel slavery an unviable arrangement for the wealthy, they started up the sharecropping industry, a form of wage slavery the new government found acceptable. Obviously prison slavery also started ballooning afterwards, and now we have more prisoners in a larger carceral system in the US than anywhere else on Earth. The profit margins of chattel slavery were stabilized by other types of slavery. Because a capitalist economy requires infinite growth, it requires new frontiers to exploit, places where resources and labor can be had cheaply and sold for more elsewhere. In US history, these frontiers (and the wretched economic conditions necessary to extort cheap labor) have always been enforced by military and intelligence organizations. Look into the history of any country the west uses for cheap labor, cheap materials, or as a trash dumping ground, and you’ll find a history of naked imperialism that set the conditions for all these “voluntary, free market” transactions that always seem to screw over anyone who isn’t part of the so-called first world.
The need for profits drove colonialism, it drives neocolonialism today, and when one frontier closes, another must open. If no external frontier can be opened, it will be an internal one. Fascism, economically, is is the attempt to open up an internal frontier against a segment of ones own society. It’s capitalism in crisis mode, a rampant imperial economy that has begun chewing at it’s own flesh to make up for the caloric deficit. This is the stage at which decline will be felt by the people living inside the empire, with things like infrastructure failures, mass poverty, mass incarceration, crimes of desperation, an explosion in new cults, and outbreaks of disease becoming commonplace. These conditions are symptoms of the contradictions between the classes becoming irreconcilable: decades of austerity, of public funds and programs being looted by the wealthy, of endless imperial wars, of the privatization of every industry and resource, even vital resources like food and water that people need to live. This is where we’re at now-and I havent even mentioned the concentration camps.
Looking at it from a class perspective, these are conditions that the American and westen bourgeoisie have inflicted both on the proletariat of their own countries, and to a much greater extent on the rest of the world. The people of all these countries we ruin don’t choose fascism, our ruling class chooses it for them. The people of America don’t choose to go to war, or for healthcare to cost a million dollars, or to give the police tanks and combat robots. Our ruling class chooses it for us. We don’t actually live in a democracy, we live in a dictatorship of the rich.
When we consider that a capitalist economy has only one goal -to accumulate capital, to make fewer and fewer individuals richer and richer- and that it will fufill this goal at any cost and when we consider that extreme fascist policies are very good for private accumulation, it leads to an uncomfortable conclusion: that any liberal capitalist economy, after exhausting or losing access to it’s external frontiers, will inevitably become fascist, must inevitably become fascist, or be outcompeted and absorbed by a more ruthless competitor.
As long as capitalism is the dominant mode of production on this planet, fascism is it’s only logical endpoint.
TLDR what we think of as liberalism is actually just when the fascism is contained in the countries we inflict it on.
We should call liberals coupies because of all their coups.
Call them boaties because NATO sent 19 warships to surround and blockade Lisbon in 1974 after Portugal overthrew fascism and started nationalizing industries and redistributing land.
I got 11 upvotes on a Ho Chi Minh quote in the clown shoes thread. Was that all you guys?
I see it got deleted. Ho Chi Minh should have known better and organize Vietnam’s liberation from colonialism through confederated and horizontally-organized municipal communes, I suppose.
omg i just had the misfortune of wandering into this thread, https://lemmygrad.ml/post/806853 i am so glad we have our own space where we can safely laugh at these fools. omg.
That whole thread:
hmm, I wonder who controls the socialist state
No one should control the state because there shouldn’t be a state. If there is a state then there’s oppression.
Oppression of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat, absolutely; the point is to eventually eliminate the bourgeois class. When class distinctions no longer exist, the state will, by definition (a tool for oppression of one class by another), cease to exist. How would you go about abolishing the state while classes still exist, or abolishing classes within a bourgeois dictatorship?
The issue is that where there is a state, definitively there will be still social classes - those with power within the state, and those without. If your position is “we can’t abolish the state until there are no class divisions” then you’ve got an infinite loop.
Obviously with the way the world is there is no way to go straight from the current situation to communism, but the goal is still the abolition of the state, and so many leftists seem to get angry with the concept that we should (and have to) abolish the state. That’s all I am saying - reading any deeper into my comment than that isn’t recommended!
I’m not sure if anyone is getting angry that you’re saying the state must be abolished. MLs fundamentally agree with that. It’s what revolutionaries are aiming for.
The criticism is that you seem to be saying that revolutionaries cannot use the state because it’s an incoherent notion:
If your position is “we can’t abolish the state until there are no class divisions” then you’ve got an infinite loop.
By this do you mean to say that the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat is logically contradictory? That it won’t work? You seemed to agree, above, that you don’t think that’s the case (i.e. you think the state can be used as a tool), but here you appear to be saying just that?
