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Fidel Castro is morally superior to every US president.
Prepare for the 14year Olds on hexbear to come in and pretend that China has a great government
Westerners deciding who’s doing real socialism or not. Westerners expressing their most vile sentiment for foreign countries rather than their own imperialism. Westerners praising the words of their own imperialist intelligence agencies. Westerners unironically praising their own nations for civil liberties like the freedom of fascists to assemble, freedom of racists to express themselves, freedom of parents to own their children, and freedom of school districts to continue racial segregation. Westerners praising imperialist nations like Norway as socialist while using bold language like fascism to describe places under that same exact threat of imperialism, like Cuba and Vietnam.
Westerners claiming foreign governments are merely pretending to be socialist, while claiming unorganized misinformed chauvinistic westerners are the true heirs to socialism, despite all they do is post online and complain about foreign nations.
Westerners praising anarchist movements from 100 years ago despite having no common cause with those movements, no connection to the circumstances within them, and probably no actual admiration of them. Westerners praising a bastardized, sectarian, perverse form of anarchism rather than attempting unity with organizations in their areas. Westerners refusing to speak with actual anarchists in their area, who by and large don’t give a shit and just want to hand out food or help at shelters. If Buenaventura Durruti were alive today he’d be regarded with scorn by western chauvinists.
Westerners continuing to bring up Trotsky of all people, who wasn’t relevant to world affairs for the last 15 years of his life and certainly not the past 80 years. Westerners not reading a single word of Trotsky’s work, westerners focusing entirely on Trotsky’s feud with Stalin, westerners not knowing that Trotsky was a literal military commander. Westerners calling themselves Trotskyists in 2023 for some reason. Westerners deciding they have a feud with Joseph Stalin, a man who died in 1953.
Westerners attempting to praise their own socialist leadership, who happen to be a scattered group of imperialist-aligned social democrats, Twitch streamers, and actual antisemitic grifters such as in the case of Caleb Maupin.
Its hard to challenge your opinions when you gish gallup 500 talking points
You gish galloped, you ad homin-ed, you no true scotsman-ed, you one true scotsman-ed, and then you mot and bailey-ed.
Checkmate sir
Its ok to say you dont know what any of those mean. You dont have to make an ass out of yourself in the process
I believe you just engaged in a masked man fallacy taken to the ad absurdum.
Checkmate
I believe you just engaged in ligma balls fallacy with a terminally online spin.
Checkmate
Hey, that one was decent actually! Good job!
“I know why the Hexbear ppbs”
Someone learned something here!
What happened to PPB? I haven’t seen it in a while despite a ton of PPB worthy posts
I dont know what ppbs stands for
It’s hard to challenge my opinions because I’m cool as hell and I exude a pleasant aroma
500 talking points and you couldn’t find a single thing to call into question
I dont want to be a victim of hexbear road rage thanks. You guys just vomit out material in hopes that you can string it together to form a cogent argument. Then you come back smug as ever asking why i didnt respond to the 10k talking points as if I was a human encyclopedia.
How would I distinguish you, based only on your reply, from someone who took one look at two whole paragraphs and decided you weren’t going to read that but had to keep arguing no matter what and spewed out some sour grape nonsense?
Its information overload aka gish gallup
How should we frame our arguments in response to a meme that paints every single prominent socialist and socialist country as fascist without addressing each one?
Really the burden of proof should be on the one making the claim, shouldn’t it?People confuse facism and authoritarianism all the time, and people respond to this as if they’ve never figured this out.
So instead of anything productive these threads churn out:
Omg communist countries are fascist!
actually no socialist!
lol oppression
Vs
hey why do so many socialist states end up being super authoritarian?
hey yeah thats a huge problem, but lets ignore it because west bad
Warning: this is a hexbear user
Warning: 🚨 ⚠️ Hexbearian detected! Everyone, into the posting bunkers!
But is warning morally justified?
Yes, because engaging with hexbears is a waste of time. They are not here in good faith. Either that or they don’t know any better, which in practice amounts to the same thing.
My post was an inside joke based on that users previous posts on our instance.
Have you engaged with a hexbear in good faith?
That’s a fair question and in all honesty the answer is no, because based on what I can easily see and understand of hexbears, they aren’t intellectually serious people and to the contrary are more akin to a kind of 4-chan trolling community than anything worth actual intellectual engagement.
