One of the biggest topics of these days is that of mods in lemmy.ml banning and censoring people because they’re Tankies. This has had a rather sizeable discussion of people agreeing and even arguing for defederating ml. I’m sure a lot of people are arguing from good intentions, but there’s also bad faith actors among them, as I will try to show in this post. The original post was based on the moderation history of the ml instance so I respond in a similar fashion.
I browsed through the discussion for a while, and stumbled upon a comment of someone who had created an instance in response, namely de_ml@lemmy.blahaj.zone The original post in about the moderation in ml has to do with the Tiananmen Square Massacre, so I decided to make a few posts in this new instance about other historical facts which are less discussed, but that we should remember too, namely the Bengal Famine and the US support of fascism in Spain.
Initially these posts were well received and had some upvoted, but after a while I got a notification that one of them had been banned. To my surprise, I looked at the mod log of the instance and found this. So, both posts being about historical atrocities committed by capitalist countries were either banned or locked, and I had been banned from the community altogether for the reason “commie?”
I checked through the admin’s history of comments and found this.
Is this admin, who censors posts that talk about historical grievances committed by capitalism, who pins “fuck Tankies” to the instance, really a person without an agenda trying to protect a community from a supposed malignant moderation, or is it someone with an agenda trying to call everyone to the left of centrism a Tankie?
We should, in my opinion, be careful with accusing and polarising one of the biggest communities in Lemmy away, which is full of non-political content, and really examine what’s going on and what agenda there is behind it.
They were the most upvoted posts in the community, so no, they weren’t disagreed at all
How can it be off-topic? There’s no declared purpose of the community in the sidebar other than a few rules, and were literally the first posts of the community
Making an entirely new post in an entirely new community is an attempt at whataboutism? I happen to be Spanish and to take the issue of fascism very seriously, since my ancestors suffered it directly and I still suffer its consequences. What part of making a new post about it is whataboutism when I’m not even comparing it to anything??
Wait, a post about fascism in Spain, and a post about a famine in India, are going to get me removed? Do you realize what you’re saying? People aren’t allowed to talk about other international grievances for how long exactly after the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre without getting accused of whataboutism, being Tankies, and getting banned? Do you realize how anti-communist discourse works?
That’s not what they did. They banned me for being a communist, not a tankie, they didn’t use it as a synonym.
I’m not here to argue about that, that’s a topic that has been discussed a lot already in the original post, I’m here to talk about bad faith actors jumping in the supposedly anti-tankie reaction to ban anti-imperialism content and anything that smells of communism.
I just want to point out that you have said in another comment that they were the first posts, so it’s not exactly surprising that they were the most upvoted at least at one point in time.
Beyond that this is such transparent concern trolling and your posts were so obviously off topic, and your attempts to feign ignorance so woefully unconvincing that they don’t even bear responses. Anyone who thinks this is a scandal is already a tankie like you, volodya ilich, meaning they can’t see this for the transparent bullshit that it is. That kind of credulity is a requirement for becoming a tankie in the first place.
I cannot imagine anybody being convinced by this.
…and there we go, the magic word to end all discussion in this platform. You guys keep disregarding any and all criticism of capitalism and accusing it of whataboutism and tankieism. Again, how many days have to pass from whichever commemoration of a heinous act committed by a communist project until people can discuss the problems of capitalism and imperialism without fear of being accused of being tankies?
Spend three seconds on Lemmy and you’ll see how wrong this is.
Now you’re conflating tankies with anticapitalism in general, another classic tankie trope. You don’t have a monopoly on the concept, although you love to pretend you do because the only way your ideas could have any legitimacy is if it is literally a binary choice between neoliberal capitalism and what amounts to state capitalism. Just like in your mind it’s a binary choice between US imperialism and red imperialism.
No thanks, I’ll take my actual anticapitalism and anti-imperialism instead of a red flag any day.
You don’t seem to have much self-awareness about this, so I’ll just repeat it: you are not convincing anyone. Let it go. Take the L. I’m sure any attempt to rebutt this will just be you showing your butt all over again. I doubt you’ll listen to this because myopic, tone-deaf self-righteousness seems to be another tankie trait, but at least I tried.
My ideas being “stop doing supporting fascist dictatorships and stop creating famines in Bengal”, right? Because what else do you know about my ideas from the post?
Again, you’re making things up and accusing me of things I haven’t said, and accusing me of being a tankie because you assume my ideology to be a given one. You may think I’m tone deaf, you may think my critique here is not legitimate, and all of that’s cool, but how am I a tankie?!
Holy shit, you’re still pretending you’re not a tankie. Not a tankie, but you chose the name volodya ilich, which is a deep cut about Lenin’s childhood nickname.
And you’re still pretending you don’t understand what was wrong with your posts. Who are you saying this for? Do you actually think anyone believes you? Is this an elaborate troll? I wish I knew but this is beyond parody. If you are doing parody: you didn’t make it obvious enough. I’m so sorry.
If you think a reference to Lenin makes you a Tankie, you have no idea what tankies are and you’re just blatantly anti-communist, that’s the issue here. Thinking that Lenin is an admirable Marxist theorist, doesn’t mean you support tanks invading Hungary, and you’re either mistakingly or willingly conflating communism with authoritarianism, which is absolute bullshit.