I was gonna try to defend my comrades for not being that brain dead then I saw the only other Lemmy.ml guy on this thread actively proving your point lmao
Its okay if you still want to. I find that they have a point in their grievances or pointing out how we in the west often fail at living up to our own proposed values of democracy and equality. I do get why they feel so strongly that they push to take it all, but the all or nothing is often counter productive I feel. Particularly given how much work they need to do with the general public that is not ready for some topics.
China bad because of their human rights record. Where as the west can judge them (being from the same culture and all) because the west has a perfect human rights record. What you disagree? \s
It’s super weird when Liberals forget about Iraq, Afghanistan, Indigenous Genocides, Racial Profiling and the war on terror, Gitmo, Palestine, and Slavery all at once.
“Oh but in the past China and Russia had famines”.
They don’t realize they’re effected by 100 years of conservative messaging.
I’ve been called all sorts of names just for asking for real evidence instead of flimsy suggestive bullshit. It took SO much pressing to get anything at all on the Ukrainian Nazi line they love so much, and I got SO much hostility for it.
Propaganda will do that. I’ve never met a single communist who denied that there was a major famine in China. The problem is that liberals seem to think Mao invented famine, when in fact China was experiencing famines every 2 to 4 years for over a century by the time the communists came to power. They had a theory for how to address the cycle of famines and increase food surplus, and their theory failed. But liberals think that Mao deliberately killed millions of people because he was an evil dictator instead of acknowledging the reality that Mao was leader of a massive government and they all failed as an organization by producing the conditions for famine. The context is also lost that eventually the Chinese revolution did end the cycle of famines permanently, and they were trying to solve it without any help from Western agriculture because the West was too busy protecting the fascist dictator that was holed up in Taiwan who was actively mass murdering and imprisoning political dissidents.
The Holodomor is another one of those things propaganda skews and breaks our ability to agree to a shared reality on. I have never met a single communist that denies that there was a famine and that many people died. What they often cite, which liberals can’t reconcile, is that the famine affected many more populations than just the people who were supposedly targeted and that research into the incident shows that the crop yield was severely negatively impacted by weather and made worse by not just bad decision making but also bad decision making that was in part driven by punitive thinking. The famine happened, but propaganda would have us believe that the famine was unquestionably a deliberate attempt at ethnic cleansing or genocide, when the evidence seems to be far more in support of a natural famine made worse by poor management with an added dose of maliciousness that ultimately rolls up to bad management.
In contrast, you don’t seem to have any problem with most Westerners having never even heard of the famines that were in fact deliberately caused by the West and for which the only explanation is the active choice of making a colonized population suffer.
Do you have a link to tankies denying there was an unwanted famine?
Holodomor was an unwanted famine that was redurected (food taken from farmers). Later wider famines were made worse mostly by Lysenkoism. A con-job which effected Russia and China.
Yet Communism is compared to Nazi? That’s what’s ridiculous liberal/right propaganda.
What happened is much more forgivable (although still regrettable) than what say the millions killed by the East India companies through intentional famines under Capitalism (done for profit), or the hundreds of millions in war dead from Capitalism in the past 30 years.
That’s much more recent, but some redirected famine from the 1930s keeps coming up when talk of Socialism makes wealthy liberals a little too uncomfortable.
What is an “unwanted famine”? Nobody wanted a famine. Lysenko was wrong, and the government backed him because they didn’t know he was wrong. It was a mistake, not a deliberate strategem to harm people.
Seriously. Was Holodomor a deliberate genocide? This is the hill you’re going to die on? Yes, the famine affected a lot of people, but we all know which people were least affected and it wasn’t the Ukrainians who were trying to actually grow the food. Much like the Irish Famine was only a tragic genocide because the British overlords wouldn’t put up with reducing their own take. The blight was real, but the decimation was pure unjustified cruelty.
I’m a leftist, but I’m an honest one. We gain nothing by denying the past and refusing to learn from it. It does a disservice to us all to hide the fact that old ethnic and cultural violence behind a window dressing of systemic failure. Systemic bigotry is still bigotry.