I could be wrong, but so far I have yet to see any evidence as such.
So you wouldn’t engage with any of us in good faith, because you’ve decided that we aren’t capable of that
If their post is short, accuse them of not engaging properly.
If their post is long, accuse them of gish gallop.
Said no one. Except you. You either know what a Gish gallop is, or you don’t. A long comment is not necessarily a Gish gallop. In this case the charge is entirely accurate.
Oh spare me, we both know full well that there was no long comment they could have posted that wouldn’t have been called gish gallop.
As if it’s somehow impossible to make a long comment in support of a single argument? As if Gish galloping comments don’t actually exist? Do I follow your logic properly? What part about this do I not understand?
Accusations of gish gallop are almost always just a bad faith way of dismissing an argument without bothering to address it.
What argument? 20+ arguments were made. Which one am I meant to address?
If I focus on one you’ll jump on me for not addressing the 19 others, which is why it’s a bullshit tactic.
That’s precisely the point. These guys have a toolbox of fallacious arguments and techniques that they regularly trot out. The Gish gallop is one of them. Another, that you see being put to wide use in this thread, is redefining words and terms to fit their narrative.
I agree. Fascist countries like Denmark, Germany and Canada often get called “socialist” and they have been disastrous for the reputation of socialism.
Of course /s. Germany, with Fuhrer Schultz, Denmark with Grand Admiral Frederiksen (I had to look it up lmao), and Canada with Supreme Commander Trudeau. All of them are actively involved in passing legislation against socialists and Muslims. All of them are involved in gathering Muslims into re-education camps. When socialists protested their respective governments for starting to become capitalist, they were run over by tanks. Also, all of these governments prevent their citizens from accessing the internet outside their own countries. Agreed! Very fascist indeed!
Would you like more resources or is this enough?
https://www.businessinsider.com/denmark-strict-immigration-policies-ghetto-neighborhoods-2018-7
https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/03/16/denmarks-mismatched-treatment-syrian-and-ukrainian-refugees
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/08/18/germany-afd-polls-krah/
Dayum… That’s shameful for Denmark. As for the German far right, polls tell many different stories. The German government is still very democratic. What about Canada? You also accused them of fascism.
To be fair, I would agree that the German government is the most decent in Western Europe. But the far right and anti-refugee sentiment in Germany has risen dramatically, and it wasn’t that great to begin with.
But just to add a few more examples, you have places like Italy, Spain (the current government is still a direct descendant of Franco’s fascist monarchy) and France (see latest laws against Muslims and Arabs, and just the rising hatred in general).
The point is, Western Europe is always painted as this morally superior place, when it is very much not. People are quick to shit talk third world countries as if we’re the only ones dealing with fascistic governments. At least we acknowledge it. So many Europeans do not.
From another commenter: https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/canada/2023/08/10/83-areas-of-interest-located-during-search-for-unmarked-graves-at-residential-school
Also, all of these governments prevent their citizens from accessing the internet outside their own countries
if this comment is anything to go by that’s just a massive W for them
You are certainly American but that’s especially stupid, is it a troll?
Would you like more resources or is this enough?
https://www.businessinsider.com/denmark-strict-immigration-policies-ghetto-neighborhoods-2018-7
https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/03/16/denmarks-mismatched-treatment-syrian-and-ukrainian-refugees
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/08/18/germany-afd-polls-krah/
I think its sarcasm
As a Canadian First Nation; you’re an idiot.
R/asablackman
You too, are an idiot.
Stop thinking your identity is an excuse to deny genocide and grow up
Very interesting how all those “pretend socialists” only exist in the third world, and all the “real socialists” existin the west. Yet all the successful revolutions have been done in the third world by “pretend socialists”, and the so called “real socialists” in the west have accomplished nothing. Their biggest success of the “real socialists” in the west being capitalist welfare states or social democracies that rely on old school imperial relationships to fund their welfare in a select few areas.
No Eurocentrism present to this line of thought here at all…
What do you think of Nelson Mandela OP? He was a very good leader, right? You know that he considered Cuba an ally and supported their revolution as Cuba sent troops to fight against the apartheid government in the border wars, took inspiration from Mao and called the Chinese revolution a miracle, thanked the Soviets for giving unending support in the fight against apartheid while receiving the a Lenin Peace Prize? So is Nelson Mandela now a fascist according to your meme?