It may be helpful here to reiterate the dialectical element of Marxism-Leninism. It’s not a step-by-step sequence of events. First one, then the other. It’s a dialectical development.
The plan isn’t to seize the state, then to use the state to abolish classes. That won’t work. It’s anti-dialectical.
The idea is that by seizing the state and wresting control over the means of production from the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie will become redundant and whither away. This will take a long time. The state is needed to keep the reactionaries in line in the meantime.
It’s taken China over half a decade to start the process and most of the rest of the world hasn’t even begun the task yet. The DotP and the abolition of classes and the state are one process. They’re interrelated.
Have you read State and Revolution or ‘Better Fewer But Better’ by Lenin?
there shouldn’t be a state
Agreed, now let’s abolish the state through developing the material conditions necessary for it to happen instead of just saying “STATES BAD!!” online :^)
As an ML I actually agree with you, the state is a weapon and i would like to see it one day outlive it’s usefulness and wither so that communism can be achieved. However, it’s a weapon that you absolutely cannot discard until capitalism has been destroyed, and until then, unilateral disarmament is guaranteed suicide for a revolutionary movement.
guaranteed suicide
As is blind faith in a revolutionary movement’s ability to wield such a weapon in the interest of the proletariat and towards communism. Seems like a lot of people in this thread are forgetting Mao’s critique of the USSR.
"The revisionist Khrushchov clique abolish the dictatorship of the proletariat behind the camouflage of the “state of the whole people”, change the proletarian character of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union behind the camouflage of the “party of the entire people” and pave the way for the restoration of capitalism behind that of “full-scale communist construction”. - Mao - marxists.org
But is this not equally true for China today?
It is not.
It’s as much analysis as you can expect from the userbase of Tumblr lite.
Tumblr lite, or tumblr alt right?
Let’s be fair to them, at least they aren’t reactionary. Still, unfunny “uwu” memes mixed with Lockheed Left behaviour does not paint a much more enjoyable scene.
Lockheed Left is reactionary though.
Holy shit what an insufferable group.
“Define Tankie”
Red fascist
Who defines a buzzword with a buzzword ffs.
Also! (Paraphrasing)
[…] people who justify genocides. […]
'scuze me what the fuck? Who here says genocides are cool and good actually? We are like the first fuckers to point them out and scream about them???
And even more!
Comrade Spood
Now that’s dose of Anarcho-Debilizm let me tell you. “Just press the communism button Xi and we’ll succeed no problem! They will just let us exist and everyone will love each other :3”
And it just still keeps going!
Educate yourself. / Please change and grow as a person. / Read a book.
Motherfuckers I read too much compared to your sorry asses.
Yeah it was torture. I tried to keep it civil and lighthearted and actually engage but they are so programmed it’s almost knee jerk comment reaction at this point.
Also fun and great that so many Lemmy instances won’t federate material that threatens their worldview. I mean, I’m 100% anti Nazi anti fascist and anti authoritarian but what does that even matter right? How dare I say there might be a different way to view say Cuba China Vietnam or North Korea…
Educate yourself. / […] / Read a book.
Their education:
I refuse to believe there’s actually 1.6gb of anarchist literature in existence that’s not supplemented with lots of random unpublished PDFs and saved blog posts that are rife with poor grammar and spelling errors.
“I have” doesn’t mean “I’ve read”, what a pretentious dumbass.
In the second part of this pic she tells the reader not having read any of it.
it’s real lmao
Hilarious how she doesn’t even have a problem admitting it’s all a matter of fitting the edgy cyberpunk aesthetic of blue hair, computers, skateboards and slapping stickers around. All about individual image and no political dedication.
And I can understand listening to theory audiobooks instead of reading them, although I think it’s worse as it’s harder for you to re-read lines and take notes, but… While skateboarding? Can you imagine yourself attempting to make any sense of a Das Kapital audiobook while playing basketball? Probably just to be able to say “yeah i’ve already read it” and nothing else. Once again, all about aesthetics.
And I had the misfortune of not resisting to participate in it. Do not recommend.
Thank you for your service comrade o9
oh dear. I told myself i wouldn’t engage. (narrator: but he engaged). Just trying to gently nudge an anarchist towards materialist analysis, i’ll try resist getting sucked into any arguments for my own sake.
Like moths flying into a bug zapper: we know it will hurt, but we just cannot help it.
the brainworm infestation has proved devastating
It might be interesting to start a conversation on the appropriate comm there about whichever rule is being enforced (check the modlog) and challenge the rule.
If you mean the blahaj 196, i doubt it will do anything, because it’s apparently this rule by their mod:
By the way, it seems that moderators in 196 are deleting those comments from lemmygrad posters in a way that appear as visible while seen from lemmygrad while they appear as deleted by mods from any other instances (or so I suppose, I do not know very well how does Lemmy work). This is happening even if there is no breaking of rules in sight.
