Many people on lemmy.ml deeply respect and admire authoritarian governments and organizations.
Iran, China, North Korea, Soviet Union…
The West has many flaws. But our flaws are nothing compared to these guys.
Iran hangs homosexuals. Iran shot 30,000 people in less than than 2 weeks. The Soviet Union had to build a fucking Iron wall to prevent people from escaping. The Soviets lied about the Chernobyl nuclear explosion. China censors the internet. China wants to eliminate Islam. North Korea is a totalitarian hellscape. Watching anime is a crime.
Why is lemmy.ml so fascinated with authoritarians?
Why do westerners have zero self awareness or critical thinking? The US has killed more innocent people in the past decade than every country you mentioned combined has in the past 5 decades, spies on our own people and everyone else, has the highest prison population on earth per capita and total, I could go on. If your #1 priority isn’t opposing the US led global order then you have no credibility, simple as.
I love communism and I think all these countries’ systems are trash.
I don’t think you can have communism with a hierarchical, centralized government or authoritarianism.
I also think the US has systematically undermined or simply overthrown every legitimate attempt to work socialism into communism, leaving only examples that morons can point at as proof that it wouldn’t work.
So if you see someone defending communism and you think they’re defending those authoritarian regimes, then your problem is you. If you honestly see people saying those regimes are great then they’re probably tankies and you can safely ignore them and disregard this entire comment.
These people are called “tankies”. It’s communists who like militarism and imperialism, as long as it’s of their own flavor. The internet has many such “bunkers” where these people congregate. They unironically support the countries you mention, and they do not represent the entire left-wing community.
I’d argue that they aren’t the result of capitalist policies being shitty. Such communities have existed on the internet since the early 00s. It’s just their ideology.
Why are they on lemmy? My guess is that Reddit banned some of their communities for posting violent content (threats of violence etc.) so they moved to lemmy, which does not censor people to the degree Reddit does.
The .ml for lemmy.ml supposedly stands for “marxism leninism”.
The West has many flaws. But
Lol no, no and fuck you for trying
I’ve been thinking a lot of about this and my educated guess would be - rising distrust with current institutions and/or bad experience with societal failures.
If you look through history of
.mlposters they are mostly in western europe or US and there’s always a specific grievance they have like the current societal system did them dirty. Most normal people just realize that all systems are imperfect and sometimes you take an L and continue but there’s this trend of sore losers extremists in both far right and far tankie left that just have full identity capture and radicalization because of a one or few conflicts.I almost fell into these pits myself several times because being owned by a system that doesn’t give you sufficient tooling or voice to feedback on does feel really terrible. Especially these days when burying issues is so easy under automation, culture of indifference and political unseriousness.
However, imo most of these are just weak people and I don’t necessarily say this as an attack but all societies have weak links that can turn to extremism but that just means we should do a better job correcting for this.
TL;DR: trauma
Short answer: the Kremlin.
Long answer: Kremlin paid propaganda leaking everywhere.
I just think they’re neat
It’s not lemmy.ml as a source, but rather a symptom.
I see two things going on:
- A general fall in trust in democratic institutions, as those institutions fail to represent people adequately;
- A clear realization of global injustice perpetuated by democratc countries against the will of people.
There aren’t many that that think that Iran’s goverment is good for Iranian people, but they do see that they are defending their civilization. This umderstanding requires that the observer is able to maintain two observations at the same time, instead of requoring complete black & white intepretations.
our flaws are nothing
Completely true if you don’t consider Palestinians as equals. Or Vietnamese. Or Koreans. Or Black people. Or Ukrainians. Or women. Or the entire continent of Africa. Or the entire continent of South America. Or the entire continent of Asia.
Literally unbelievable you’d be saying this during genocide in Palestine and western invasion of Iran.
Weak snowflakes who think they are not.
mirror images of conservatives, just look at them. they are more closer to liberterian-republicans, too afraid to be called republicans but support thier policies 100%.
Totally, we communists support republican policies like checks notes universal healthcare, free education, guaranteed housing, guaranteed employment, state pensions…
And then there’s .ml tankies that also support wars of conquest (if by Russia or probably if China, too), harsh censorship, wholesale slaughter of perceived enemies, etc.
The question wasn’t about communists. It was about the dipshit tankies on .ml.
Anything’s possible when you make shit up
“Tankie” is a pejorative for communist, I think you’re confused here. Communists don’t support “wars of conquest,” but they do support using force as necessary against fascists and capitalists, and censoring capitalist and fascist speech. Class analysis is core to communism, by reducing it to “groups we don’t like” you’re obscuring the class nature of communist theory in a way that makes it seem based on whims or genetics like fascism.