“Authoritarian” is completely drtetmined by
Nelson Mandela was not a great man. At least not great enough to be so admired while F.W De Klerk had his funeral protested (F.W De Klerk helped end Apartheid).
Nelson Mandela did no more besides be a figurehead and help make a constitution that no one (not even when he was in power) follows. The ANC is corrupt to this day
Im going to come by your homestead with a handgun past midnight and make you feel true fear, Afrikaner maggot
Based
I’m South African, I know who F.W de Klerk is. Don’t lie about what he did, there’s a reason he was unanimously booed while receiving his joint noble peace prize. He didn’t help end apartheid, he was forced into a position where it was the only viable option. Pure pragmatism. He was a member of the NP for many years, he willingly joined that organisation at the height of apartheid in 1972. If he was actually interested in ending fighting apartheid, he would have joined a liberation movement, not the apartheid party.
de Klerk was an apartheid president that was so corrupt he ordered the incineration of evidence of his, and his parties, corruption and crimes against humanity to be carried out by industrial steel smelters. Not to mention what he did with all the “third force” shenanigans towards the end of apartheid that almost caused civil war. It’s been revealed that he knew all about it. Or all the racist things he said later in life that revealed his true character, such as refusing to call apartheid a crime against humanity. Yes, I also used to be a liberal that thought de Klerk was a good guy that helped end apartheid, that was until I actually decided to do some research into the matter. Nelson Mandela said it best when it comes to de Klerk:
“Despite his seemingly progressive actions, Mr de Klerk was by no means the great emancipator…He did not make any of his reforms with the intention of putting himself out of power. He made them for precisely the opposite reason: to ensure power for the Afrikaner in a new dispensation.”
Yes the ANC is now extremely corrupt, it was effectively couped by corporate interests in the late 90s and early 2000s. Remember the move from RPD to GEAR? Thabo Mbeki and Trevor Manuel? Ramaphosa running away to make money in McDonalds and mining instead of succeeding Mandela? Leaving the door open for Mbeki to become president, a self described Thacherite who instituted austerity measures, underfund Eskom and give South Africa it’s first bout of load shedding, and denied that HIV causes AIDS, killing hundreds of thousands in the process? This all paved the way for Zuma’s corruption and ineptitude, and for Ramaphosa to come back, even after his shameful involvement in Marikana. Yes the ANC is shamefully corrupt, incompetent and useless, and it’s interesting to look at exactly how it got to that position.
Nothing more ‘socialist’ than supporting the current world order but with some welfare
oh no the tankies be tanking
Why is memes of all places political, amma head out
Excerpt from Michael Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds
Some leftists and others fall back on the old stereotype of power hungry Reds who pursue power for powers sake without regard for actual social goals. If true, one wonders why, in country after country, these Reds side with the poor and powerless often at great risk and sacrifice to themselves, rather than reaping the rewards that come with serving the well-placed.
For decades, many left-leaning writers and speakers in the United States have felt obliged to establish their credibility by indulging in anticommunist and anti-Soviet genuflection, seemingly unable to give a talk or write an article or book review on whatever political subject without injecting some anti-Red sideswipe. The intent was, and still is, to distance themselves from the Marxist-Leninist Left.
Adam Hochschild, a liberal writer and publisher, warned those on the Left who might be lackadaisical about condemning existing communist societies that they “weaken their credibility” (Guardian, 5/23/84). In other words, to be credible opponents of the cold war, we first had to join in cold war condemnations of communist societies. Ronald Radosh urged that the peace movement purge itself of communists so that it not be accused of being communist (Guardian, 3/16/83). If I understand Radosh: To save ourselves from anticommunist witchhunts, we should ourselves become witchhunters.
Purging the Left of communists became a longstanding practice, having injurious effects on various progressive causes. For instance, in 1949 some twelve unions were ousted from the CIO because they had Reds in their leadership. The purge reduced CIO membership by some 1.7 million and seriously weakened its recruitment drives and political clout. In the late 1940s, to avoid being “smeared” as Reds, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a supposedly progressive group, became one of the most vocally anticommunist organizations.
