Ugh these people suck so bad. On average, western leftists are worse than useless. Some bullet points are kinda interesting, even if annoying.

  • intresteph
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    17 days ago

    Well, I’m not a tankie, if that’s what you mean.

      • intresteph
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        17 days ago

        Shut me down harder baby, it just aligns with the article more.

        • robinn_ [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          17 days ago

          Heh, if I intentionally vaguepost then they’ll tell me to make clearer points or stop talking. This will prove the article right (I’m literally being censored for not conforming to your hivemind).

          If they intuit what I’m saying and agree with me then they’ll be agreeing with the article and this will also prove the article right.

            • robinn_ [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              17 days ago

              You are. Take an actual position. Push a specific point from the article, point out your specific problem with “tankies,” etc. If you can’t do that then read the other replies to the post. Try making a specific reply to their critiques of the article.

              • intresteph
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                17 days ago

                I said the article was spot on. I don’t need to pick out points because you don’t intend to discuss it, you’ll just ramp up the dunks until you are screaming and posting weird memes that only you understand. Like a child.

                I read the replies. It’s… pretty spot on.

                Not sure what the problem is, most of you like being like that. You’re not here to promote communism or social equality… this is recreation.

                • Nakoichi [they/them]@hexbear.netM
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                  17 days ago

                  You clearly just came here to stir shit and get attention from perceived enemies. Nobody here gives a shit what you think not because we are all “tankies” but because you’re a beligerant and willfully ignorant child about it.

                  You can’t just say “the article is spot on” and then be surprised when people press you on what you thought was correct and why. You couldn’t even give one single example.

                  Also I’ve been here doing anarchist shit for over 4 years and I get along with tankies a lot, we all have valuable knowledge to share.

                • robinn_ [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  16 days ago

                  But we are discussing it. There are multiple comments going through specific points in the article. If you gave an actual substantive reply to criticism of the article then you would get a substantive reply instead of a dunk.

                • REgon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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                  16 days ago

                  I said the article was spot on.

                  ABOUT WHAT MOTHERFUCKER??? NOBODY HAS EVEN ASKED ABOUT SPECIFIC POINTS JUST MAKE LITERALLY ANY FUCKING POINT WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT YOU STUPID IDIOT

        • REgon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          16 days ago

          You haven’t said anything to shut down yet dude. You haven’t said anything at all. People are asking you to elaborate because you’ve said absolutely fuck all, how can you be this dense?

    • miz [any, any]@hexbear.net
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      17 days ago

      okay dronie

      Tankies [1] don’t usually believe that Stalin or Mao “did nothing wrong”, although many do use that phrase for effect (this is the internet, remember). We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the bourgeois politicians who are typically put forward as role models (Washington? Jefferson? JFK? Jimmy Carter?), and that they haven’t been judged according to the same standard as those bourgeois politicians. People call this “whataboutism” [2], but the claim “Stalin was a monster” is implicitly a comparative claim meaning “Stalin was qualitatively different from and worse than e.g. Churchill,” and I think the opposite is the case. If people are going to make veiled comparisons, us tankies have the right to answer with open ones.

      To defend someone from an unfair attack you don’t have to deify them, you just have to notice that they’re being unfairly attacked. This is unquestionably the case for Stalin and Mao, who have been unjustly demonized more than any other heads of state in history. Tankies understand that there is a reason for this: the Cold War, in which the US spent countless billions of dollars trying to undermine and destroy socialism [3], specifically Marxist-Leninist states. Many western leftists think that all this money and energy had no substantial effect on their opinions, but this seems extremely naive. We all grew up in ideological/media environments shaped profoundly by the Cold War, which is why Cold War anticommunist ideas about the Soviets being monsters are so pervasive a dogma (in the West).

