I really hated the word tankie when i joined lemmy, it felt like it was thrown around too much, but then i really started seeing "communists" "critically supporting" Russia, despite being a far right shithole, like you only need to see who where the allies of Russia in Europe, weeks before the war started they were meeting with Meloni from Italy, Vox (fascist far right) from Spain and similar parties from other sides of Europe. Some communists are so in love with the idea of the USSR that cant really see that Putin is just your average far right dictator.
Thankfully in Spain you dont see this happening as much as in some lemmy communities.
They're not communists. If you suggest a communist revolution to them (that is, a revolution resulting in a stateless, classless, moneyless society), they'll call you an idiot.
Yeah, I mean, over the years, I've gone far left enough that I believe that capitalism must be dismantled as it's incompatible with democracy. I'm not exactly conservative. But good god, some parts of Lemmy would make me out to be a Gilded Age Robber-Baron for calling out Russia as an imperialist fascist state. It's insane. And exhausting. I hate dealing with it.
Luckily, it's not nearly as bad as it was back when Grad and Hexbear were still federated.
But good god, some parts of Lemmy would make me out to be a Gilded Age Robber-Baron for calling out Russia as an imperialist fascist state
I've been on Lemmy some 8 months I think and I've never seen anyone do that. I have seen plenty of Ruski trolls spamming "don't vote genocide Joe", but I haven't really seen anyone pretending to be for the Russian side in the Russo-Ukrainian war.
Unfortunately Podemos has taken the position of opposing any policy that helps Ukraine in their defense effort, framing an attitude that only leads to maximizing Ukraine's losses as "anti-war". At least most people in Sumar haven't fallen to this fallacy.
Eh, i dont know the point of your comment, but just to clarify, Podemos is not a communist party, altough it is supported by some communists / has some communist in the party. Sumar as a whole is even less to the left than they are, despite having also some parties inside the group that could be considered communists.
Its not true that Podemos is against anything that helps Ukraine, they are all in for a cease fire and for an end to the war through dialogue which should be done from the EU mainly, the same way they are in for a cease fire/end of the war in Gaza, what they are against is spending billions of euros that are needed here to send weapons and war vehicles to Ukraine, the same way they do not support sending weapons and war vehicles to palestine nor no one expects that to be the position of any party here.
If Russia is willing to continue the war as long as they're making gains (and Russia is making gains as long as they control foreign territory and intend to keep it), refusing to military support Ukraine means supporting a scenario where Russia will have effectively violated their sovereignity, which in turn further incentivizes imperialist countries to attack their neighbours as they've just seen they can get away with it.
You can keep gaslighting yourself into thinking that you only need words to convince Putin to leave Ukraine, or for Netanyahu to leave Palestine, or for Jeff Bezos to give up his privileged position in the capitalist hierarchy, but the vast majority of the world will keep their feet in reality and understand that some people are fundamentally selfish and must be forced into no longer committing evil.
Just lol, go fight in the war yourself against Putin and Netanyahu then, also good mental gymnastics making a relation in fighting against nuclear powers that will ensure mutual destruction vs fighting against the capital and billionaries like Bezos lmao.
You might want to reread the whole thread also just in case. See ya.
I'm in a small leftwing party in Portugal whose roots go back to the fight against dictatorship which was mostly done by Communists, and when Russia invaded Ukraine I had to come up with a framing to help some of the older members understand it since they were instinctively siding with Russia (I basically just compared it with the invasion of Iraq by the US and reminded them how they felt about it).
People back 50 or 60 years ago were just indoctrinated into Communism as young people (understandably in a country which was under a Fascist dictatorship which included censorship) and still today in their mind space they have lots of "undeniable truths" which they accepted long ago without any critical thinking and which they never really examined, and specifically in my country were "Communism" was mainly the Soviet Union variant, a lot of those "truths" are about how great Russia is.
Mind you, this being a party other than the local Communist Party, and thus were even the older Communists were people who were not in the actual Communist Party because they disagreed with them (so a thinking kind of Communist rather than mindless tribalists), I did manage to turn around the few who had instinctively sided with Russia. The local Communist Party, even now (after that country turned into basically Fascism) are still pro-Russia.
Well, the funny bit is that those old guys were still flexible enough to change their minds when a suitable framing of the thing was presented to them, by which point they recognized it all as the more generic scenario of "aggressor attacking victim to take their shit" and made their opinions based on what their principles were on that kind of thing.
