Hey I’m a terminally online leftist.
Fuck Russia, fuck China, fuck the US too. I’m not going to gaslight myself in to thinking someone else is doing it right just because the West is also fucked.
Working class people all over the planet are getting fucked by billionaires who’ve purchased their governments, few places are exempt from that problem.
Fuck all countries and their imaginary lines.
And double fuck Russia for starting a war.
This is seeing the wood for the trees.
Nation states largely exist to protect the power of their respective elites. No country is immune, but there are shining examples in the world, like the nordic model, that other nations choose to ignore because, unlike those nations, most nation’s decision maker’s goal isn’t to maximize the well being of their people, but to maximize their own individual power, which capital is a form of.
What’s your opinion of the West lending aid to Ukraine to help it defend itself?
I think the military industrial complex will be the end of us all. Generally, I think military spending is fucking atrocious and is a huge contributor to the myriad problems we as people face on a daily basis.
While I agree, Russia has no right to annex territory in Ukraine or Georgia or anywhere else, and I agree, like any rational person will, that Ukraine has every right to defend itself to the fullest extent, including matching on Moscow and fucking up the place, that’s decidedly not our problem.
Ukraine found a fucking massive oil ans natural gas deposit, large enough it threatens Russia’s market dominance. Ukraine kicked out it’s Russian puppet. Russia wants control back and will bleed itself dry to obtain it. In so doing, they’re bleeding us too.
I wish Ukraine the best, I really do. But at the top, this isn’t about defending the freedom of a downtrodden underdog. That’s a convenient story to sell to the American public. It’s about resources, and resource wars will only become more common.
How is this bleeding the US? I thought we were giving them cast-offs the military had no interest in using anyway.
that’s decidedly not our problem.
Disagree. The putin propaganda parties are fucking up every democracy possible - most importantly, or perhaps most relevantly to this topic, the US. And the invasion and destruction of Ukraine is the proof that it’s working. We’ve got to help Ukraine win, rebuild, and be a peaceful and prosperous democracy because russia will stop at nothing to bend everything to them.
trump and the Qult will stop at nothing to help putin destroy the US ideals and become a malleable Christofascist oligopoly like they are. If you think Ukraine is not our problem you’re not addressing our problem. Ukraine is the leading edge of the problem.
While I agree, Russia has no right to annex territory in Ukraine or Georgia or anywhere else, and I agree, like any rational person will, that Ukraine has every right to defend itself to the fullest extent, including matching on Moscow and fucking up the place, that’s decidedly not our problem.
How convenient that every time a moral issue comes up that we’re on the right side of, it’s not our problem.
Military industrial complex is relatively tiny.
If you want to see who will be the end of us, follow the bigger fish.
Oil companies will destroy the environment.
Agrochemical companies will destroy biodiversity.
Food companies will make us obese.
Social media companies will misinform and divide us.
You are just a libtard with brainrot and not a proper tankie leftist!
Where is my main man Youghurt and OmegaHaxor at?! Gish galop that western ass.
Tankies aren’t leftists.
Tankies have less hesitancy calling more libertarian leftists and liberals “fascists” than the various flavors of the modern far-right, because “Stalin’s definition of fascism”.
I’m moving around online leftist circles for more than a decade. First I wanted to have some unity with tankies, but I had to slowly learn that it’s a futile attempt, with the main issue being their idea of unity being total assimilation.
First of all, just like their authoritarian-right counterparts, don’t play by the rules, but expect other to do so, except it’s only for the libertarian-left (or anyone who’s not as authoritarian as Stalin). This leads to them forming online (and from what I’ve heard, real life) spaces to their liking, usually with the intent to turn what they call “moderates” into “full-fledged Marxist-Leninists”. If you don’t they will bait others to harass you, usually by finding something in your past. Often they also work in tandem with far-right groups by providing anonymous information to them, and register accounts to their forums (kiwifarms etc) to get help from them. They often managed to even manipulate the discourse around social causes, they singlehandedly managed to remind people that “spook” also used to be an anti-black slur (they got really angry at egoist leftist memes), and part of the reason why some online leftists are sometimes terminally online about loli/shota (around that time, they really wanted to cancel sex-positive leftists en masse, consensual-noncon also got a hit but that wasn’t really part of a fandom that needed a “safe space” for right wingers, hence the frequent cooperation with the right).