      The reason we “defend authoritarian dictators” is because we want to defend the accomplishments of really existing socialism, and other people’s false or exaggerated beliefs about those “dictators” almost always get in the way — it’s not tankies but normies [4] who commit the synecdoche of reducing all of really existing socialism to Stalin and Mao. Those accomplishments include raising standards of living, achieving unprecedented income equality, massive gains in women’s rights and the position of women vis-a-vis men, defeating the Nazis, raising life expectancy, ending illiteracy, putting an end to periodic famines, inspiring and providing material aid to decolonizing movements (e.g. Vietnam, China, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Indonesia), which scared the West into conceding civil rights and the welfare state. These were greater strides in the direction of abolishing capitalism than any other society has ever made. These are the gains that are so important to insist on, against the CIA/Trotskyist/ultraleft consensus that the Soviet Union was basically an evil empire and Stalin a deranged butcher.

      There are two approaches one can take to people who say “socialism = Stalin = bad”: you can try to break the first leg of the equation or the second. Trotskyists take the first option; they’ve had the blessing of the academy, foundation and CIA money for their publishing outfits, and controlled the narrative in the West for the better part of the last century. But they haven’t managed to make a successful revolution anywhere in all that time. Recently, socialism has been gaining in popularity… and so have Marxism-Leninism and support for Stalin and Mao. Thus it’s not the case that socialism can only gain ground in the West by throwing really existing socialism and socialist leaders under the bus.

      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). 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.

      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.

      And shouldn’t we expect capitalists to smear socialists, especially effective socialists? Shouldn’t we expect to hear made up horror stories about really existing socialism to try and deter us from trying to overthrow our own capitalist governments? Think of how the media treats antifa. Think of WMDs in Iraq, think of how concentrated media ownership is, think of the regularity with which the CIA gets involved in Hollywood productions, think of the entirety of dirty tricks employed by the West during the Cold War (starting with the invasion of the Soviet Union immediately after the October Revolution by nearly every Western power), and then tell me they wouldn’t lie about Stalin. Robert Conquest was IRD [5]. Gareth Jones worked for the Rockefeller Institute, the Chrysler Foundation and Standard Oil and was buddies with Heinz and Hitler. Solzhenitsyn was a virulently antisemitic fiction writer. Everything we know about the power of media and suggestion indicates that the anticommunist and anti-Stalin consensus could easily have been manufactured irrespective of the facts — couple that with an appreciation for how legitimately terrified the ruling classes of the West were by the Russian and Chinese revolutions and you have means and motive.

      Anyway, the basic point is that socialist revolution is neither easy (as the Trotskyists and ultraleftists would have it) nor impossible (as the liberals and conservatives would have it), but hard. It will require dedication and sacrifice and it won’t be won in a day. Tankies are those people who think the millions of communists who fought and died for socialism in the twentieth century weren’t evil, dupes, or wasting their time, but people to whom we owe a great deal and who can still teach us a lot.

      Or, to put it another way: socialism has powerful enemies. Those enemies don’t care how you feel about Marx or Makhno or Deleuze or communism in the abstract, they care about your feelings towards FARC, the Naxals, Cuba, DPRK, etc. They care about your position with respect to states and contenders-for-statehood, and how likely you are to try and emulate them. They are not worried about the molecular and the rhizomatic because they know that those things can be brought back into line by the application of force. It’s their monopoly on force that they are primarily concerned to protect. When you desert real socialism in favor of ideal socialism, the kind that never took up arms against anybody, you’re doing them a favor.


      from https://redsails.org/tankies/

      • intresteph
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        17 days ago

        I have a feeling that maga is gonna love that text when defending trump. They aren’t defending the authoritarian, they’re just celebrating his accomplishments!

        No authority is the best authority.

            • GnastyGnuts [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              17 days ago

              Do you take any negative reception to your comments as proof of whatever point you are trying to make? If you have a criticism to make in a public forum, shouldn’t you reasonably expect a response that might likewise be critical?

              • cicebazna
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                17 days ago

                Well, if I walk into a room full of maga and point out that they are behaving like maga and they go off on me, should I take their negative reception seriously?

                The article was spot on, and continues to be. I think it’s a little funny that more lemmy ‘communists’ don’t just own up to it.

                I guess my view of communism is different. However, this is the internet after all. Everyone is kind of a dick.