The strategy did not work. ADA and others on the Left were still attacked for being communist or soft on communism by those on the Right. Then and now, many on the Left have failed to realize that those who fight for social change on behalf of the less-privileged elements of society will be Red-baited by conservative elites whether they are communists or not. For ruling interests, it makes little difference whether their wealth and power is challenged by “communist subversives” or “loyal American liberals.” All are lumped together as more or less equally abhorrent.
Even when attacking the Right, left critics cannot pass up an opportunity to flash their anticommunist credentials. So Mark Green writes in a criticism of President Ronald Reagan that “when presented with a situation that challenges his conservative catechism, like an unyielding Marxist-Leninist, [Reagan] will change not his mind but the facts.” While professing a dedication to fighting dogmatism “both of the Right and Left,” individuals who perform such de rigueur genuflections reinforce the anticommunist dogma. Red-baiting leftists contributed their share to the climate of hostility that has given U.S. leaders such a free hand in waging hot and cold wars against communist countries and which even today makes a progressive or even liberal agenda difficult to promote.
A prototypic Red-basher who pretended to be on the Left was George Orwell. In the middle of World War II, as the Soviet Union was fighting for its life against the Nazi invaders at Stalingrad, Orwell announced that a “willingness to criticize Russia and Stalin is the test of intellectual honesty. It is the only thing that from a literary intellectual’s point of view is really dangerous” (Monthly Review, 5/83). Safely ensconced within a virulently anticommunist society, Orwell (with Orwellian doublethink) characterized the condemnation of communism as a lonely courageous act of defiance. Today, his ideological progeny are still at it, offering themselves as intrepid left critics of the Left, waging a valiant struggle against imaginary Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist hordes.
Sorely lacking within the U.S. Left is any rational evaluation of the Soviet Union, a nation that endured a protracted civil war and a multinational foreign invasion in the very first years of its existence, and that two decades later threw back and destroyed the Nazi beast at enormous cost to itself. In the three decades after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviets made industrial advances equal to what capitalism took a century to accomplish—while feeding and schooling their children rather than working them fourteen hours a day as capitalist industrialists did and still do in many parts of the world. And the Soviet Union, along with Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic, and Cuba, provided vital assistance to national liberation movements in countries around the world, including Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress in South Africa.
Left anticommunists remained studiously unimpressed by the dramatic gains won by masses of previously impoverished people under communism. Some were even scornful of such accomplishments. I recall how in Burlington Vermont, in 1971, the noted anticommunist anarchist, Murray Bookchin, derisively referred to my concern for “the poor little children who got fed under communism” (his words).
Those of us who refused to join in the Soviet bashing were branded by left anticommunists as “Soviet apologists” and “Stalinists,” even if we disliked Stalin and his autocratic system of rule and believed there were things seriously wrong with existing Soviet society. Our real sin was that unlike many on the Left we refused to uncritically swallow U.S. media propaganda about communist societies. Instead, we maintained that, aside from the well-publicized deficiencies and injustices, there were positive features about existing communist systems that were worth preserving, that improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people in meaningful and humanizing ways. This claim had a decidedly unsettling effect on left anticommunists who themselves could not utter a positive word about any communist society (except possibly Cuba) and could not lend a tolerant or even courteous ear to anyone who did.
Saturated by anticommunist orthodoxy, most U.S. leftists have practiced a left McCarthyism against people who did have something positive to say about existing communism, excluding them from participation in conferences, advisory boards, political endorsements, and left publications. Like conservatives, left anticommunists tolerated nothing less than a blanket condemnation of the Soviet Union as a Stalinist monstrosity and a Leninist moral aberration.
Fun fact: the word count of the people shidding and pissing and cumming about how long this excerpt is now exceeds the word count of the excerpt itself.
Gonna paste a comment I made a couple weeks ago. Seems relevant again, both because of the accusation levied against hexbears and also because Parenti.
Oh a hexbear. … You lot only have overly simplistic takes.
When we respond to blatant ignorance with carefully chosen wording, backing up our position with citations and links, and calmly explaining the nuance of complex geopolitical realities, we get accused of “always throwing walls of text at people.” When we answer that same ignorance with short and pithy responses, we “only have simplistic takes.”
There’s no winning with you simple-minded dronies, but I guess there never is when one side can just make shit up that fits their vibes-based outlook on the world.
