On lemmy.ml/c/worldnews, the second comment / chain of comments I ever made on Lemmy. I had no idea that there would be so many Putin supporters. I was downvoted to hell for saying that the war in Ukraine is Putin’s war and it can end whenever he decides to get the fuck out.

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In college, some friends of mine were organizing for a Trotskyist group. A Stalinist group showed up uninvited on campus and spread the story that the Trotskyist group was a front for NAMBLA. The Stalinists were ejected for harassing students.

Sorry but what’s a tankie?

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It was on here, on my first day. I went and asked “what even is a tankie?”

Then began a pretty meaningfully discussion, but it was less about the whole pro authoritarian cult of personality, and more about communism and human nature in general and the origin of the term Tankie, because I have never heard it outside a few “fuck tankie” comments on r/politics.

Now that I think about it, I’m not sure the people were actual tankies, unless they were avoiding the topic altogether.

I got alot of “It’s just something the liberals say and has lost meaning”

I have since visited a few random posts where the people were sort of glorifying these utter scum bags and I’m not sure of the logic in it.

I’ve come to the conclusion that these people think: humans suck, shitty people will take power regardless, so let’s try and manipulate it to at least get “smarter” authoritarian leader. And in the process they’ve become enamored with these people.

No idea

First time I heard the term was probably from wandering into politicalcompassmemes but thought they were more of a punchline than an actual group. Then I made the mistake of signing up for lemmy.ml and realized I was surrounded. Read some pretty crazy copypastas claiming Tiananmen Square massacre never happened and it’s all western propaganda. Seems like they’re be happier in North Korea or something.

@Zstom6IP Literally lemmy.ml, lol. I commented a post where a guy was simply not respecting their Rule 2 at all. Then I got into a series of replies until I got banned from there, lol.

I tried my endeavour of making fun of them and further being apologetically about the genocidal regime of USA that loves to manufacture colour revolutions in countries to ensure their global hegemonic dictatorship, and to ensure using media, military, NED funded fake NGOs and funded terrorist groups around the world, that any country has trouble maintaining sovereignty for a couple of times more (yes, I literally copy-pasted the entire thing, sorry for wasting your time reading all this) until I got banned several times again.

At that point, I realized that there’s nothing one can do. Tankies own that site. They can do everything they want, ban everyone they want for whatever reason while protecting their own and pretty much sitting in their own bubble, disconnected from the real world, where they can just troll everyone. And I just got tired and quit.

Also, for a while before that I tried to somehow beat their propaganda bullshit and posting articles myself. After the first pro-Ukrainian interaction I had with these guys, they just started mindlessly downvoting everything I was posting (Yes, I know it was them. Here on Friendica you can see who has upvoted and downvoted you, but don’t tell anyone about that 😉), even though it was something unrelated with Ukraine, Russia or politics at all. At first, I blocked them, but somehow this had no results. They could still be commenting on my threads and whatnot, but I was just not receiving the comments. So I tried to post every more sensational news I would find in order to trigger them (this didn’t really yield the expected results - as we have a saying: don’t mess with the stupid one, as the stupid one has the mind at rest).

So yea, trying to get into an argue with the entitled people at lemmy.ml is simply pointless. I can only enjoy they are not the majority of the Fediverse.

As an end to all this: Before the Reddit migration, pretty much every community that I followed on Reddit was only on lemmy.ml. Or most active there. Beehaw was the only instance in this place that was relatively more active. Others were pretty much vacant. I am glad more people migrated to Lemmy and opened more instances. This has really become a sane replacement for Reddit (along with Kbin), nowadays!

I have only ever encountered them on reddit.

it seems someone got angry enough to downvote every single comment on this post.

I was a social liberal and economic conservative. I read The Economist and Ayn Rand. My mother had a copy of Mao’s Red Book from her grandfather, but none of it made sense and there was nothing about communism in the media. I even had to seek out anti-communist literature, I read Solzhenitsyn and Orwell.

My evolution to social democrat happened during the Obama administration. I had been railing at GW Bush, flabbergasted he would start two wars, watching the Daily Show, and eager for Obama to get in and stop the wars and close Guantanamo. When Obama did a troop surge in Afghanistan instead, kept Gitmo open, and invaded Libya and Syria, I started to realize that there is no major anti-war party. Obamacare got everyone talking about health care and I started to realize that it makes no sense to deny health care to poor people. I didn’t vibe with anyone but I read in a magazine about a Vermont senator that sounded pretty based, and he went on to run for president.

So I gave over a thousand dollars to Bernie Sanders’s two presidential campaigns. I was pretty crushed to learn that the DNC is a corporation that will openly work against popular will to suppress any threats to private health care. CNN was handing debate questions in advance to Hillary, the email leaks showed open conspiracy against Sanders in the DNC. The second go-around wasn’t much better and ended with a whimper as COVID obscured everything. Warren acted like someone trying to pull the left wing of democratic voters back to the center.

From time to time I would see socialists on Reddit. Bernie was talking about socialism like a good thing and I liked Bernie so I would see what these people were saying. My first impression was two things, firstly that I had no idea what they were talking about and secondly that they had more in-depth discussions about international relations than anyone I’ve seen.

They were saying that history shows that incremental reform through elections in a country controlled by the wealthy will never bring about lasting socialism, and the elections of Bernie Sanders, Jesse Jackson, Howard Dean, Eugene Debs, Henry Wallace, Jeremy Corbyn and Salvador Allende showed that. These were not people talking about revolution because they like violence and death, they were talking about revolution because it is necessary to stop all the death that comes from capitalist exploitation at home and abroad.

I wanted to have an informed opinion about communism, so I could understand exactly what’s wrong or right about it. I read Marx, Lenin, Frantz Fanon and Michael Parenti. The State and Revolution by Lenin explained with historical context why a revolution is necessary to overthrow capitalism, and why a state is needed to protect the revolution from being overthrown by capitalists.

I read The Conquest of Bread by Kropotkin and The Ecology of Freedom by Bookchin to get an idea of the left-libertarian mindset. I went in wanting an answer for how an anarchist revolution would protect itself better than the Paris Commune did, and I left with no answers. It seems to me that libertarian socialism only works if there’s so much popular support for anarchism that there is no state suppression necessary, and there are no sufficiently strong foreign influences that will profit from invasion and overthrow.

This whole journey basically came from two questions about my disillusion with the USA Democratic Party, what will it take to get our country to stop supporting unnecessary wars, and what will it take to keep tens of thousands of Americans from dying every year from denial of health care. Most people don’t want war, do want everyone to have health care, yet something keeps us from getting it year after year.

I remember feeling smart because I read Solzhenitsyn and The Economist. I understand how pervasive anti-communist propaganda is, and it makes perfect sense that it is so when monopoly media and the CIA have no interest in portraying communism in an honest light, and I’ve seen how they work, reading “Manufacturing Consent” by Chomsky and “Inventing Reality” by Michael Parenti.

So people generally call Marxist-Leninists “tankies” and now the tankie is me.