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But "socialism" is a scary word
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this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025
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We’re right here, actually, and we do indeed deny Western Cold War II bullshit propaganda.
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It doesn’t reflect well on your media literacy to still be accepting this stuff uncritically, especially given how Western corporate media has been misreporting on an actual, ongoing genocide in our name. Not to mention Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, or the thousand other lies in the twenty years between.
Hexbear’s flavor of irony-poisoned humor does confuse some people. But Stalin didn’t do nearly as many things “wrong” as cold war propaganda told us. Even contemporary Western historians see Stalin in a very different light than corporate media, airport books, and popular culture do.
Edit to add: And to be specific, “double genocide theory” was Nazi propaganda, which you’re continuing to propagate.
Any leftist that shit talks Stalin is immediately suspicious in my eyes. Man led a country besieged from all sides not ten years before, invaded by the same fucks that financed the Nazis' rise who then invaded them and turned the tide of Nazism at an incredible sacrifice, all of which can be reasonably laid at the feet of the west.
Then westerners have the nerve to act like he was a monster based on yet more atrocity propaganda created by holocaust deniers and literal Nazis (thank you, Operation Paperclip and the internationalization of fascism). Fuck off.
I would only suspect anti-Stalin leftists of ignorance as I have yet to find an instance where someone talks about Stalin in this way and it isn't from a place of ignorance. Never seen it from someone who was informed and purposely pushing anti-Stalin Cold War propaganda...except fucking Trots.
Not that ignorance is a good excuse for their actions, but the amount of damage propaganda has done to the history surrounding Stalin is very difficult to break through and shouldn't be overlooked. If someone didn't grow up in a Western country, it seems they have a serious advantage in overcoming the challenge of looking at Stalin with a critical eye because they aren't constantly exposed to an overwhelming amount of trash heaped on his grave. Not only can it be difficult to find information that isn't Red Scare propaganda on your own, but you'll be ostracized when trying to speak to anyone about the subject from anything but an anti-comminist perspective. It makes having discussions on the subject difficult and I can't say I would have ever broken through this without the Internet.
Maybe I'm going too easy on them because overall I agree with you. I also want to give people the benefit of the doubt because I was once where they were and my anti-Soviet, anti-Stalin, and anti-China stances all came from a place of ignorance (and miseducation) that I only overcame once I began looking at the topics with a critical eye and put effort into learning about them from a different (and materialist) perspective.
That’s the vast majority of us on Lemmy. Almost all of us come from roughly the same life-long immersion in imperial core ideology & propaganda. I know it’s surmountable by at least some, because I eventually did.
I unblocked the instance out of morbid curiosity, and what do I find? One side of the conversation only continues to exist because you quoted it. Hopefully some people get to see the full context from this post before it's inevitably removed as well.
Those who post something ironically enough times either start to believe it themselves, or it becomes indistinguishable from their own beliefs. That's how we ended up with QAnon and later the Proud Boys and MAGA cultists. 4channers who posted that stuff ironically long enough that either they or others on there started to huff their own farts and actually believe it.
And that was my entire point, and the point of OP in the first place. That the general political spectrum of Lemmy is so left-wing that instead of 4channers, QAnon, and MAGA, we have Hexbear and the irony-poisoned users who are high on their own supply.
But now we have a dictionary's worth of arguing about theory while the original post has been removed and the OP banned, and my posts deleted as well and I'm probably going to be banned for this post talking about it.
I got less beef with any specific leader of a nation during World War 2 than I do with Hexbear users and their particular brand of brain rot and malicious actions against other instances. None of them were "good," and most of them supported Hitler at one point or another or did horrible things themselves. Hell, you can blame the 70+ years long campaign against the Palestinians and the ongoing genocide squarely on the British promising the same piece of sacred land to multiple tribal groups during the Africa campaign. But I have even less patience than that for any of this while the oncoming administration here has openly and directly called for the genocide (in those words) of people like me. I'm blocking you and the rest of the mod team before I block the instance again just so I remember why I did it in the first place 5 days from now. Goodbye and good riddance.
