Mods
Actions
- Removed posters comments
- Banned posters from community
Mod log
- Original comment that was deleted with reason of “Tankie apologia”.
- When another user comments has suspicions of mods actions, Mod replies with this.
- Poster replies in exasperation explaining perspective, rationale, and offline experiences. Comment gets deleted and purged.
Explanation
The original comment I made was stating that alienation of someone by frustrating their political beliefs is not a way to convince them of anything.
That being their genuine friend goes a long way in helping someone rather then attacking them.
That together they both can work together for a better future.
That you can be annoyed, but that should be swallowed because that is what it means to be part of a community.
You will always be annoyed one way or another in a community, that is the beauty of a community, that there are different people that may annoy you slightly, but working together to still be a community.
The moderator disagrees with this, viewing it as “tankie apologia”.
When I replied, explaining why I made my post and my background, My post was removed and I was banned from the community.
Thank you @[email protected] for reminding me on this missing context: https://lemmy.ml/comment/17251624
In my reply post, I wrote that “advocating for war on any country is not political flavoring”.
That cannot be swallowed, and one should not befriend such a person without sufficient care for ones own wellbeing.
I had wrote explicitly thinking of people who suport Russia against Ukraine, Israel over Palestine, and Assadists etc.
My purged comment also states that “people seeking to punish / attack LGBTQIA+ people is not political flavoring”.
I whole heartingly believe trans rights are human rights.
Free HRT and gender affirming care for all!
To remove an otherwise popular comment advocating for support what I feel are healthy behaviors, then name call someone as a “authoritarian” and a “tankie apologist” is disingenuous and corrupt to me.
Remedy
Personally I would like my comments restored so at least others see a different way of looking at things. I have no qualms with remaining banned.
Perhaps I should have not commented in reply to the mod, but they had already removed my post and I had little to lose.
Otherwise, I am very tired of this on the internet, I am tired of tribalism and the lack of empathy in this world.
What do you all think, should I have even made my original comment if I already knew it would be fruitless?
I support direct action, unionization, and revolution, I just don’t also support states that suppress unions, like you do. Improving society somewhat doesn’t look like implementing a military dictatorship.
You can’t support hierarchical dictatorships that take away the rights of workers and call yourself a communist, leftist, etc. etc. You are an authoritarian even now with no power.
so you support every revolution except for the successful ones?
life is not a map painting game
Two questions:
Were Marx and Engles communists?
Have you read “On Authority” by Engles?
On authority : notoriously the worst Marxist essay ever written.
What you think of it is irrelevant. What’s relevant is that it plainly demonstrates the author’s perspective on this issue. Meaning that anyone who claims “You can’t call yourself a communist if you’re an authoritarian” has to either make the absurd claim that Engles wasn’t a communist or pretend the essay doesn’t exist.
Of course, On Authority is just the shortest and most to the point work demonstrating the view in a way that is completely impossible to deny. If you (God forbid) read Lenin (particularly The State and Revolution), he cites Marx extensively to defend his position and refute the idea that Marx didn’t support the use of “authoritarian” state power.
What’s funny to me is that for all the time Lenin spent refuting these ideas in his time, the people saying them today don’t actually read any of the people whose intellectual tradition they’re inheriting. The modern day Kautskist won’t read Lenin, but they certainly won’t read Kautsky. There’s no theory to even be critiqued really, it’s just memes, streamers, and recycled propaganda lines.
Or, hear me out here, that Engels was just fractally wrong .
Lol
So you’re saying he wasn’t really a communist then.
I’m saying he was stupid wrong about what “authority” is.
As I said, your opinion is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is that the work shows his position, and that he was, indisputably, a communist.
That doesn’t matter at all
Why do you cling to the words of old dead men
Because the things that we discuss today have been tried - and implemented! - in the past. It’s only though the utmost arrogance that people like you reject all historical examples and treat every historical figure as simply dumb or morally impure in some way. Us “tankies” are considerably more humble in that we are willing to accept the fact that historical projects - even those that were flawed and ended in failure, like the USSR - belong to our intellectual tradition, which thereby allows us to analyze their successes and failures and to learn from them.
Of course, no matter how hard you try to distance yourself from us or from things like the USSR, you will still be tied to them. They called Obama a communist, you think they won’t do the same to you? This is literally how we got into this mess in the first place, all the major labor unions in the US purged communists and radicals to prove that they were “one of the good ones” and then, wouldn’t you know it, the capitalists didn’t fucking care, they were still unions and still opposed to their interests (and they’d just defanged themselves too!) so they just called them communists anyway. Eventually it got to the point where even the word “liberal,” which literally means someone who supports capitalism, became a dirty word. You can’t be afraid of getting called names, it just gives the other side power.
Of course, even if you reject all of that, there have been countless examples of libertarian socialist/left-wing movements in the developing world. They’re just not around anymore because they were violently suppressed. Whether it was Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, or any number of other places. Ultimately, arguing that libertarianism is the way to go is either denying/ignoring all of those examples (as your lot generally does, reveling in ignorance), or denouncing them as impure for not delivering utopia overnight. Anyone who refuses to learn the lessons of history is, as I said, either an aspiring martyr who doesn’t care that they’ll be killed and replaced by a fascist, or an armchair intellectual who has no pretense of ever even attempting to get close enough to the levers of power to actually accomplish anything, and can safely criticize from the sidelines.
You sure put in a lot of effort to call yourself a humble authoritarian. I don’t believe there is some magic switch that can be pulled to achieve socialism over night, but a nation that commits all the same wrongs as a capitalist nation doesn’t seem like an upgrade of any kind. I’m not going to believe someone suppressing my rights is going to be able to deliver on any promise to implement socialism. I should note I’m mostly talking about states like the USSR and the CCP, and other so called communist states.
Anyways, you can’t do anything without unions. Communism won’t happen under dictatorship, nor through some “democracy” swamped by capitalism or whatever other horror people can conjure. Change can only be achieved by all of us working together, not under some tyrannical oligarchy or leader.
Of course the quality of life in the USSR was not an upgrade compared to already developed nations built on centuries of slavery and colonialism. It was, however, a major upgrade compared to Tsarist Russia. Likewise, this is even more pronounced in China, where the life expectancy under the Nationalists was in the 30’s, unchanged since ancient times with no signs of improvement - now it’s higher than that of the US. Since the 1980’s, China lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty, which accounts for 3/4 of all poverty reduction in the world in that time. But China is still a middle-income country, so instead of looking at relative improvements, or at what realistic alternatives could’ve accomplished, it’s simply denounced as reactionary because it’s not “an upgrade,” as compared to what you’re used to.
Likewise, smaller states like Cuba and Vietnam have successfully overthrown colonial regimes and improved quality of life across many metrics, Cuba went from being mostly illiterate to having one of the highest numbers of doctors per capita in the world. Of course, these states have faced tremendous economic pressure from outside.
You’re evaluating all of these states not in their historical context of what they were like before and what alternative paths they could’ve taken, but against this ideal of achieving communism. Of course, in addition to states that use the label of socialism, there are also those who don’t use that label at all and have no pretenses of having communism as their aim. For example, Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran, who I mentioned previously, was in no way a socialist and had no alignment with the USSR or any other socialist state, he just wanted the profits of Iran’s oil to go to the Iranian people, to improve their quality of life. Perhaps, had he been an evil authoritarian socialist, he would’ve taken measures to protect himself from being ousted from the CIA and succeeded in improving people’s lives. Instead, he did it your way and got replaced by a fascist who hunted down and exterminated leftists of all stripes for decades.
I’m well aware of what industrialization can achieve