The kazhaks lost more people per capita than Ukraine did. Major non-Ukrainian Russian populations centers suffered equally or very nearly as much as Ukraine did.
So you may think you’re an honest leftist, but you might not be. As an honest leftist myself, I recognize that the Soviet government made tragic decisions, many of them punitive, none of them directed at ethnic cleansing, because the Soviet Union did not have an analysis that included specific ethnicities being material to their political goals as ethnicities. They understood, documented, wrote about, discussed, debated, legislated, and enforced the exact opposite of ethnic cleansing constantly. Yes, Ukranian suffered a lot through the transition to collectivized agriculture, more than most. But that’s because the majority of Ukranian peasants were freeholders of land, whereas the majority of Russian peasants were serfs. As freeholders, they would lose their claim to their farms. Serfs would suffer no such loss. This was structural. Russian peasants weren’t targeted for collectivization because under the Tsar they were already collectivized, whereas Ukranian peasants had private ownership of the land they worked.
Collectivization was not ethnic cleansing, the famine was not ethnically targeted, and the punitive actions of the Soviet Union were not ethnically motivated by an ethnic strategy of ethnic supremacy.
That’s honesty. Honesty is doing the reading, doing the research, and not discarding all the evidence that contradicts the obviously contrived narrative. Yes there was a famine. Yes it killed more Ukranians in absolute numbers. Yes the Soviet leadership made deliberate decisions that were intended to punish people who were Ukranians. No it wasn’t because they were Ukranian, no it wasn’t because the Soviet leadership thought that ethnic cleansing would achieve their intended goals, no it’s not because the Soviet leadership decided to artificially starve all of those people out of malice or ethnic supremacy.
As a .ml user, I hereby denounce the states’ rights to own slaves for which this war was fought. The confederates were not fighting against “the west”, they were fighting for racism and bigotry.
However, I do offer critical support to Hasan Piker, and think Americans should take a long hard look at foreign policy which led to the 9/11 attack. It’s the worst it’s ever been now, giving taxpayer dollars to Israel for them to purchase American politicians and order them to bankroll and provide cover for ongoing genocide and destabilization of the region so that Israel can steal more land. Like owning slaves, rank imperialism and land theft is wrong, especially post-globalization.
I mean I kinda get it. The biggest obstacle to World Peace today is the US. So you could make the argument that anything that opposes US Hegemony gets us closer to world peace. Idk that I would go so far as to “support Russia” but I understand the logic.
Please don’t defend them. These kinds of arguments lack any kind of deeper thought or nuance. It’s literally just trolling and straw-men. Do not feed the trolls.
These kinds of arguments lack any kind of deeper thought or nuance.
I mean that’s what Zionists say about Pro Palestine group. That’s what Americans said about resistance groups in the middle east. That’s what Americans said about the Natives.
I just disagree with this entire philosophy. You should be able understand an argument you disagree with.
I didn’t say don’t understand them, I’m saying they’re literally not thinking that deeply about it. They want to get a rise out of you and someone showed them they can do that by opening with a straw-man like this. By deliberately misrepresenting what “Tankie” means they can completely disarm it and force you to defend a position they chose, which they know is indefensible. It’s pure rhetorical strategy, they don’t actually know or care what a Tankie thinks. They’re trying to make the word mean something it never has and never should mean. Is it possible someone on their side has done some work to rationalize their twisted interpretation. That rationalization is usually paper thin and almost no one on their side knows or cares about it besides its usefulness as a tactical fallback. They don’t believe any of this, its a rhetorical game and the point is their nihilistic disregard for consequences.
That sounds like a description of every troll. Tbh I keep hearing tankie thrown around, but I’ve never had the conversations people who complain about it have.