Libs out here proudly being like
TLDR
Do you guys actually write this shit out or are you ctrl + v from some source? Every time i see hexbears they write up a whole journal article as a comment that most likely nobody is going to read.
Just read it ffs you libs are just the laziest
Im actually a cracker… no wait im a fascist… or am I a conservative?? I dont know you hexbears call me everything i dont remember where we left off
You’d be better able to define what you are on ideological grounds if you’d read
Why not all of the above, and a dedicated idiot to boot?
Sorry can you dumb that down for me please
I probably couldn’t stoop down that low if I tried
most likely nobody is going to read
Being too lazy and uncurious to read a handful of paragraphs is not something to be proud of
Say it with me nowNo investigation…
I think a part of good, honest discourse is recognizing and respecting the time of the person you are talking with.
If you are going to respond with 11 paragraphs quoted from a book, you should preempt it by saying something to diffuse it. Something like, “oh man, this is super long but actually quite beneficial. I wrote a tldr though at the end in case you don’t have time to read the whole thing.”
I use this site while I’m at work. I literally don’t have time to read all of that lol.
On Hexbear we regularly bully each other into reading entire books when someone has a bad take. This is mild.
11 paragraphs is like one single page, maybe two.
Good for you guys
It would be good for you too. I see less whining about having to read two pages in 5th grade classrooms.
But in fact you don’t have to! No one is forcing you to engage.
Educate yourself or shut the fuck up. Otherwise, don’t act surprised when you’re ridiculed for constantly voicing worthless thoughts.
educate yourself and everyone around you
In this case, I’m just saying throwing 11 paragraphs of some random essay isn’t a good way to communicate. I’m all for education.
Someone else already said that the last 2 paragraphs are basically a summary of the whole book, try reading those and see if the other 9 interest you
You are wasting your time shitposting on social media. Your time means nothing. I respect neither it, nor you.
Likewise 😘
Oh lmao it’s the Topic Decider.
Was I deciding a topic just then?
No, I’m just amused that you consistently put so much effort into decrying reading. Much more so than just doing the reading.
Can you read,serious question?
It’s a bit fucking stupid to ask that question through the medium of the written word, no?
It’s probably still less stupid than asking whether the clearly labelled excerpt from a clearly labelled book and author is copied “from some source”
No he wasn’t asking it seriously obviously
Then they are an idiot for saying “serious question” then, aren’t they?
You are the only one you didnt seem to get it moron
My feed got a lot less irritating when I blocked posts from CyberGhost.
Cuba is a beacon of progress and humanity in the Americas. Fidel Castro was a hero. Also a pro at dodging the CIA’s kill squads.
Fascism.
I’m confused, are you saying he’s using it wrong?
Here’s a copy paste from Webster.
often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
Replace the word race with party and you’ve got an incomplete yes, but not necessarily inaccurate description of Stalins USSR.
Seriously not trying to just be a troll or shill here, so if you feel I’m wrong please let me know how and why. I am legitimately, in good faith, curious about the perspectives of some communist here. It is an ideology I am somewhat interested in.
A different response, which comes from a different angle to those pointing out that Marxism-Leninism is not fascist:
The word ‘fascism’ is used so fast and loosely outside of a technical context that I wouldn’t say one interpretation is necessarily right or wrong. It depends on context. (Incidentally, same for ‘socialism’, even principled well-read communists can’t agree on a definition.)
For example, if we’re talking about the actual Fascist ideology (think of Mussolini and associates) then I would even hesitate to include Nazism due to the very different roots: they’re both nationalist anti-liberal anti-democratic, anti-socialist ‘third way’ ideologies and they did ally in the war, sure, but to group them both as ‘fascism’ trivializes core differences in how they formed, why they successfully formed, how they appealed to their followers (fascism actually recruited many self-identifying socialists in Italy and its important to recognise why to prevent it), and why they were ultimately antisocial and unsuccessful in their goals.
This isn’t just some academic masturbation nitpicking or anything: I believe that the ignorance of Classical Fascism by lumping it in with the far more obvious and baseless idiocy of Nazism makes it harder to recognize and counter, especially when neo-Nazis are such ridiculous cartoonish farces. Fascism stemmed from National Syndicalism and has core economic ideas like corporatism (from ‘corpus’) that could fool people, and sounds much less stupid that Hitler’s bizzare esoteric fantasies about Aryan racial supremacy: even Mussolini considered Hitler crazy.
