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What is a ‘tankie’?
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
Did not know about this site. It was a nice read and their mission statement is cool. Thanks for sharing! :)
o7 happy to hear that!
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.
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. Practically, we find a functional balance like the rest of the "first" world.
To co-opt my criticism of zionists defending genocide with the "1,200 dead" figure: If tens of millions dead under socialism makes you so mad, just wait til you hear about the hundreds of millions dead under capitalism.
((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 ))
Yet more whataboutism. This thread is about tankies not capitalist slavery.
Maybe you shouldn't have defended your point with a link using these talking points then if you didn't want them responded to.
Thanks for proving my point though about liberals just saying shit then going "SeEeEe??!?!" no matter the response.
Oh no! Won't somebody think of the Nazis and Japanese invaders?
Stalin and Mao both killed a hell of a lot of their own people that is what they are referring to
They said "tens of millions", the only number of people killed that matches that scope is the number of enemy combatants in world war 2.
Regardless, the Kulaks and the Landlords deserved it.
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.
The fact that they don't tell you in the average anticommunist pop history youtube video is that China had been experiencing famines pretty much every single year for a thousand years by the time the Communists took over. The last famines occurred under Communist rule, but it is because of Communist policies that the cyclical famines stopped. This applies to the USSR as well.
Yes we can look back and see that killing the sparrows was a bad idea, but on the whole collectivized farms produced more food per hectare than smallholder farms did, and the policies of the Communists are what brought in sufficient numbers of tractors and other farming equipment to modernize outdated practices in rural regions. Without the Communists the simple fact is that the famines would have happened anyway, they would have been worse, and there would have been more of them.
This is the reason why, even when you include the famine deaths in your data, the average lifespan under Mao doubled from what it had been when the Republic of China controlled the mainland. The Communists won the war precisely because they treated peasants better than the then-central government did, and when they took power they enacted policies that massively improved the lives of everyone in China, and still continue to do so.
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.
Any state can, but many don't. And the point here was to explain why I don't believe that blaming famine deaths on Mao Zedong is a justified position to take, when the cycle of famine was ended under his watch.
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
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.
glad it managed to reach someone! If you want the best nuanced review of Stalin from anyone anywhere, you will have to read Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo (free pdf here!). It is well sourced, and also uses western sources that should be biased against stalin to make its arguments! review on the same site as the tankies article here: https://redsails.org/on-losurdos-stalin/
additionally, some other articles I highly recommend if you want to understand our position better:
https://redsails.org/why-marxism/
https://redsails.org/the-case-for-socialized-ownership/
https://redsails.org/concessions/
https://redsails.org/what-is-dialectics/
https://redsails.org/communist-self-confidence/
most of these are quite a bit longer, so sorry to flood you with them, but I'm always eager to share these excellent articles with anyone who will consider reading them!
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.
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.
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.
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.
As I mentioned, I'd be inclined to wonder what you're considering "apologism." The fact that you didn't address the points I made makes me think you fall into that camp of boiling an intentionally wide array of ideas, conversation, etc down to "apologism" to take up arms against instances you don't like. I see discussion of those countries, and examples of things that are happening there, but not one time have I seen people celebrating violence or excusing it on either hexbear or .ml.
Don't be gaslit, Russian warcrimes enjoyers are running wild on Nazbear.
What you saw is what I saw too, and that's just disgusting. Don't be fooled.
I've seen them pulling the debatebro tactics they complain about, and feigning ignorance when you talk about their favorite dictators.
Those people aren't acting in good faith, and are trying to manipulate you. They're pissed that they're being treated like pariahs and are defederated from everything, because their influence has shrunk significantly and they've essentially been defanged (they're getting banned left and right, even by real lefties).
Apologists for Chinese/Russian government.
"Leftists" who are more interested in authoritarianism than leftism. At their very worst, they even ally with the far-right.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
"Authoritarianism is when people want things, not when government exerts force!"
Are you saying that Marx and Engels weren't Leftists?
Not at all. They were wrong on certain things, which people like Stalin used to justify his own horrible stuff.
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.
You might wanna work on your reading comprehension if that is what you get from Engels text
Someone ideologically somewhere between his greatest heroes, Stalin and Mao.
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.
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.
I'm not familiar with UniversalMonk. Why do you think they're a government paid shill?