Tankie is a general term for someone who thinks there is a clear justification to use force or the threat of force to impose a socialist system on a state. The term originates with people who supported the USSR “Sending in the tanks” to annex other countries and crush dissent from people in their sphere. They are what people mean when they “If you go far enough left, you get your guns back.” These days they tend to be a tiny minority within the rather small minority of actual leftists. They do exist, and some of them are pretty out there, but not the way the .ml crowd tends to characterize them. They’re terrified of them, because in their heads the most terrifying thing in the world is a leftist that is willing to fight back, and they don’t recognize anything that doesn’t kill someone as “fighting.”
The Confederacy was fighting against the United States. Under tankie logic, that must mean that they’re virtuous and attempting to build communism. In reality, they were fighting to preserve chattel slavery.
Okay but Lenin considered the US Civil to be good actually
But what a pedant, what an idiot would anyone be to deny on these grounds the immense, world-historic, progressive and revolutionary significance of the American Civil War of 1863-65!
The representatives of the bourgeoisie understand that for the sake of overthrowing Negro slavery, of overthrowing the rule of the slaveowners, it was worth letting the country go through long years of civil war, through the abysmal ruin, destruction and terror that accompany every war. But now, when we are confronted with the vastly greater task of overthrowing capitalist wage-slavery, of overthrowing the rule of the bourgeoisie—now, the representatives and defenders of the bourgeoisie, and also the reformist socialists who have been frightened by the bourgeoisie and are shunning the revolution, cannot and do not want to understand that civil war is necessary and legitimate.
Yes. But these topics about tankies are about reinforcing ‘us/them’ rationalizations for those who already have their prejudice. The comments here certainly do.
By providing a critical thinking from Lenin, you instead become the tankie, and therefore become incapable of critical thinking, per the meme. Therefore anything Lenin might’ve said or written can just be dismissed.
And so the tankie can be mocked as a confederate chud nonetheless.
I think you’re mistaking the lunatic left for the lunatic right. The left usually did their homework at least. Better than the right who refuse to acknowledge what they call “Capitalism” has nothing to do with the foundational principles of the theory.
This is a straw man. Tankie logic clearly understands the concept of factions and factional disputes within a larger system. The US had two major bourgeois factions within it - agrarian raw materials producers/merchants and industrialists. These two factions were fighting for their faction’s existence and ultimately the power to dominate their colonized subjects in the way that seemed most beneficial to their faction.
If you aren’t American: Depicted are American civil war reenactors with the flag of the Confederacy which seceded from the Union of the United States in the 19th century due to built up tensions regarding slavery. The Confederacy were ultimately fighting to keep slavery as a government institution.
The target of the joke are tankies (described briskly above), which we will see on Lemmy, often see any action taken against the US or the EU (the West) as praiseworthy, blatantly disregarding or downplaying equivalent or worse actions from non-western nations.
The subversion of expectation here is that a tankie would see the pro-slavery Confederacy as praiseworthy because they’re fighting the US government, despite the Confederacy’s blatantly immoral cause.
Caveat - I say this with bias as someone explicitly against authoritarian bootlickers, like tankies.
Thank you for your efforts, I really do appreciate it. It makes discussion a lot more accessable to people who do not know the details of US history. I am not american myself but unfortunately I have family who live in Kennesaw. I hope that’s self explanatory 🥲
I guess the joke doesn’t make sense because Lenin thought it was based that the civil war happened because slavery is wack.
Who is “them” exactly here? Are you listening to teenagers on TikTok and extrapolating a whole ideology here? Tankies aren’t anti-American by definition. Someone is feeding you some pretty twisted propaganda.
Strawman. Tankies literally have a phrase for this. It’s called “critical support”, which means supporting the efforts of anti-imperialism while reserving the right to criticize without that critique rising to the level of reversing the support for the anti-imperialist action
Lemmy.ml users in particular will defend fucking ANYTHING done in opposition to The West. Like they love to support Russia against Ukraine.
Also any time you say NK is a dictatorship they come out of the basement to say how awesome it is.