I would say the problem here was tribalism: they were predisposed to believe, support and excuse the aggressor because they felt, due to long ago experiences and indoctrination that "they're our people". Fortunatelly these specific people were open minded and intelligent enough to be able to step out of that and consider the whole thing from a detached point of view.
Plenty of tribalists are pretty much religious fanatics when it comes to all those "acquired truths" and the truthfulness, trustworthiness and wisdom of whatever the tribe's leaders say.
IMHO, tribalist is by far the greatest problem, though I would agree that it and inflexibility are deeply connected.
It's even better - by invading Ukraine to steal their territory and mineral wealth Russia is quite literally behaving as an Imperialist nation, something confirmed by their own Propaganda which talks of Ukraine as something "which was always part of Russia" as well as by their interference in the internal affairs of other ex-Soviet Union nations such as Georgia.
Imperialism isn't limited to only conquering far away lands, even if that has been the most common form of it in Europe and for the US, and the Soviet Union itself can be considered an Empire, having been formed by Russia conquering other countries whilst maintaining control over several vassal nations.
Communism is just as Imperialist as the rest - it's only the style of Propaganda justifying the conquest of other countries that differs - which explains why it's so easy for the "Communists" who are mere parrots of the Soviet or Maoist propaganda (rather than independent thinkers) to side with Russia's Imperialism.
Russia has been an expansionist force for centuries - long before the October revolution. There's various explanations for this such as Russia constantly feelings vulnerable due to the vast plains to their west without any natural Geographics barriers. But instead of forging literally any true alliances or building any soft power with the nations in that area they just constantly antagonize all of them. The one country they have on side is Belarus and that's because they have to constantly prop up its leader against the will of their people. No good will, only force.
The current former Soviet countries in that area have the distinct memory of living under Russian control during the USSR and shockingly - want no part of it again. So they join NATO. Voluntarily. To the tankie if someone wants to join NATO, no matter how rational their reasoning for doing so, it must be because the CIA and "the West" tricked them into it. Smaller countries and the people who live there never have any agency.
After the USSR , western political discourse was full of talk about whether NATO is obsolete. Russia did everything possible to prove that wrong.
Your knowledge of history is pretty shallow. Just talking about the post-USSR, Yeltsin and Putin were literally put in place by the CIA and for two decades did everything they could to appease America and Europe - they wanted to join NATO, they wanted to join the EU, and they were rebuffed. Putin broke with the west only after it became clear that he would never ever be let into "the club" and that the west's vision of Russia's future was as a completely de-industrialized gas and mineral exporter and nothing more.
From the historians I've read, the thinking is that most preindustrial colonial projects including Russia were vanity projects by rulers with little strategic thinking. As for the USSR it seems the goal was twofold. Spreading Soviet ideology and giving the USSR the resources to be a global player. It seems with the Russian Federation it's mostly about getting the resources to stay as a global player, but it the whole picture probably will only be clear in hindsight like any historical event.
by invading Ukraine to steal their territory and mineral wealth
ohoho. I advise you to take out of your head the porridge of the propaganda of the American government. It is the United States that is the bloodiest empire in the world, and its manual NATO military unit is the bloodiest military unit in history. And this bloc, among other things, is constantly expanding in order to seize new lands and take away part of their sovereignty from their governments in favor of the US dictatorship
Some people's minds just seem to reject the idea that you don't have to lick any boots at all. They've come all the way from the western boots and at the far end of their journey just went "ooh, new boots!" and just got down on their hands and knees and got to work.
If history has taught us anything, it's that fascists sure have some shiny shoes.
That’s always the issue though, you shouldn’t expect any politician to always have the right solutions, and why cabinets are needed. That’s also kinda why small government is an inadequate recipe for the complexity of human life.
It’s definitely a lie that you need conservatives in your political offices though
It’s definitely a lie that you need conservatives in your political offices though
100% they don't have the monopoly on brain power or good ideas... It's absolutely about who you surround yourself with which is partially why I don't care about Biden or his age, I know he isn't like Trump where Trump is just going to surround himself with "yes men."
Have you considered that they have a comprehensive worldview that leads them to different conclusions than yours does? No, they just must be big dummies because they haven't figured out this one super simple universal truth!
If that comprehensive worldview leads people to defending russian imperialism, they really seem to be big dummies or just inhumane scum. It's actually pretty simple.
Dude I think we should be supplying warships to the fucken Somalian pirates to fuck with the Chinese and even I can tell you are incapable of having a comprehensive worldview.