One of their greatest display of “manipulating the rules” is their constant redefinition of authoritarianism into “the will of the people” rather than “a hierarchial system of power formed around a select number of people, whom must be submitted to by the rest of the people”. On some level, authoritarianism is “will of the people”, but tankies (likely intentionally) forget that dictators having pet projects and banning things they don’t like isn’t the same as liberation of the people who often want to free themselves from those strongmen, and not replace them with someone who promises to be kind. This is not their only use of the “redefinition game”: they often like to redefine porn as something inherently exploitative, while promising general sexuality will be fine, then they proceed to act in ways people who define porn as “an ungodly act of perversion”, but pretend they’re doing it in favor of “progress” rather than saving the masses from the eternal burning fire. On paper, “authoritarian social justice” sounds good, but in practice it can be only be done with things that are “concrete”. You can stop people from denying the holocaust, you probably could also stop social media accounts calling all LGBTQ+ people pedophiles, but then there’s the issue of sexual objectification in media, which will be on very shaky grounds, and should not be put into law. China put a lot of effort into trying to regulate it, but other than tankie puriteens on Twitter, no one likes it, and often gets workarounds.
Sorry for my personal ramble here, even forgot why I was answering your comment, but the TLDR is that the auth-left and auth-right have way more in common than the auth-left and lib-left, which is especially sad since capitalism itself is a form of authority around wealth.
I think the problem with tankies is that they let their perception of what is “pragmatic” and “realistic” poison and overpower their true ideals, which tends to steer them towards authoritarianism. So scared of losing, that they lose themselves in pursuit of victory.
I think the exact opposite is true: they use the excuse of pragmatism while arguing exactly in favor of what they idolize. It’d be more convincing if their concessions to anti-socialism advanced or preserved leftist causes, but largely that’s simply not the case. What you described is the exact problem some Anarchists have, where they idolize praxis to such a degree that they argue against making optimal moves in favor of keeping themselves ideologically pure. Anarchists sometimes argue against voting on principle whereas Tankies will argue that you should vote for the newest ML party. The ML party will decry not doing enough for workers, propose nothing of substance, and call Biden evil for helping Ukraine resist Russia.
You should change it to tankies instead of leftists.
Unfortunately, as people in this thread show, even non-tankie leftists can be sucked in by Russian talking points.
Ok so obviously this is anecdotal evidence but my personal experience with this is that the people who support Russia are pretty much all right wing. The farther to the right they are , the harder they’re buying into Russian propaganda.
I haven’t seen actual support from the left in real life, but more some sort of vague both-siding and “understanding” and stuff like that. And that’s come from both left and right (not center-left or center-right), but as a minority opinion. Old Stalinists, some left-wingers closer to the left side than center, then some right to far right. I think for the left it might also be the heritage of USSR alignment and peace mindedness. For the right, I’m not even really sure. Some sort of “anti-West” in the sort of “anti-globalism” sense which make you go hmmmm and then there’s been some pretty sus financial ties.
OP should, but the entire reason he posted it was to pretend that anyone to his left is a Russian sympathizer, and to try to discredit anyone who opposes genocide elsewhere.
And for the record, fuck Putin and fuck Russia.
OP should,
Oh, so now you’re in favor of me calling people tankies? Curious, because you’ve repeatedly complained when the label is applied. Almost like this is agreeing with someone in bad faith.
But of course, you would never do that, right? :)
Why, it’s almost as though you call everyone to your left tankies regardless of their actual politics.
Nah, the mask is off. It’s clear that a lot of people who are obsessed with tankies just hate the left in general and use tankies as a proxy.
I keep hearing this but I almost always see the word used correctly for communists supportive of authoritarianism
You’re literally looking at a post with the word “leftists” to talk about people who support Putin, do you really not think there hasn’t been a slide of what “tankie” means to the point that now some people like OP will use it indistinguishably?
The point is it’s tankies (and Trumpers) that defend Russia, not people on the left side of the spectrum.
But I thought tankie (and not just authoritarian or some other word) meant leftists (specifically communists) that are pro-authoritarianism. I’ve seen people often saying that tankies aren’t leftists but to me it just seems like they are, but just the shit kind. Would be a lot nicer not to share even the vague space of “leftism” with them but I think there’s not much to be done about that.
I really hated the word tankie when i joined lemmy, it felt like it was thrown around too much, but then i really started seeing “communists” “critically supporting” Russia, despite being a far right shithole, like you only need to see who where the allies of Russia in Europe, weeks before the war started they were meeting with Meloni from Italy, Vox (fascist far right) from Spain and similar parties from other sides of Europe. Some communists are so in love with the idea of the USSR that cant really see that Putin is just your average far right dictator.
