My first months on Lemmy were spent on Lemmy.world, which was the biggest instance at the time. I had no experience with Hexbear because .world had defederated that instance. I sometimes saw it being described as a “tankie” instance, but it was nothing specific.
After I moved to .zip, I came across !games@hexbear.net, which seemed to be free from anything overtly political and reminded me of r/Gamingcirclejerk, so I subscribed to it and occasionally made comments related to gaming.
Today I made multiple comments to a post about an article on the STALKER game developers having removed the Soviet symbols and the Russian audio in the remastered edition of the game. I would argue that in the thread, there were no comments from me that could be construed by a reasonable person as defensive of Nazism, fascism, or even hinting at it. For example, in one of the comments, I linked a Ukrainian law that prohibits the use of Nazi symbols, though I highly advise looking through all my ten comments as to avoid any misunderstanding or false impressions.
Conversely, one comment posted by another user dismissed Holodomor as Nazi propaganda, which I reported, but a moderator of that community just ended up calling me out for that and taking no action, followed by them banning me.
The thread containing all of my untouched posts is still available via lemmy.zip. My comments are also available for viewing via my user page. They are not available on hexbear due to the ban.
Tankies are primarily authoritarians, not really far left in any useful sense of that term. And even though they are vocal, they definitely don’t constitute “the entirety of Lemmy”.
I’m not very sure about that. I don’t get banned on literally every community for being right wing (even when I talk about it) but I do feel hostility coming from everyone. I understand that their opinion is way different to mine but if they act passively/actively aggressive towards other opinions (not just me), doesn’t it make them tankies automatically?
I always thought tankies are mostly stalinists and nostalgic brezhnevists, a violent and fanatic type of marxist-leninist who will crush anyone and anything to establish their utopia. They don’t argue much, it’s just aesthetics, violence and rhetoric, they are essentially red fascists. Most communists I know (which includes leninists, but not only) are mostly pacifist…but they will quickly turn authoritarian to tamp down any fascists and rich people who get a little too uppity, so yea, naturally, rule of law and property rights are secondary to them.
‘Secondary’ is being generous. They’d likely see them purely through a pragmatic lens instead of seeing them as legitimate concepts.
The core point of socialism is to eliminate private property altogether (not to be confused with personal property!), and socialist theory considers the current laws to be effectively dictated by the owning class through systemic influence over politicians, judges, mass media and other systematic pressures, rather than rules proposed or ratified by people like you and me, or for the benefit of people like us. So it makes sense for them to see rule of law as illegitimate, as a tool for the bourgeois class to maintain their dominance over the working class.
Yea, but I was thinking of socialism in practice e.g. China has private property…it’s just that it’s not an absolute right, it is secondary to some other interests i.e. the state/workers/etc look at what they did do Jack Ma when he started getting too elon musky for their liking.
Ah, I see, yeah I was just talking about theory and ideology, the behaviour of activists rather than governments, which can be much simpler.
I’d assume a tankie perspective (based on my understanding of historical Lenin/Bolshevik perspectives, plus the event that the name ‘tankie’ came from) is that their government/party represents the worker class, and that when push comes to shove, the most important thing is to maintain the revolution and avoid capitalist counterrevolution, so if that ultimately demands sacrificing rule of law, property rights, liberties and even suspending democracy, they would insist the ends justify those means. Their view is that there’s no point in pursuing ideals like property rights and rule of law if that means the government falls and those rights collapse anyway. So they justify pragmatic compromise. And what happened to Jack Ma is an example, they’d rather remove Ma’s rights than permit that amount of capitalist power.
You do know where you are, right? Did you get lost?