I was gonna try to defend my comrades for not being that brain dead then I saw the only other Lemmy.ml guy on this thread actively proving your point lmao
Its okay if you still want to. I find that they have a point in their grievances or pointing out how we in the west often fail at living up to our own proposed values of democracy and equality. I do get why they feel so strongly that they push to take it all, but the all or nothing is often counter productive I feel. Particularly given how much work they need to do with the general public that is not ready for some topics.
I’m not entering this argument, but I can see how “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” may be a thought process there.
Yeah, in a vacuum, sounds like a solid idea. Russia isn’t that friend, though.
I think the argument is:
It’s super weird when Liberals forget about Iraq, Afghanistan, Indigenous Genocides, Racial Profiling and the war on terror, Gitmo, Palestine, and Slavery all at once.
“Oh but in the past China and Russia had famines”.
They don’t realize they’re effected by 100 years of conservative messaging.
That is the thought process being mocked, yes
I stopped replying to one of them when they denied the holodomor or the chinese famine.
Its quite disheartening that we can’t even agree on a common reality.
I’ve been called all sorts of names just for asking for real evidence instead of flimsy suggestive bullshit. It took SO much pressing to get anything at all on the Ukrainian Nazi line they love so much, and I got SO much hostility for it.
Propaganda will do that. I’ve never met a single communist who denied that there was a major famine in China. The problem is that liberals seem to think Mao invented famine, when in fact China was experiencing famines every 2 to 4 years for over a century by the time the communists came to power. They had a theory for how to address the cycle of famines and increase food surplus, and their theory failed. But liberals think that Mao deliberately killed millions of people because he was an evil dictator instead of acknowledging the reality that Mao was leader of a massive government and they all failed as an organization by producing the conditions for famine. The context is also lost that eventually the Chinese revolution did end the cycle of famines permanently, and they were trying to solve it without any help from Western agriculture because the West was too busy protecting the fascist dictator that was holed up in Taiwan who was actively mass murdering and imprisoning political dissidents.
The Holodomor is another one of those things propaganda skews and breaks our ability to agree to a shared reality on. I have never met a single communist that denies that there was a famine and that many people died. What they often cite, which liberals can’t reconcile, is that the famine affected many more populations than just the people who were supposedly targeted and that research into the incident shows that the crop yield was severely negatively impacted by weather and made worse by not just bad decision making but also bad decision making that was in part driven by punitive thinking. The famine happened, but propaganda would have us believe that the famine was unquestionably a deliberate attempt at ethnic cleansing or genocide, when the evidence seems to be far more in support of a natural famine made worse by poor management with an added dose of maliciousness that ultimately rolls up to bad management.
In contrast, you don’t seem to have any problem with most Westerners having never even heard of the famines that were in fact deliberately caused by the West and for which the only explanation is the active choice of making a colonized population suffer.
Do you have a link to tankies denying there was an unwanted famine?
Holodomor was an unwanted famine that was redurected (food taken from farmers). Later wider famines were made worse mostly by Lysenkoism. A con-job which effected Russia and China.
Yet Communism is compared to Nazi? That’s what’s ridiculous liberal/right propaganda.
What happened is much more forgivable (although still regrettable) than what say the millions killed by the East India companies through intentional famines under Capitalism (done for profit), or the hundreds of millions in war dead from Capitalism in the past 30 years.
That’s much more recent, but some redirected famine from the 1930s keeps coming up when talk of Socialism makes wealthy liberals a little too uncomfortable.
What is an “unwanted famine”? Nobody wanted a famine. Lysenko was wrong, and the government backed him because they didn’t know he was wrong. It was a mistake, not a deliberate strategem to harm people.
Exactly.
Seriously. Was Holodomor a deliberate genocide? This is the hill you’re going to die on? Yes, the famine affected a lot of people, but we all know which people were least affected and it wasn’t the Ukrainians who were trying to actually grow the food. Much like the Irish Famine was only a tragic genocide because the British overlords wouldn’t put up with reducing their own take. The blight was real, but the decimation was pure unjustified cruelty.