The first sentence of "Tankies" by Roderic Day over on Red Sails explains that no one actually believes Stalin did nothing wrong. That's a combination of Hexbear being more of a Communist and Anarchist hangout than a Communist party. It's the internet. What people generally mean is that Stalin did not kill 100 million people, and his actual historical role was as a leader of the world's first Socialist state, and as such has had piles and piles of myths distorting the real facts of his life by Western propagandists.
Hexbear is the Lemmy equivalent of 4chan, and like the QAnons there who started by posting their garbage and racism ironically, if you say something ironically enough times, you either begin to believe it yourself or it becomes indistinguishable from your beliefs.
And that was my whole point, and OP's as well. That the rest of the internet has to deal with the right-wing MAGA chuds and QAnon crazies, and over here, we have Hexbear because Lemmy is just that left-wing. Even our chuds are leftists. But my patience has run out, and you all can join them in the sin bin. Goodbye and good riddance.
Hexbear is just a group of Anarchists and Marxists hanging out, calling them "chuds" is confused. You haven't really backed up anything you say, just regular character assassinations and vague claims of "racism" coming from Leftists. I don't think ableist attacks on Marxists and Anarchists is very productive, to be honest.
Enough with the sea-lioning.
Hexbear, whose users have such a reputation for their hostility and aggressive attacks on other instances that instances have defederated them entirely rather than deal with them - the one I'm posting from included - are not "just a group of Anarchists and Marxists hanging out." They've openly called for their mods to "take over" other instances. That's not "just hanging out" or "irony poisoning" or whatever else you want to paint it as.
I started this out trying to avoid naming them because my point was that apart from a tiny sliver of crazies over there, we're a far cry from the right-wing cesspool that is the rest of social media, and even the worst here are leftists because that's how fairly united we are in terms of the political spectrum.
But I'm done. I get enough sea-lioning from transphobes on other platforms, I'm sick of dealing with it here as well. This thread has shown me just what caliber of people .ml is - mods included - and I find it not all that different from Twitter or Reddit. The only difference is that you guys argue Communist theory in a memes thread as a replacement for debunked transphobic studies. So go back to "hanging out" with the Hexbear chuds because I'm not going to spend another ounce of energy entertaining this nonsense anymore.
I'm not "sealioning," I asked you what you meant by "racism" from Hexbear, proof or not. For what it's worth, Hexbear had their reasons for defederating from Blahaj, notably the trans users on Hexbear felt unsafe by the way Blahaj was dealing with transphobic issues like chasers. Now you move on from unsupported claims of racism to unsupported claims of transphobia, and I still don't know what you're actually talking about. Hexbear has the largest and most active trans community on Lemmy for good reason.
No, you didn't. The closest you came to talking about racism was when you said:
Which didn't disagree with my original post it was responding to and a statement that I agreed with in a now removed post that also pointed out how some users had become so irony poisoned that they had actually started believing their own nonsense. You then started quoting theory at me while claiming that nobody actually believes what they're saying and cherry-picking my comments and calling them "ableist," alongside a mod who also straw-manned me, accusing me of being media illiterate and supporting the US's forever war in the Middle East based on a single statement about the worst of the extremism on the entirety of Lemmy that we have to deal with, which pales in comparison to the right-wingers of the rest of the internet.
Show me on the straw-man where I claimed anybody was transphobic instead of saying that you were sea-lioning and cherry-picking my comments to ignore my point that I've stated several times now, like the transphobes on other social media platforms do.
In short:
As for the Hexbear defederation, aye, that was the justification the admins over at Hexbear gave when they defederated from Blahaj suddenly and without warning while the admins of Blahaj and Lemm.ee were in talks with their userbases about the large volume of complaints about Hexbear users' behavior and calls to defederate from Hexbear. The rest of the context is that up until that point, the admins on all sides had been on good terms with each other and had acted on any issues the admins had had - including said incidents which had happened in the past, and that the threads on both Blahaj and Lemm.ee where the admins of both instances were gathering feedback from their respective communities were brigaded by Hexbear users spamming emojis on comments to the point where the admins on both instances had to hide all posts by Hexbear users.
To quote some of the complaints from various users across various instances at the time:
Sound familiar? Because you should reread the entirety of the comment section on this post with that in mind. I think you'll find a lot of similar behavior in here. That quote of theirs in the middle is an excellent summary of my interaction with the mod up there.
