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What is with the lemmy community's deep fear or tankies? (hexbear.net)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/chat@hexbear.net
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There's dozens or harassment communities, if you say anything that's not pure, weapons grade condemnation of anything USSR or AES nuts accusations start getting levelled.

Internet communists have to be like the most irrelevant political bloc in the world. Even if you take the stance that everyone is hoping for a return of purges that's still just a completely irrelevant group. Most people I've seen being accused of tankyness is are more nuanced.

Wtf is going on. I thought it would settle down after the reddit migration faded.

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[–] 41 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (17 children)

I think it's a lot simpler than most people here believe: people in Lemmy love the West and they see tankies as people who hate the West. It's nothing more complicated than that. They do not hate fascists in the same way because fascists do not hate the West.

I think this is a very good insight! It seems anytime I interact with someone who complains about "tankies" it goes one of two ways: either A) they go full frothingfash about how West is Best, usually dressed up in Liberalism in a flimsy attempt to hide their racism and chauvinism (which are so intense they leak through anyway), or B) I'm removing B because I don't want to get too into sectarianism, but I'm frustrated that radlibs seem to have been successfully co-opting anarchist terms over the last decade in order to cosplay as radicals while still defending the system that gives them some crumbs of comfort.

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  • [–] [S] 31 points 1 year ago (16 children)

    I have very deep anarchist sympathies, but often find myself at odds with people who seem to think anarchism means the future is luxury space communism and lives of idleness. Not, in reality, surrendering a lot of the trinkets we can only have as they are extracted by empire. Accepting that life will be full of hard and often unpleasant labour but that we will be emotionally richer and the result will be closer to justice.

    Also that to get there we're gonna have to be violent, and the thing about violence is people get hurt.

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  • [–] 29 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    I definitely have no patience for the radlib types that I've been seeing browbeating and tut tutting leftists for wanting a revolution. "Don't you know a revolution would hurt disabled people?" "Oh so I guess we just won't do anything until the glorious revolution?" etc etc

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  • [–] [S] 31 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Well see, the thing is that the people huddled wet and cold in the street. They're not really people. The Nepali miners with freeze burns on their hands so you can have salt with visually pleasing contamination? They're well... you know. That blackfella dying in hospital because people think he's faking pain for drugs? You've got to understand these are complex issues we simply must have patience with. Incremental chain my good friend incremental change.

    If we're not careful people could suffer you know?

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    Oh god I fucking hate that whole strain of calling any problem they don’t want to confront “nuanced” or “complex”. It’s not complex, you just don’t want to admit that you’re the kind of person who’s fine with letting others suffer

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  • [–] 23 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    In their minds, revolution has to be perfect and polite to be worth trying at all

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  • [–] [S] 26 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    God yes it pisses me off to no end. I often think about how invisible state violence is to half the chucklefucks.

    Like chemical weapons, torture devices, beating, cages, screaming, and hitting. These things are used to stop someone taking surplus, discarded food from a bin but if that person says enough. If that person says "No, I will not suffer and die in indignity. I will kill you, you who would kill me" and like beats some cop to death or the person who would call the cops on them. They're the violent party? Really? The person that was content to subsist off of literal garbage if it meant peace.

    No. Fuck that. We have tried asking nicely, I will always maintain that forgiveness be offered if people seek to change but when people horde wealth and use the machinery of law to deprive people of the necessities of life. Things they would often not even notice being gone. Yes I am willing to hurt them, and yes I am willing to accept that mistakes will happen as we try and halt this horrible orphan crushing machine.

    What is the alternative? Children are dying. What good are ideals if they would have you sit by and do nothing while children are dying.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago

    The funny thing to me is that these people will also defend the use of violence in “self” (read: property) defence. Like they will condone violent fantasies about what they’d do if someone hurt their family or robbed their houses. But when it comes to other people’s children, or indigenous people, or poor people, it’s all kumbaya-didn’t-you-know-Martin-Luther-was-a-pacifist

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    A revolution is a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it has to be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I never understand this argument. Do radlibs think revolutions purposefully target and hurt disabled people or something?

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago

    IMO it's a sound argument (disabled people who need medications will struggle to get that medicine during a revolutionary war) but it's not valid, because disabled workers are socially murdered under capitalism, unless they are lucky enough to have family or other people around them to support them.

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  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.

    Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

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  • [–] [S] 16 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I am a huuuuge fan or Ursula and particularly the dispossessed.

    It's obviously fiction but I think it's good to get people thinking about how labour, i.e. doing stuff for productive ends, and work in our current society are different.

    Not all labour is onerous work, anyone who's cooked with friends has direct experience in how a task is transformed by the context it's peformed in.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    Yeah, same. I think it's the most realistic fictional look at what a real, fully developed anarcho-communist society might look like, warts and all. It's not FAL(G)SC by any means, and it's not a perfect world. People still suffer and do each other wrong, but there's a dignity, solidarity, and (as you said) justice running through it that makes everything better. One of my favorite books.

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