                • GnastyGnuts [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  17 days ago

                  Should the people you’ve gone out of your way to antagonize take you seriously if you actively refuse to even articulate a criticism (even when directly invited to multiple times) and just post vague smug shit?

                  And look, for all the whining about “dog-piling” and “swarming” that people make about our instance, you can have replies to your comments, or you can have downvotes where nobody expresses an actual criticism and nobody gains anything.

                • REgon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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                  16 days ago

                  Well, if I walk into a room full of maga and point out that they are behaving like maga and they go off on me, should I take their negative reception seriously?

                  Well what if you wrote “heil Hitler” instead of what you did write? Then that would be very bad right? So this means you’re a nazi.

                  What the fuck are you talking about? Liberals and making up weird situations that complicate a simple situation, instead of just relating to the situation at hand: Name a more iconic duo.

                  The article was spot on, and continues to be.

                  ABOUT WHAT MOTHERFUCKER? YOU STILL HAVEN’T SAID ANYTHING ABOUT WHAT THE ARTICLE IS SPOT ON ABOUT? HOW? HOW DOES IT DESCRIBE LEMMY INSTANCES? WHICH INSTANCES? SAY ANYTHING PLEASE YOU HAVE BEEN ASKED SO MANY TIMES JUST SAY ANYTHING YOU FUCKING DUMBASS

                  I guess my view of communism is different.

                  MAYBE??? HOW CAN WE KNOW WHEN YOU SAY NOTHING AT ALL??

                  Everyone is kind of a dick.

                  My grandmother used to say: If you meet someone who smells like shit, then you probably met someone who stepped in dogshit. If everyone you meet smells like shit, then it’s time to check under your shoe.

            • Tomorrow_Farewell [any, they/them]@hexbear.net
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              17 days ago

              Is this the first time you come to any forum and start pissing and shitting all over the place?

              Try to mildly criticize western anarchists or liberals and I guarantee that you will get dogpiled immediately.

                • Tomorrow_Farewell [any, they/them]@hexbear.net
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                  17 days ago

                  Well, firstly, you need to check your eyesight, because at the very least I am not a westerner.

                  Secondly, in case you couldn’t understand a sentence worth of text, I suggested you go to a western anarchist or liberal forum and try to antagonise them. You will get swarmed and dogpiled right that instant.

            • REgon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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              16 days ago

              Me when I see a community of people supporting eachother: “Wow, glad I’m not like those people! I’ve got no one and am all alone, which proves that I am living a healthy life. Very rude of them to ask me about my opinion, especially when I can’t explain it. Anyway back to my thousands of online accounts I maintain so I can argue with strangers online. And by argue I mean insult people who keep asking me politely to please explain what it is I believe. This will deal a massive blow to the vague concept of authority somehow. Also the US is a force for good and I need to support it.”

        • heggs_bayer [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          16 days ago

          You clearly lack reading comprehension. The quoted text is not trying to draw some distinction between “defending” and “celebrating one’s accomplishments” and say that the former is bad while the latter is fine. What it does do is point out that the common attack on socialism that accuses actually existing socialist states of being totalitarian hellholes and important historic socialist leaders of being dictators is a load of shit; using a consistent standard to compare them to their contemporaries would reveal that socialism accomplished many wonders starting from extremely difficult conditions and that most “democratic” leaders are far more monstrous than even the nastiest tales cooked up about Stalin and Mao.

          Among what I just said and some other things, it makes a point that is very pertinent to this discussion: the characterization of tankies as “uncritically defending authoritarian regimes/dictators” (as asserted by the zine from the OP) and detesting literally all dissent regardless of what the content of that dissent might be (as you asserted) is also a load of shit that depends on treating socialist experiments as radioactive failures that are entirely bad and not worth defending. Tankies are perfectly capable of recognizing and criticizing the mistakes those experiments actually made; the commonly hurled criticisms are torn apart because they are factually wrong and made in bad faith.

        • REgon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          16 days ago

          Lmao “what if the text said something other than what it said and it was about MAGA instead?” also authoritarianism is made up by the totalitarian CIA you uneducated dork 1 2
          We both know you’re not gonna read this either though, it’s above your grade.