I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy’s massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It’s been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let’s say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they’re what’s colloquially referred to as tankies. This wouldn’t be much of an issue if they didn’t regularly abuse their admin/mod status to censor and silence people who dissent with their political beliefs and for example, post things critical of China, Russia, the USSR, socialism, …
As an example, there was a thread today about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. When I was reading it, there were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some whataboutist/denialist replies critical of the USA and the west. In terms of votes, the posts critical of China were definitely getting the most support.
I posted a comment in this thread linking to “https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs” (WARNING: graphical content), which describes aspects of the atrocities that aren’t widely known even in the West, and supporting evidence. My comment was promptly removed for violating the “Be nice and civil” rule. When I looked back at the thread, I noticed that all posts critical of China had been removed while the whataboutist and denialist comments were left in place.
This is what the modlog of the instance looks like:
Definitely a trend there wouldn’t you say?
When I called them out on their one sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml that I had ever participated in.
Proof:
So many of you will now probably think something like: “So what, it’s the fediverse, you can use another instance.”
The problem with this reasoning is that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml, and they’re not so easy to replace. I mean, in terms of content and engagement lemmy is already a pretty small place as it is. So it’s rather pointless sitting for example in /c/linux@some.random.other.instance.world where there’s nobody to discuss anything with.
I’m not sure if there’s a solution here, but I’d like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.
Yeah, I’ve been banned because I said something about Uighur genocide, on the other hand I’m wondering about dessalines’ nationality and his knowledge about communism, it’s easy to be communist of you only touched it online, I for example live in post communist country and remember some of it, old people are talking about it, it wasn’t that good
I’d “understand” if everything would be transparent and they admitted it’s tankie instance and you’re banned because you don’t like China but no, everything is against their own COC
Do we want someone like that not only administrating the oldest Lemmy instance but developing the whole platform?
lemmy.ml has changed their level of transparency about their political leanings twice. Look at the history of their home page description:
April 2021 to June 2021:
June 2021 to November 2022:
November 2022 to now:
This is almost certainly the case, these kids read about the ideals of communism and think it sounds great, and they know about how things are in the USA and think that’s bad. Two fair assessments, but they then deduce that the because capitalist America is bad, then Soviet Russia “communist” China must be good, ignoring the fact that every person who survived/escaped those reigemes described them as hell.
This is patently false, you’re either mistaken or lying. During my PhD in a western European country, I had the pleasure of working with several Chinese students and supervising the thesis of even more of them. Of all the Chinese students, all except one returned to china after finishing their studies because they prefer life in China. I made it a point to ask about their opinions on the government, and the approval rate of their government is so much higher than the approval rates of governments that we have in the west. If you look up any poll on this topic you’ll find the same conclusion: Chinese people are on average happier with their government than westerners are with theirs.
About the USSR, a majority of the citizens were against the dissolution of the country and a transition to liberalism, so again, you’ve been misled or you’re lying.
First of all, anecdotal evidence. Also survivorship bias. One - the type of person that goes to study abroad is usually wealthy, well off. Two, your family is collateral so you are guaranteed to return. Saying negative shut about the regime can get you in trouble so they’ll sing praises of it - just like in Russia.
Second, the USSR thing is complete dogshit and you can see why now in Ukraine. People hated the russians. Speaking russian in western Ukraine after it disolved could get you threatened or punched in the face. Same thing with the Baltics. Same thing with Poland.
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Yeah, okay, you are just a tankie. Fucking bloodless invasion my ass you ignorant moron. You are insulting the history of my country and my people. I won’t be wasting any more time on you - you don’t deserve the wear on my phone screen from replying to you.
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Ah yes the tankie forgetting about Katyn in their assessment and countless other massacres. You heard it here folks, the war in Gaza is bloodless. So many nazis we need a denazification special military operation, huh?
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Everyone who wants communism has never lived it, and those who have don’t want it.
It sounds great on paper, but humans will always have those who wish to hold power.
For real, I knew people whose family had to stand in lines just to get food or common items. It’s foolish to advocate for abolishing capitalism when states with “real leftism” overwhelmingly do not thrive for long or at all.
I mean… the Soviet Union was illegally dissolved and as far as I remember, the people didn’t want the dissolution to happen. A lot of tomfooleries happened after that and many former soviet countries did lose protections for their least economically safe population.
This is not a defense of the Soviet Union, but dealing with the first statement you wrote.
What? No just no…what type of crazy revisionist history is this…the people on the other side of the wall tried to escape constantly, they wanted Western goods and entertainment, the ussr was made up of forcefully captured countries. I don’t know where you got this idea that they liked it, maybe the people in charge did.
It’s not revisionist what do you mean? It’s a very normal fact that is literally even easy to wiki.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_Union_referendum
When you live in an authoritarian system, votes mean jack shit. People don’t escape the ussr because they want to keep it together…
So when faced with facts you just turn away. I mean, I’ll even concede that some of the member states didn’t hold elections and therefore, we have no statistics on them. Not every facet of your enemy can be unreasonably demonized. Not every element of Soviet life was as bad as you think, and it’s totally fair to say that the lower socioeconomic class was harmed by the dissolution.
In the aftermath of the dissolution oligarchs did dismantle a lot of the social security nets that existed and concentrated a lot of wealth.
I can just as easily shit on how Norwegian social security has been harmed by for-profit initiatives on the back of 8 years of Høyre and Frp rule.
I’m guessing US, on account of the whole “America Bad” thing. Can also be seen with European tankies but they’re not nearly as much USSR stans and way more likely to identify as Trots. South American is another option but then I’d expect at least some of his output to be Spanish/Portuguese. It all does have that US exceptionalism turned around “The US is the source of all evil, ever” kind of vibe you generally only see from Americans as the rest of the world plain and simply isn’t seeped in US jingoism and self-importance.
…also I didn’t really invest much time in this at all, if someone else did, please enlighten us.
I don’t believe you. I think your country was state capitalist, and would have described itself as economically socialist rather than communist.
I live in an actual post communist country, Australia, and everyone here understands that when capitalism arrived here, it was genocidal and environmentally destructive.
In what universe was australia ever a communist country?
Take your medication dude
You misunderstood me. Australia was never a communist country, because it wasn’t yet a county back when it was communist. It was a landmass full of communist tribes