I can’t stand libbed out moralist attempts to talk history because it’s just oh was a bad person oh was a bad person DO YOU HAVE ANY CONCEPTION OF EVENTS beyond a judgement derived from believe it or not your experiences, material interests, propagandization? Have you seriously investigated this? Why do you have to talk in thought terminating cliches? Good thing the Fourth Reich is not morally compromised

ah its not something to pay much mind to they’re dime a dozen

If "authoritarian" means:

• Mass incarceration of minorities
• Concentration camps
• Political repression of dissent
• Surveillance state
• State violence against marginalized people

Then the United States is authoritarian. Full stop. It has been since its founding. The only difference is that it holds elections between two parties that both agree on empire, and it calls this "democracy." America is a white supremacist empire that uses elections to legitimize genocide and mass incarceration. Its "democracy" is a branding exercise. Resisting it isn't authoritarian — the empire itself is the authoritarianism. And if you're still doing "but China" whataboutism while kids in Gaza are being starved and protesters in the US are getting put on blacklists by their own universities, you're not serious about liberation. You're just a lib with a Harry Potter understanding of politics.

Regarding some of the Discourse:

This shouldn’t have been an announcement. Its fine to remove moderators and enforce standards within the team, but you can handle these situations gracefully and quietly. The exact individual makeup of the mod team isn’t relevant to most of 196’s visitors, especially in this case where you claim this won’t be a major change to moderation.

It seems disingenuous to claim this isn’t a condemnation when you’re dumping screenshots and pinning this post for maximum visibility. I agree with many here that transparency is important, but similar to modlogs, this should be posted somewhere those interested can find it rather than shouted from the rooftops.

You can and should separate amicability without involving all of us.

oh i’m actually a fan of giving explanations for mod decisions.

I hate when people give these glib, quippy "refutations" that completely ignore what the other person said:

this should be posted somewhere those interested can find it rather than shouted from the rooftops.

It's complete bad faith to reply as though the comment was opposing giving an explanation. What it was opposing was completely correct, which is that the pretense of the mods being amicable and magnanimous is completely ridiculous when they have pinned this list of indiscretions by KR, citing a "wide ideological gulf" and basically accusing them of being a red fascist. It's public shaming while pretending to be the bigger person.

I have no issue with public shaming (of a sort), but pretending that that isn't what you are doing is pathetic and cowardly.

Being rulzd by kittenz? Idk, sounds pretty authoritarian to me. /j

What's impressive here is how tame kittenzrulz' comments are. They sound like someone just dipping their toes into socialism and doing some reading, with plenty of DemSoc and liberal framings and word choices, but because they are rejecting outright anticommunist falsehoods and historical revisionism they are branded "tankie" and censured.

Lemmy dot world continues its authoritarian reactionary tendencies.

Of course they removed the only comment questioning this and just called the person a tankie while blaming others for not taking the word tankie seriously anymore...

@kittenzrulz123@lemmy.dbzer0.com I do really appreciate your desire for honesty and I admire your willingness to lose your standing on it, but I don't think all of your comments on Stalin make sense.

First of all, the thing about the CIA self-debunking, if you're referring to that one note (the "leader of a team" thing), is a myth and a crass misunderstanding that got perpetuated for a long time. That was basically the equivalent of a tip line and doesn't reflect the agency's actual informed stance on Soviet leadership, which afaik we don't have such a tidy summary of.

Secondly, I object to the "strong leader" rhetoric. You are of course right that Stalin was superior to Allende, but that's because Allende was a reformist while the Bolsheviks took a hardline stance (generally, the right wing was more conciliatory). Stalin's cult of personality (which objectively did exist and which he did less and less to combat and more to support as he aged) is a key element of the undermining of socialism in the SU starting with Khrushchev, because it became very easy to make the SU's socialism synonymous with the already-fallible figurehead who in death had no ability to argue anyway, and so by looking both at real bad choices and invented ones create a basis for a movement that didn't actually do much to address the real issues with bureaucracy except insofar as it promoted liberalizing at the expense of socialist construction.

My broader point being that socialists, as supporters of radical democratization, should be much less concerned with strong leaders than with systems that have the correct incentives to tend toward the outcomes we want and resist antidemocratic corruption. Also, there are significant points of Stalin's success (e.g. during WW2) where he did well because he let experts do their jobs rather than act like he's a universal genius like Hitler did (though of course Stalin also had important strategic input).

Conversely, I think you can make a much stronger claim about Xinjiang, because there has been real repression that is worthy of condemnation but the claim of genocide has been continuously refuted or considered to not have adequate evidence, which in a country like China is a ridiculous thing to be in epistemic suspense about when people have cellphones with which to document things, among many other factors like a lack of militant resistance.

I'm saying all this because I believe you are coming from a place of sincerity and are interested in trying to have a nuanced understanding of these subjects and, while I won't claim to be an expert on literally anything, I'm pretty sure about these points.

Kittenzrulz's mistake here is introducing nuance into topics liberals demand absolute black and white positions on. Most of these nuance takes are pretty reasonable if you know the subject matter and the developments since, but liberals neither know the subject matter nor the developments and their entire understand of all of these events boils down to

If you step away from the liberal canonised history in their heads which is based entirely on popular belief rather than facts they immediately freak the fuck out, when you show them evidence they immediately go into an extremely uncomfortable sense of cognitive dissonance, this feeling resolves itself either with cutting ties with the source of the discomfort or with changing as a person. The vast majority of the time it ends with cutting ties, especially when changing as a person would involve reassessing positions of power that they hold.

@kittenzrulz123@lemmy.dbzer0.com

Another based comrade kicked out by liberals

Liberal ouster of an actual communist?