The point of me making this distinction is that the dictionary definition you gave isn’t even wrong in describing fascist ideologies, but, I don’t think that list of common traits should be mistaken for a definition. Those traits are the results, not the foundation of the ideology, and a neo-liberal state like the USA can easily match many of those traits despite being a very distinct ideology. Any you will absolutely see people saying ‘USA is fascist’ as a shorthand for nationalist, racist, imperialist, oppressive, blah blah blah, but it’s definitely not post-National-Syndicalist faux-socialist corporatist collectivism. We should obviously fight both but they are not the same and manifest differently.
Replace the word race with party
That’s a pretty significant difference, don’t you think? Exalting racism and exalting a political organization that opposes racism are diametrically opposed things, not equivalent.
Replace (good thing) with (bad thing). You looking pretty fucking bad now don’t you tankie?
Not saying it is a fair exchange, you are correct. But do keep in mind the wording in the definition is “often”. My suggestion of replacement was to emphasize that race is not a requirement to the definition, it’s just pointing out that it is usually the characteristic used to define who is the most loyal or desired type of citizen. From what I understand party loyalty could be definitely be applied there.
“Replace the word ‘pollution’ with the word ‘jews’ and captain planet looks pretty fascist!”
Personally I like the definition that the historian Robert O. Paxton uses. Now, he’s a liberal, but he does have good insight into fascism and he doesn’t fall into that trap of deciding that communists and fascists must be the same thing. His definition isn’t materialist, but it’s a good start.
To paraphrase, his definition is “a suppression of the left among popular sentiment.” By left he means things like socialists, labor organizations, communists, etc. Fascism is a situation where a country has found its theater of democracy has failed and the capitalists need anything at all to keep themselves in power, even if it means cannibalizing another sector of capitalists. The fascists are the ideological contingent of this, who put forward a policy of class collaboration between working class and capitalist, instead of what socialists propose, which is working class dominance in the economy. Fascists exalt nationality or race because that extends through class sentiments. It brushes aside concerns like internal economic contradictions. I once had a comrade say something like “Fascism is capitalists hitting the emergency button until their hand starts bleeding.”
Communists using a vanguard party is to defend their own interests against capitalists or outside invaders. The praise of the CPSU in Stalin’s era was precisely because it acted as a development and protection tool for the working class. It did its job and people were wary of any return to the previous Tsarist or liberal governments. Women began going to school, women were given the vote for the first time. Pogroms ceased. In less than one lifetime of the CPSU administrating the country, people went from poor farmers to living in apartments with plumbing, heating, and clean medical care. That’s why there was such praise of the party, because they actually did things people liked, and they didn’t want anything to threaten them.
Also, what does it matter if there’s one party or two? The working class have a singular, uniting interest to overthrow capitalism. Why are multiple parties needed? Anything the working class needs to negotiate for can be handled within a socialist, democratic structure, not two or three competing structures against one another. Take a look at Cuba, which has one party, but doesn’t use their party to endorse candidates. Everyone’s officially an independent in the National Assembly.
I’m confused how he could make these observations and remain a lib, what happened?
He was a professor at Harvard most of his career, if that explains anything. He’s also on record calling the January 6th capitol thing a fascist coup attempt.
Harvard, say no more fam
I do think it was an attempt. They just didn’t even know that a coup attempt involved more than walking in the door and demanding Trump be president. The next one in America will involve mass killing, and it will be from a similar demographic.
Yeah we’re still in a position where American fascism doesn’t even recognize itself in the mirror. It doesn’t realize it’s a movement that needs coherent aims. It’s still stuck in the American paradigm of politics as consumerism. A comrade the other day here said the explicit kind of American fascism is having a hard time getting off the ground because they refuse to adopt socialist rhetoric, like European fascist movements in the past.
Yea that’s well said, also American fascists luckily have no history to look back to that’s before the US state formation. So instead of wanting a new system, they just want their guy to play President as they sit on the couch.
If i remember his book correctly, at start he explicitly denies marxist definition of fascism, and then in course of the book his research lead straight to it being correct on at least two separate occasions, them makes full stop and end the topic when he realise what would he have to write next.
I don’t know if thats merely ritually exorcising communism in order to have his book accepted by liberal academia (like in case of Geza Alfoldy for example) or he really is this intellectually dishonest, because he clearly did realised. Anyway it was funny as hell and the book isn’t even bad.
