"Tanky" and the perception of Lemmy.
I’ve been trying to make people aware of Lemmy on discord and Mastodon, but it’s always met with resistance citing “the devs are pro authoritarianism tankies.” Kbin seems to be picking up steam because of the developer baggage. Do you feel like this negative perception will hamstring Lemmy’s growth?
A tankie is a leftist who doesn't agree with mainstream geopolitical opinions or shows any interest in nuance
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.
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.
https://redsails.org/tankies/
It originally was used to describe Leftists supporting authoritarianism while claiming to be leftist. It was used originally to describe Marxist-Leninist members of the Communist Great Party in Britain who supported the use of tanks by Soviets to quell a couple of uprisings in the late 50s and late 70s. It has since evolved as a term since then to include Leftists (or maybe not even leftists anymore, it's getting thrown around a lot now) who support similar actions in China and Russia. Usually they have an obsession with Mao and/or Stalin and China can do no wrong in their mind while claiming the western world is evil.
The term has an interesting history (to me as I'd describe myself as leftist, but I look at is as we all suck and can all improve) and Wikipedia has a decent article on it that I pulled most of this info from to double check my memory. Unfortunately they tend to be the most vocal part of leftist communities so I just tend to ignore any of them...
It originally was used to describe Leftists supporting authoritarianism while claiming to be leftist. It was used originally to describe Marxist-Leninist members of the Communist Great Party in Britain who supported the use of tanks by Soviets to quell a couple of uprisings in the late 50s and late 70s.
And history proved that support to be 100% correct given what those uprisings were. Have you ever actually looked at who was riling it up (gladio implanted fascists), who backed them and who was coordinating it? The US and CIA played a huge role.
It's fucking weird that this gets brought up as some huge gotcha thing by people when the supporters have been shown to have been historically correct in their decision. It was unpopular and split a lot of parties but they were on the right side ffs read a book.
I mean, you used that reference because you are implying that shutting down those pro-capitalist counter-revolutions by literal fascists using force was a bad thing, that's why you said "leftists supporting authoritarianism while claiming to be leftist".
You're just demonstrating that you have never actually engaged with learning about any of these events. You have the vagueist knowledge about them and only understand them within the lens of "tankies bad" instead of what actually happened during those events, why certain decisions were made, and what we have learned in the decades since they occurred that proved the supporters to be on the right side of the decisions.
Of course you implied that - you WROTE IT.
You are now backtracking instead of admitting wrong, what you should be saying "you know what, you're right I actually don't know anything about it but I regurgitate this because I've seen other anti-communists regurgitate a thousand times with literally no opposition so I've never taken any time to properly examine events, learn about them, or critically analyse whether the accusations have weight or not"... A response that would be mature, laudable, and the sign of a person who actually wants to grow as a human being. Instead what you seem to be doing is deflecting from this and trying to segue into something else. I am asking you to properly learn about this specific event first, if you want to talk about other events then I am fine with doing that.... But one at a time. This practice of bombarding people with dozens of different things at once is called Gish Gallop as is a tactic used in bad-faith to avoid any real critical engagement with the events.
If you don't want to engage that's on you. I told you I'm willing to, one at a time. That way we can get into each topic individually and give it the due care, research and understanding that it needs.
You are the ones avoiding engagement by demanding a 10,000 character response on every single topic simultaneously, which we all know that you will not read.
No I never implied that at all
Emphasis mine
It originally was used to describe Leftists supporting authoritarianism while claiming to be leftist.
Get out of here with that bad faith nonsense
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