Comment on Is it me or is everyone in hexbear insane?

• TraitorToAmerica@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨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 is now used to attack anyone to the left of an american democrat like facebones said.

  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”

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  • RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨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.

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    • Facebones@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It’s interesting how the only criticism anybody can drum up is “tens of millions dead,” but nobody bats an eye at the death toll of capitalism, capitalist countries, and their endless war machine/endless interference in other countries via funding coups or outright assassinations in support of harmful leaders who will play nice with the corporations.

      Your link describes discussion of labor camps as if it’s some long lost relic of a bygone era - but slavery of inmates is, right now, legal and prevalent in the US subsidizing private industries for pennies on the dollar. It references the conditions of the camps, but plenty of current US inmates face subhuman conditions and treatment. You imply that everybody suffered all the time under the Soviets, but a far from insignificant number (depending on how you do the numbers, with more support for the USSR than we have for our own government this past decade or so) remember the USSR fondly, or at least as better than their current governments.

      All the things y’all constantly belt about to argue socialism is the great evil of the world is shit we do now that you support as long as it benefits private entities instead of public. I’m not going to argue that everything was perfect, or that nobody was corrupt, but I WILL argue that y’all spend a lot of time defending those same imperfections and corruptions under capitalism with this lazy weak ass “but fixing it would be spooky scary socialism” argument. Per the common reasons people call socialism a failure, so is capitalism. That’s why leftists call for, as you call it, “prettied up” socialism - not to fool people, but because what we’re doing now is FAILING EVERYBODY and tripling down on funneling even more of our economy to 1-3% of the population hasn’t helped anything so it’s time for something different and realistic change is gradual, not “seizing the means of production” overnight.

      ((I don’t know anything about how to do the thing notating an image so in the off chance it helps someone: Drake No/Yes Meme DrakeNo - tyranny.gov DrakeYes - tyranny.com )) Image

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      • RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Yet more whataboutism. This thread is about tankies not capitalist slavery.

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    • TraitorToAmerica@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨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:

      washingtonpost.com/…/why-do-so-many-people-miss-t… reuters.com/…/us-ebrd-transition-survey-idUSKBN14…

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      • christian@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨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.

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    • SSJMarx@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      the tens of millions of dead both, Stalin and Mao, were responsible for.

      Oh no! Won’t somebody think of the Nazis and Japanese invaders?

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      • michaelmrose@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • Urist@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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    • TraitorToAmerica@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      o7 happy to hear that!

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• Facebones@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • expr@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨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.

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    • Facebones@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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.

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      • expr@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨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.

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• ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • carl_marks_1312@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    www.marxists.org/archive/marx/…/authority.htm

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    • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      “Authoritarianism is when people want things, not when government exerts force!”

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      • carl_marks_1312@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        You might wanna work on your reading comprehension if that is what you get from Engels text

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      • Cowbee@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Are you saying that Marx and Engels weren’t Leftists?

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• ShepherdPie@midwest.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨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.

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  • skeezix@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    [deleted]

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    • irreticent@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨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?

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• Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

  Or to hear most of world describe them, anyone to the left of Joe Manchin.

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• Ullallulloo@civilloquy.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Someone ideologically somewhere between his greatest heroes, Stalin and Mao.

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