Possibly because of the way he’s found his career. Paxton is very popular in France and was very instrumental in introducing liberal historiography into French WW2 history. For him to throw a bone to Marxists would be undermining how he earned a name for himself in the first place.
Yeah i see that in polish social sciences too, especially by older authors, it’s hard here to keep position in the academia without paying at least lip service to anticommunist witchhunt. Unfortunately even those people are already dead and the new ones are not even shy about being opportunists, most books publish nowadays are almost worthless since it’s either anticommunist propaganda, pophistory or bland compilations from older ones.
This was an enlightening comment and I appreciate it. I may not agree with all of it but it definitely shows there are some perspectives I haven’t considered. A parliamentary or council type system could definitely provide enough representation of different working class communities within a single party. I wonder if they had term limits, or if their representatives would fall into the same hole as the US Congress.
The common socialist position is that term limits are anti-democratic not just because they keep people from voting for who they want to but, more significantly, it tilts the scales in favor of structures that do not have term limits. In the US, for example, elections are essentially completely controlled by private companies from the media to the National Conventions, and term limits check the power of popular candidates (and therefore popular sentiment) versus capital, which does not expire in 8 years.
So many hexbear users here lmao
Libs are subconsciously uncomfortable thinking about real politics. Too many contradictions with their world view. Leftists are not. Hence a lot of us engage with these threads, it gets to the top of our all, and more engage.
We can smell liberal lies from a mile away
Why the fuck do both authoritarian sides use “liberal” as an insult?
It’s because they both think the common man should be submissive or forced to submit to their brand of authoritarianism.
We out here
The_Donald of the Left.
Do you agree with this meme and consider yourself part of “the Left”? Just curious
That’s irrelevant, also, I’m not interested in discourse with you. Bye.
Then you shouldn’t have said anything
The_Donald is when you believe the opposite of The_Donald
This has made my Lemmy experience considerably better
As they get banned from more instances, the instances they are not banned at start seeing a higher concentration of them.
Not how federation works.
deleted by creator
Have fun worshipping the machinery of enslavement and death. As it crushes you, I hope it comforts you knowing at least you weren’t a tankie.
What is a tankie?
No one seems to know
The term originates from Soviet and aligned regimes sending in tanks to brutally crush protests and rebellions. E.g. The Hungarian Revolution, The Prague Spring Uprising, Tiananmen Square, etc. Some communists were disgusted at their fellows for cheering on said oppression (“Send in the tanks!”) and started calling them Tankies.
Tankies fellate oppressive regimes and dictators. They’re the smooth-brained “communists” that live in a binary world where anything “their side” does is good and anything the west does is “evil”. They’ll claim any criticism of historically “communist” countries like China and Russia is a CIA talking point … because they’re idiots.
TL;DR – they’re the MAGAts of the left.
Oh, so calling people Tankie is just red scare propaganda then. Thanks for the heads up.
Tbf the hungarian coup was actually connected to an mi6 operation. And the people involved started killing Jewish people and communists, so…
And the people involved started killing Jewish people and communists
On brand for libs
Random observation but I find it kind of interesting how the talking points anti-tankies tend to bring up are things that, even if the worst allegations are accepted, are relatively minor compared to some other events you could bring up. I’ve heard so much about Tienanmen Square under Deng, but much less about the Cultural Revolution under Mao. And the Hungarian Revolution and the Prague Spring happened under Khrushchev and Brezhnev respectively, when there’s much worse stuff you could bring up about Stalin.
I can’t help but think that this conflicts with the supposed definition of tankie of just knee-jerk defending anything someone does if they wave a red flag. If that were actually true, wouldn’t you focus on the most extreme examples by the most extreme leaders? The fact that there’s so much focus on people like Khrushchev and Deng, who were both more moderate than their predecessors, seems more like the point of the word is specifically to attack people who might have a more favorable view of those more moderate figures, while being critical of their predecessors’ actions.
Which is to say, tankie isn’t actually meant to be directed towards someone who knee-jerk defends anyone with a red flag, but rather, it’s meant to be directed towards someone who defends anything at all about anyone at all with a red flag, by accusing them of being the former. In other words, it’s a word that demands the exact kind of knee-jerk response it’s supposedly criticizing, just in the other direction.