I have seen you make this “correction” about 50 times.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tankie&t=fpas This is what the average person sees and defines as tankie. The first result which means it is the most viewed and read page any time someone searches that. You can disagree with that definition but you’re literally doing the Jordan Peterson of redefining a word to mean what you believe it should mean and muddying the waters for everyone else. I have never heard anyone besides people from ml describe tankie as “perjorative for communist.”
Some people may use it more loosely as a term for all communists, but I understand it to be a pejorative for a specific type of communist. Specifically, the kind that will excuse anything done by a communist or formerly communist regime. They make excuses for Russia invading Ukraine in defiance of their own diplomatic agreements, seemingly just for the sake of railing against the west. They make excuses for the most gruelingly authoritarian things communist groups may do or support. They generally seem to relish the idea of righteous violence, so long as they can find a way to align it with their world view. Tankies are the ones who will stand up for even the most brutal of regimes so long as they are communist or descend from historically communist states; in their eyes, the only possible failure of a communist state is genuine failure and collapse.
What you’re describing isn’t a real person or ideology, but a caricature in the form of a strawman that can be wielded to delegitimize communists. You aren’t describing a real group, but instead a real perception of a real group that is projected onto said real group.
I am describing behavior I quite frequently directly observed in .ml threads, but go off about how it’s not real. I personally got banned for calling Russia out for the war in Ukraine and the lack of any proper justification for it, and it was relevant to the discussion at hand, not just some random post to stir the pot.
Of course, there’s also the popular theory that .ml is heavily astroturfed by Russia and China, so maybe you’re right that they’re not actually communists, just a bunch of malicious propagandists the communists can never seem to weed out.
Or maybe a bunch of western propaganda to make communists look like violent assholes. Which, again, never seems to get weeded out.
Or some combo of the two.
But in all cases, it’s a common observance on .ml, and the one thing they’re not doing over there is distancing themselves from it literally at all. Far more likely to find .ml users like you in other communities trying to stick their head in the sand and pretend it’s not happening.
It’s a specific kind of communist, not all communists are tankies
The ones of any relevance seem to count. It’s a term levied against every major Marxist party and every socialist state.
Please do tell me which conquest war China has engaged in the past 50 years.
harsh censorship
It’s 2026, we’ve seen how western legacy media are owned by Zionists and social media are owned by oligarch Epstein class, we literally go into the Lemmyverse running away from this. Only thanks to Chinese-born social media such as Tiktok have we been able to witness the genocide in Gaza and open our collective eyes to the Palestinian cause. How, with this hindsight, can we criticise a country wanting to protect its citizens from this?
Additionally, seeing your interest against censorship, are you aware that most Russian media is outright banned in Europe? Have you seen how Chinese social media gets banned in the US unless it changes ownership to an American firm? And most importantly: does this desire for media availability from all over lead tou to read news coming from, say, Iranian, Chinese or Russian media? Do you actively consume such media, or do you consume your media de-facto equally to as if there were censorship of such media?
wholesale slaughter of perceived enemies
I believe you’re mistaken, the countries currently engaged in the genocide of Palestinians and threatening Iran with “the total elimination of a civilization” are the US and Isntreal, not communist.
Can you now bring up some points that are not projection of Western imperialism onto China?
you need to think like a cave man, conspiracy theorist, and an idiot all at the same time. america bad, therefore not-Amera good. Wikipedia is anti-communist propaganda
Wait… Do you think the Iron curtain was a literal iron wall?
It was mostly tin and zinc, that’s why it was not very efficient.
I can’t speak for everyone, but a lot of people have learned to just ignore many reports from international news organizations about anything, since those same organizations routinely repeat the US government’s released data, which has been filtered by international conglomerates with their own interests.
This is because those claims are often found to be untrue or wildly exaggerated after the dust settles.
That skepticism is the result of decades of “fake news” leading to a general doubt of any claim as a baseline.
…and that’s just for starters.
So, first, you must agree on what the truth is with sources that you can trust. Good luck.
I’ve read that Iran killed 30,000 people, but can’t read Arabic or know the context of images I have seen, and this could be true, however, given the track record of US media, I would consider the number to be wildly exaggerated just as a matter of course.
Also, I know that even IF it is true, that Iran has killed 30,000 protestors, the “good guys” can’t stop Iran and “win one for democracy and human civilization” without murdering many magnitudes more.
Anyway, I want to read about the IRON WALL the USSR built to stop people from escaping, please share
(not a tankie, and I think Muslims and all other religions should pay the same taxes as everybody else, which they consider to be a wild affront to their dignity)
Anyway, I want to read about the IRON WALL the USSR built to stop people from escaping, please share
Not OP, but my guess is the “IRON WALL” they’re referencing is a conglomeration of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain. The vast majority of the iron curtain was enforced with military patrols, not a literal wall.
