cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/16246531
I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy’s massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It’s been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let’s say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they’re what’s colloquially referred to as tankies. This wouldn’t be much of an issue if they didn’t regularly abuse their admin/mod status to censor and silence people who dissent with their political beliefs and for example, post things critical of China, Russia, the USSR, socialism, …
As an example, there was a thread today about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. When I was reading it, there were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some whataboutist/denialist replies critical of the USA and the west. In terms of votes, the posts critical of China were definitely getting the most support.
I posted a comment in this thread linking to “https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs” (WARNING: graphical content), which describes aspects of the atrocities that aren’t widely known even in the West, and supporting evidence. My comment was promptly removed for violating the “Be nice and civil” rule. When I looked back at the thread, I noticed that all posts critical of China had been removed while the whataboutist and denialist comments were left in place.
This is what the modlog of the instance looks like:
Definitely a trend there wouldn’t you say?
When I called them out on their one sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml that I had ever participated in.
Proof:
So many of you will now probably think something like: “So what, it’s the fediverse, you can use another instance.”
The problem with this reasoning is that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml, and they’re not so easy to replace. I mean, in terms of content and engagement lemmy is already a pretty small place as it is. So it’s rather pointless sitting for example in /c/linux@some.random.other.instance.world where there’s nobody to discuss anything with.
I’m not sure if there’s a solution here, but I’d like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.
Just to weigh in here with a bit of political nuance — “tankies” are certainly defined by their leftist politics, but moreso by their apologist defense of regimes that more or less transparently use socialist or communist maxims as a cover for state capitalism or straight out autocracy.
Tankies may be the loudest voices to claim themselves Marxist or socialist, but please don’t mistake them as actually representing those ideologies truthfully or completely. Personally, I see tankies as more indebted to a cold war-style school of Soviet dogma transplanted to current autocracies. Marx and Trotsky would have rolled their eyes at either.
Yes, I hate to be “no true Scotsman”, but they are not actually leftists, just fan of a few dictatorships, some of which claim or used to claim to be socialist.
Yeah coming to lemmy and finding out about the so called communist reminded me more of those in favor of the small ruling elite like the pigs from Animal Farm was surprising. Not realizing they are the ones being sent to the glue factory while the pigs lounge around enjoying the lavish life in this so called communist workers paradise.
Reminded me nothing of socialists or at least what I think of socialism with it reminding me of more the monarchy. They seem more like nationalists who coopted socialism/communism to white wash what they actually support and overlooking the elite ruling class that they are not a part of.
Much like the fascists in Western countries who deny they are fascists and are for democracy while supporting ideas of coups for life time dictators that hold their views. Very similar groups.
Eh, I disagree. Left isn’t “when good,” right isn’t “when bad.” There are bad leftists, and you’re looking at them, right there on .ml, grad, and hexbear. These morons actually believe not only that “those states would have dissolved themselves given the opportunity if it wasn’t for ‘western interference,’” they also have such hubris to believe that if they tried the same thing they’d actually achieve what none of them did in the past. They can’t grasp that their autocrats would never cede power either to usher in Communist Utopia™.