To be fair, when you said you get enough sealioning from transphobes on other instances, that implies that there are transphobes on Hexbear. If that's not what you mean, then I apologize for misunderstanding. As for ableism, calling people "crazy" is ableist and shouldn't be done.
Regardless, when you spend a good amount of time complaining about Hexbear and other Marxists and Anarchists unprompted, you shouldn't be surprised by pushback. A good number of people on Hexbear are members of orgs and parties, at higher rates than other instances, so the idea that they just read theory and never touch grass is also pretty wrong.
Either way, getting extremely defensive and hostile when you deliberately attack other users is pretty toxic behavior.
I never said that there were transphobes on other instances - I said that your sea-lioning behavior was alike that of transphobes on other forms of social media and then directly referenced Twitter and Reddit. As is the cherry-picking.
Also, unprompted? This entire thread, including the removed original comment, has been about the political leanings of Lemmy as a whole, and my comment was that we're so left-wing, that even our extremists are left-wing - a point that you continue to ignore. The only complaining about specific groups I've done has been the direct result of demands by you and others to specify who I mean. Should I have referred to them as extremists or maybe radicalists? Because that's what caused you to demand that I specify who I was talking about in the first place.
Again:
Reread my comments and the quotes about the defederation of Hexbear and have a look in the mirror: You and others here are guilty of the same behavior that caused people to demand the defederation of Hexbear from multiple instances.
The original comment was also out of nowhere, they just wanted to complain about the presence of Marxists (which they proceded to do throughout this thread), and which you are perpetuating to an extent. It was originally unprompted and continues to be.
The original post was in response to the meme's statement that people hate capitalism but don't know that they hate capitalism, saying that there are few people on Lemmy who don't specifically blame the problems of capitalism on capitalism (in short, "fuck capitalism, all my homies hate capitalism"), with the criticism I read being directed at pro-authoritarian regime people, not pro-communism. The fact that people took criticism of those who handwave away the wrongdoings of oligarchies because they espouse to be socialist/communist as an attack on communists says more about them than it does the OP.
A perfect summary of their point and mine that I realized after being reminded that r/theDonald was a thing is that Lemmy is so leftist that our version of r/theDonald would be r/thePutin. Although, with the current state of the Republican party, that might be a more conservative leaning sub than one would expect...
The thing is, on parts of Lemmy there is a widespread notion that it isn't the ones reading theory, joining parties and unions, and discussing with fellow comrades who are the real Communists. This notion, in my experience, has come entirely from non-Marxists, and I don't mean Marxists that haven't passed some vague purity test, I mean people who openly admit to not being a fan of Marxism or not being Marxists in general. These people usually have extremely simplistic views of Communism, yet think themseleves an authority on Communism to speak over people who have read theory and take it seriously. They also frequently misrepresent the views of Communists, and as a result run into friction when Communists either try to correct them or give into frustration and call them out.
When I say Hexbear, Lemmygrad, etc are Marxists and Anarchists, I say that based on the fact that I read theory and take it seriously. The idea that there are Real Communists out there that significantly diverge from those on Hexbear and Lemmygrad is not really backed up by anything. The consensus views of Hexbear and Lemmygrad are very standard for practicing Communist parties, outside of fringe ideologies like Gonzaloism.
What I'm trying to get at here is that by intentionally shutting yourself off of Communists, you start to form visions of what said Communists believe that aren't connected to reality, and the more you dismiss and block (be it by defederation, personal blocking, etc) the more distorted from reality this vision of the average Lemmy Communist becomes.
The fact is, Lemmy Communists hate Putin and the Russian Federation and see it as an incredible tragedy that the former Soviet Union went from a good, Socialist state to a brutal Capitalist country, but they understand that Russia has to fight US dominance in order to survive, and see that as a temporary good move. It's an "enemy of my enemy" situation, not enthused support, and yet by shutting yourself out you act like there is some Putin fanclub on Lemmy.
I dunno, this turned into a bit of a longer comment than I intended, my goal was more to get you to reconsider how you percieve Marxists and people you disagree with in general like Communists as it seems to be causing friction.
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."