In fact, it’s particularly interesting that these accusations of ideological rigidity and blind loyalty are in reference to Khrushchev, who did nothing but criticize Stalin, and Deng who controversially said that Mao was “70% good, 30% bad.” I don’t think it’s even possible for someone to defend everything done by both Stalin and Khrushchev
And anyone who dares criticize them or any actual communist is a fascist, of course!
“An actual communist is someone who hates any communist movement that has actually managed to successfully overthrow its country’s ruling class and take power,” I say without a hint of irony
I support crushing fascists with tanks.
Too bad instances can’t defederate HB.
Can you please elaborate?
They seem to not understand that they’re tankies.
Tankie is a social construct and is used to lazily discredit everyone to the left of bernie. It functions to libs the same way as “woke” functions for chuds. As a term it’s basically meaningless to anyone outside of the internet.
I have only seen it used in reference to people who support dictatorial regimes with socialist aesthetics, mostly MLs. I have yet to see an anarchist be called a tankie. Also you can hear it IRL, not commonly though since most MLs are on twitter and the like and not IRL.
Literally every one of our anarchist users have been called tankies, lmao
Based on your answer, I’ve discovered what tankie means: Tankie = Marxist.
Successful Marxist movement results in a dictatorship of the proletariat. Dictator = tankie.
Hence tankie is a term used to describe any Marxist.
Thanks for contributing to this scientific breakthrough!
Nah, first premise is false in more than one way. You are conflating the ideology Stalin made with Marxism.
The second error is that there has never been a dictatorship of the proletariat, every time it has been a political party that seizes power for themselves and not the workers. In doing so they become the ruling class with differing class interests than the workers.
Marx must be rotating in his grave with the speed to power the whole globe at this point.
You didn’t do the reading :(. Dictatorship of the proletariat is a concept Marx and Engles adopted. Stalin didn’t create it.
I don’t know what you think the proletariat taking control of the state is suppose to look like, but there will always be a communist party involved. The mechanisms of power exist to be ruled by a party.
Communist parties should be judged by what they do for their poorest citizens. With that in mind, AES countries are doing a decent job. Things get better when they are in power, and get way worse if they are overthrown
Yeah, clearly the Soviet, Chinese and Cuban workers had completely different interests than being raised out of poverty and squalor. Damn those dastardly political parties and their… diligent work towards eradictaing poverty while promoting actual, decentralized democracy.
Well, Cubans still live in pretty close proximity to squalor. They can’t even afford to maintain their own buildings, don’t have a functional transportation system, and people live on what, $20 a month? The one saving grace is out there health care system is decent. And by that, I mean much more equitable than in the United States.
What my society looks like when a party seizes power for themselves and not the workers
(Source: Thomas Piketty’s World Inequality Report 2022, for fun maybe try poking around and finding a non socialist state with any comparable inversion of income inequality.)
Do you believe capitalism is good because it helped some people? The whole point of socialism is to put the means of production into the hands of the workers and not a vanguard party. Yea, the USSR did quite a lot of imperialism which it used to reduce income inequality of the Russian people but it was never socialist.
the ideology Stalin made
I would say Lenin was more instrumental in the creation of Marxism-Leninism, Stalin was just the guy who happened to be in charge when they named it. It’s also a tendency that has evolved a lot from what it was in the 40s.
You mean the guy in charge after the death of Lenin? Who Lenin warned against?
I love how you guys have decided that your definitions are the only correct ones. It’s your primary weapon here, for obvious reasons.
Communism is political science, words have meanings and we tend to use the correct ones, yes.
I love how you guys have decided that your definitions are the only correct ones.
You’re strawmaning hard here, because I never said it’s a definition or that it’s the only one. It’s just my understanding of the term. What part of it is wrong in your opinion? I want to consider it
It’s your primary weapon here, for obvious reasons.
Because it’s obvious that when you’re challenged on your understanding of words you have nothing to say?
Nooo not tankies! Don’t they know it’s illegal to be a communist
they wish it was and will side with Nazis to make it a reality
Classic Hexbear take that is not remotely based in reality.
They historically have aligned with or created fascist movements to oppose communists around the globe. Read the Jakarta method, read about the contras.
Link to the original meme?
Tankies forget that Trotsky existed.
