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 [email protected], 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.
Yah, that’s why people call them tankies. Any criticism of the USSR, or even acknowledging why people criticize it, is a banable offense.
The term tankie get’s thrown around a lot, to the point of dilution, but the origin of it comes from western communist who defended the Soviet Union putting down the 1956 Hungarian revolution, notably using T-54/55 tanks. It later came to mean western communist that would ignore or downplay any criticism of the USSR, as “propaganda”. These days it could even be applied more broadly to “People who call them selves left wing or communists but who will defend the actions of any authoritarian regime so long as it is notionally in opposition to the US and it’s allies” IE people who defended Assad and Putin.
I think hexbear fits even a fairly narrow older definition. Which is why most major instances are defederated from them.
I don’t think y’all get to use that talking point anymore after 1500 people upvoted a .world post calling the only realistic alternative to Assad, “a known terrorist.”
Seems like most people on here hold the position that the US shouldn’t have even lifted sanctions on al-Sharaa, let alone given him weapons and supplies. And not wanting to give al-Sharaa weapons and supplies is what you’re describing here as “supporting Assad,” is it not?
Fun fact, two people, in opposition to each other, can both be assholes.
And you don’t have to like one to criticize the other.
Like how you can criticize the actions of both the USSR and the USA in the Cold War.
More importantly, you don’t have to defend one ass hole just because you like the other less.
The world ain’t fucking a dialectic.
Do not feed the sea lions.
Oh, ok, so tell me, what’s your vision for Syria, exactly? Have Turkey and Israel annex the whole thing? Or maybe create a power vacuum in ISIS’s backyard? Practically speaking, one of those two assholes was going to end up in power, and if they didn’t, the situation was going to be even worse.
Your argument would be a lot stronger if our side was the one calling for active support of one side. You’ve got it completely backwards. My alleged “support” for Assad was always just, “I don’t think either side is worth supporting, so we should leave them alone.” Which is, you know, the proper “null” position when looking at any conflict. But the “null” position of anti-tankies seems to be, “Whatever the news says.” So rather than neutrality being the zero point, it’s seen as “supporting” the opposing side. So much so that you don’t even seem to realize how much your argument is shooting yourself in the foot.
Your side, the side that labels us as “tankies” and “Assadists” and so on and so forth every time we advocate non-interventionism, is the side that “defends one asshole because you like the other less.” In virtually every foreign policy debate, it’s not between which of two sides should be supported, it’s between supporting one side or not supporting either. If you want to convince me to adopt a position of interventionism when both sides are flawed, then you need to argue the exact opposite of what you just said.
Man, I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but Russia isn’t even opposed to the US, as long as the Christian white supremacist fascists are ruling things.
The sheer irony of people playing defense for a white supremacist fascist state and then accusing someone else of being a “fascist sympathizer”. Like dawg the call is coming from inside the house.
I think the current Russian leadership has this detached fantasy of what America’s far right are like, this idea that they’re homebody rural folks who just want to keep to them selves and that if they’re in charge the US will disengage it’s self from the rest of the world, leaving Russia to treat Eastern Europe as a playground for their imperialism.
But the thing is, it ignores the agency of the eastern Europe to oppose them, and it ignores the fact that the the US far right is fundamentally narcissistic and egomaniacal. Ultimately the far right of the US will stay engaged in eastern Europe because they will perceive Russia telling them to get out as an insult and a humiliation. The only way the far right would disengage would be if they could frame it as them “winning” and that framing would be perceived as an insult and humiliation to the Russian leadership, so they won’t allow it.
So they will come to genuinely hate each other. I don’t think this will lead to the US far right suddenly deciding they care deeply about the well being of eastern Europe, but they also aren’t going to disengage completely.
I could never understand that. I mean I understand that for someone completely dissatisfied with the government in a Western country, it’s a lot easier to just switch sides and join a community of like-minded people with a large state-funded network of information behind it, but the morality of that is just beneath me. Besides, you won’t be completely alone even if you oppose or harshly criticize both the West and the likes of Russia or China.
Its very simple. Americans dont give a single flying fuck about eastern euros and consider them lesser humans, therefore being a nazi but with hammer and cicle instead of swastika is acceptable in america
A lot of people seem to believe “if you are for one thing I’m for then you must be perfect - anytime it is proved otherwise it was a small one time thing so I’ll ignore it.” It is really hard to admit someone you don’t like does do good things, or someone you like does bad things.
I mean, I think a big part of it is foreign influence efforts landing very strongly with dissenting groups in the US. Then forging influence networks using the extant distrust for the US’s government to dismiss nuance that would paint their patrons in a bad light.
Good thing the US world never spread propaganda and that you’re immune to propoganda yourself.