I’m a leftist, but I’m an honest one. We gain nothing by denying the past and refusing to learn from it. It does a disservice to us all to hide the fact that old ethnic and cultural violence behind a window dressing of systemic failure. Systemic bigotry is still bigotry.
The kazhaks lost more people per capita than Ukraine did. Major non-Ukrainian Russian populations centers suffered equally or very nearly as much as Ukraine did.
So you may think you’re an honest leftist, but you might not be. As an honest leftist myself, I recognize that the Soviet government made tragic decisions, many of them punitive, none of them directed at ethnic cleansing, because the Soviet Union did not have an analysis that included specific ethnicities being material to their political goals as ethnicities. They understood, documented, wrote about, discussed, debated, legislated, and enforced the exact opposite of ethnic cleansing constantly. Yes, Ukranian suffered a lot through the transition to collectivized agriculture, more than most. But that’s because the majority of Ukranian peasants were freeholders of land, whereas the majority of Russian peasants were serfs. As freeholders, they would lose their claim to their farms. Serfs would suffer no such loss. This was structural. Russian peasants weren’t targeted for collectivization because under the Tsar they were already collectivized, whereas Ukranian peasants had private ownership of the land they worked.
Collectivization was not ethnic cleansing, the famine was not ethnically targeted, and the punitive actions of the Soviet Union were not ethnically motivated by an ethnic strategy of ethnic supremacy.
That’s honesty. Honesty is doing the reading, doing the research, and not discarding all the evidence that contradicts the obviously contrived narrative. Yes there was a famine. Yes it killed more Ukranians in absolute numbers. Yes the Soviet leadership made deliberate decisions that were intended to punish people who were Ukranians. No it wasn’t because they were Ukranian, no it wasn’t because the Soviet leadership thought that ethnic cleansing would achieve their intended goals, no it’s not because the Soviet leadership decided to artificially starve all of those people out of malice or ethnic supremacy.
As a .ml user, I hereby denounce the states’ rights to own slaves for which this war was fought. The confederates were not fighting against “the west”, they were fighting for racism and bigotry.
However, I do offer critical support to Hasan Piker, and think Americans should take a long hard look at foreign policy which led to the 9/11 attack. It’s the worst it’s ever been now, giving taxpayer dollars to Israel for them to purchase American politicians and order them to bankroll and provide cover for ongoing genocide and destabilization of the region so that Israel can steal more land. Like owning slaves, rank imperialism and land theft is wrong, especially post-globalization.
I mean I kinda get it. The biggest obstacle to World Peace today is the US. So you could make the argument that anything that opposes US Hegemony gets us closer to world peace. Idk that I would go so far as to “support Russia” but I understand the logic.
Please don’t defend them. These kinds of arguments lack any kind of deeper thought or nuance. It’s literally just trolling and straw-men. Do not feed the trolls.
I mean that’s what Zionists say about Pro Palestine group. That’s what Americans said about resistance groups in the middle east. That’s what Americans said about the Natives.
I just disagree with this entire philosophy. You should be able understand an argument you disagree with.
I didn’t say don’t understand them, I’m saying they’re literally not thinking that deeply about it. They want to get a rise out of you and someone showed them they can do that by opening with a straw-man like this. By deliberately misrepresenting what “Tankie” means they can completely disarm it and force you to defend a position they chose, which they know is indefensible. It’s pure rhetorical strategy, they don’t actually know or care what a Tankie thinks. They’re trying to make the word mean something it never has and never should mean. Is it possible someone on their side has done some work to rationalize their twisted interpretation. That rationalization is usually paper thin and almost no one on their side knows or cares about it besides its usefulness as a tactical fallback. They don’t believe any of this, its a rhetorical game and the point is their nihilistic disregard for consequences.
That sounds like a description of every troll. Tbh I keep hearing tankie thrown around, but I’ve never had the conversations people who complain about it have.