Imagine being old enough in 2002 to know the successor to the Mujaheddin was called the Northern Alliance who were our allies in opposition to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. But since the facts didn't fit the narrative that we're fighting the people the US put into power and also didn't fit the racist narrative that "all those people over there are all the same." Neither the left nor the right wanted to think about Afghanis having any kind of agency so failure in Afghanistan was inevitable.
Yeah I'm a socialist and agree with a lot of what Marx wrote and no fucking way do I support anything Russia is doing in Ukraine. Tbh I'm disheartened that Russia hasn't suffered more severe internal consequences for this illegal invasion. Ukraine has every right to fight and retake its sovereign land, including attacking assets inside Russia.
I do feel bad for the Russian people in general, but that's not because of any politics, I feel the same way about Palestinians, Sudanese, Haitians, and the people of Myanmar. Anyone suffering under the tyranny of small dick leaders.
The point here is that all sides have a majority that hate russia but each side chooses to think of all the other sides as being in support of them despite clear evidence to the contrary. Of course many of those reds really like russia.
I have. Not so much that they are all rah, rah, russia, but because the west is the one supporting Ukraine. They seem to believe russia was, in fact, there to "de-nazify" Ukraine, and other russian propaganda. You know, the country who had recently ousted a putin puppet, then elected a Jewish man in a landslide, was so in need of a russia to fight the nazis that have over run the country.
I've seen plenty of tankies "defend Russia" M8. Especially on lemmy fucking tons of erm. What rock are you living in. If anything it's mainly tankies,neo libs,socialists (like alot of you lot). I see get involved in this harry kissenger pick-a-side war-hawk bull-shit I mean neo-libs,socialists,tankies aren't exactly the brightest
Me personally fuck Putin and fuck zelensky. I don't care who wins. I just wish for a end to the senseless war.Stop the war stop civilians getting harmed or worse. And stop people's personal property and livelihoods getting destroyed. There are no winners in war only losers. And in the end of the day. You can mend broken infrastructure. But you can't mend the dead or maimed
I've seen plenty of tankies "defend Russia" M8. Especially on lemmy fucking tons of erm
I feel like it's the same dozen howling assholes.
Me personally fuck Putin and fuck zelensky. I don't care who wins
Yeah, you lost me there... Last time the world tried appeasing an asshole with conquest delusions in the hope they'd cut it out it didn't work out to well
Generally what you'll see is right wing types directly supporting Russia (because they hate gay and trans people) and a certain stripe of leftists who will lean more into "NATO expansionism", "Western proxy war" and all that other thoroughly debunked nonsense that, while not explicitly pro-Russia, is all directly lifted from Kremlin propaganda talking points.
You need two (or more) proxies to have a proxy war and looking at the belligerents and who supports them it's clear who is who: Ukraine is South Korea's proxy, Russia the one of North Korea.
Ukraine and Israel are literally defending the civilized world against the savages and barbarians of the world. And the left has the audacity to criticize how they are being defended
I practice an obscure form of online performance art and satire. Some say it originated on the Gamefaqs gaming forums after a user got banned for sending nudes of his wife to mods in exchange for shitposting privileges
Is that there on the bottom the noted genocide denier and conspiratorial edgelord Noam Chomsky. Please, Yanks, stop worshipping him. You have Bookchin.
Kraut has an essay on it. He's a persona non grata in Europe. Of course, those are old takes, regarding more recent events he's saying things like "Russia is fighting more humanely in Ukraine than the US did in Iraq". I have absolutely no love left for US imperialism or its military but damn, they're not that bad. His world view is simple: US bad therefore non-US good.
Nazis were not left ever. That's a myth. They use the trappings of leftism, but never did anything leftist. They also attacked the real socialists. They were authoritarian-right.
OP isn't making it up, but they constantly make or repost memes about tankies and are seemingly blowing it out of proportion, as I mentioned in another thread (and was down voted) people are throwing it around way too much on lemmy.
See all the top level comments like "all the tankies coming out of the wood work! Must have struck a nerve!" when in reality there are legit arguments to be had around these things, but no, question Biden or the DNC and you're clearly just a tankie on russia/china/whatever payroll. Doesn't matter if it's a valid point of concern or strategy, fall in line or you're the enemy. Literally.
"Biden should be doing more to pressure Isreal to stop murdering innocents"
TANKIE!! YOU'RE LITERALLY VOTING FOR TRUMP!!
DNC should just be able to dictate elections because they clearly didn't learn their lesson with Hillary and led directly to a Trump presidency, but no it's the left and "Bernie Bros" who were wrong.
The invention of campism and its consequences have been a disaster for sane leftist discourse (in western europe. somehow it's not a problem in countries like poland and baltics)