Tankie is a general term for someone who thinks there is a clear justification to use force or the threat of force to impose a socialist system on a state. The term originates with people who supported the USSR “Sending in the tanks” to annex other countries and crush dissent from people in their sphere. They are what people mean when they “If you go far enough left, you get your guns back.” These days they tend to be a tiny minority within the rather small minority of actual leftists. They do exist, and some of them are pretty out there, but not the way the .ml crowd tends to characterize them. They’re terrified of them, because in their heads the most terrifying thing in the world is a leftist that is willing to fight back, and they don’t recognize anything that doesn’t kill someone as “fighting.”
Wait so .ml isn’t a community of tankies? I’ve been on here for 6 months and I just assumed that .ml was tankie central based on how people talk.
No. Or at least that isn’t what the term was coined as. They discover a new word and then reinterpret it as kind of a weird cosplay thing.
And sealioning, can’t forget that.
Blocking them and moving on is usually the best option. They’ll ruin your day given the chance.
Oh and if they violate the rules of where they’re posting, report them before blocking.
I think this explanation makes the meme even more confusing 😭
The Confederacy was fighting against the United States. Under tankie logic, that must mean that they’re virtuous and attempting to build communism. In reality, they were fighting to preserve chattel slavery.
Okay but Lenin considered the US Civil to be good actually
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/aug/20.htm
Yes. But these topics about tankies are about reinforcing ‘us/them’ rationalizations for those who already have their prejudice. The comments here certainly do.
By providing a critical thinking from Lenin, you instead become the tankie, and therefore become incapable of critical thinking, per the meme. Therefore anything Lenin might’ve said or written can just be dismissed.
And so the tankie can be mocked as a confederate chud nonetheless.
I had to read this a few times because I am high and thought you were being serious 😭
I don’t want to people to think I’m knowledgeable or well read or anything I just googled it because I wasn’t sure what the meme was trying to say.
And? You seem to be under the delusion that tankies have actually read anything by their heroes.
I think you’re mistaking the lunatic left for the lunatic right. The left usually did their homework at least. Better than the right who refuse to acknowledge what they call “Capitalism” has nothing to do with the foundational principles of the theory.
This is a straw man. Tankie logic clearly understands the concept of factions and factional disputes within a larger system. The US had two major bourgeois factions within it - agrarian raw materials producers/merchants and industrialists. These two factions were fighting for their faction’s existence and ultimately the power to dominate their colonized subjects in the way that seemed most beneficial to their faction.
If you aren’t American: Depicted are American civil war reenactors with the flag of the Confederacy which seceded from the Union of the United States in the 19th century due to built up tensions regarding slavery. The Confederacy were ultimately fighting to keep slavery as a government institution.
The target of the joke are tankies (described briskly above), which we will see on Lemmy, often see any action taken against the US or the EU (the West) as praiseworthy, blatantly disregarding or downplaying equivalent or worse actions from non-western nations.
The subversion of expectation here is that a tankie would see the pro-slavery Confederacy as praiseworthy because they’re fighting the US government, despite the Confederacy’s blatantly immoral cause.
Caveat - I say this with bias as someone explicitly against authoritarian bootlickers, like tankies.
Thank you for your efforts, I really do appreciate it. It makes discussion a lot more accessable to people who do not know the details of US history. I am not american myself but unfortunately I have family who live in Kennesaw. I hope that’s self explanatory 🥲
I guess the joke doesn’t make sense because Lenin thought it was based that the civil war happened because slavery is wack.
You need to tell that to the tankies. We already know it here. They are the ones having problems understanding that.
Sorry tell the tankies what?
Tankies: “Any enemy of the US is my ally”.
It is a zero sum game for them. They are incapable of thinking that while the US sucks, their enemies can also suck.
Who is “them” exactly here? Are you listening to teenagers on TikTok and extrapolating a whole ideology here? Tankies aren’t anti-American by definition. Someone is feeding you some pretty twisted propaganda.
Strawman. Tankies literally have a phrase for this. It’s called “critical support”, which means supporting the efforts of anti-imperialism while reserving the right to criticize without that critique rising to the level of reversing the support for the anti-imperialist action