Thankfully in Spain you dont see this happening as much as in some lemmy communities.
I’m in a small leftwing party in Portugal whose roots go back to the fight against dictatorship which was mostly done by Communists, and when Russia invaded Ukraine I had to come up with a framing to help some of the older members understand it since they were instinctively siding with Russia (I basically just compared it with the invasion of Iraq by the US and reminded them how they felt about it).
People back 50 or 60 years ago were just indoctrinated into Communism as young people (understandably in a country which was under a Fascist dictatorship which included censorship) and still today in their mind space they have lots of “undeniable truths” which they accepted long ago without any critical thinking and which they never really examined, and specifically in my country were “Communism” was mainly the Soviet Union variant, a lot of those “truths” are about how great Russia is.
Mind you, this being a party other than the local Communist Party, and thus were even the older Communists were people who were not in the actual Communist Party because they disagreed with them (so a thinking kind of Communist rather than mindless tribalists), I did manage to turn around the few who had instinctively sided with Russia. The local Communist Party, even now (after that country turned into basically Fascism) are still pro-Russia.
Well, the funny bit is that those old guys were still flexible enough to change their minds when a suitable framing of the thing was presented to them, by which point they recognized it all as the more generic scenario of “aggressor attacking victim to take their shit” and made their opinions based on what their principles were on that kind of thing.
I would say the problem here was tribalism: they were predisposed to believe, support and excuse the aggressor because they felt, due to long ago experiences and indoctrination that “they’re our people”. Fortunatelly these specific people were open minded and intelligent enough to be able to step out of that and consider the whole thing from a detached point of view.
Plenty of tribalists are pretty much religious fanatics when it comes to all those “acquired truths” and the truthfulness, trustworthiness and wisdom of whatever the tribe’s leaders say.
IMHO, tribalist is by far the greatest problem, though I would agree that it and inflexibility are deeply connected.
Yeah, I mean, over the years, I’ve gone far left enough that I believe that capitalism must be dismantled as it’s incompatible with democracy. I’m not exactly conservative. But good god, some parts of Lemmy would make me out to be a Gilded Age Robber-Baron for calling out Russia as an imperialist fascist state. It’s insane. And exhausting. I hate dealing with it.
Luckily, it’s not nearly as bad as it was back when Grad and Hexbear were still federated.
But good god, some parts of Lemmy would make me out to be a Gilded Age Robber-Baron for calling out Russia as an imperialist fascist state
I’ve been on Lemmy some 8 months I think and I’ve never seen anyone do that. I have seen plenty of Ruski trolls spamming “don’t vote genocide Joe”, but I haven’t really seen anyone pretending to be for the Russian side in the Russo-Ukrainian war.
I mistakingly thought tankies were kind of phoning it in, like they don’t really believe this nonsense they’re just bored right? Woof
They’re not communists. If you suggest a communist revolution to them (that is, a revolution resulting in a stateless, classless, moneyless society), they’ll call you an idiot.
Unfortunately Podemos has taken the position of opposing any policy that helps Ukraine in their defense effort, framing an attitude that only leads to maximizing Ukraine’s losses as “anti-war”. At least most people in Sumar haven’t fallen to this fallacy.
Eh, i dont know the point of your comment, but just to clarify, Podemos is not a communist party, altough it is supported by some communists / has some communist in the party. Sumar as a whole is even less to the left than they are, despite having also some parties inside the group that could be considered communists. Its not true that Podemos is against anything that helps Ukraine, they are all in for a cease fire and for an end to the war through dialogue which should be done from the EU mainly, the same way they are in for a cease fire/end of the war in Gaza, what they are against is spending billions of euros that are needed here to send weapons and war vehicles to Ukraine, the same way they do not support sending weapons and war vehicles to palestine nor no one expects that to be the position of any party here.
If Russia is willing to continue the war as long as they’re making gains (and Russia is making gains as long as they control foreign territory and intend to keep it), refusing to military support Ukraine means supporting a scenario where Russia will have effectively violated their sovereignity, which in turn further incentivizes imperialist countries to attack their neighbours as they’ve just seen they can get away with it.
You can keep gaslighting yourself into thinking that you only need words to convince Putin to leave Ukraine, or for Netanyahu to leave Palestine, or for Jeff Bezos to give up his privileged position in the capitalist hierarchy, but the vast majority of the world will keep their feet in reality and understand that some people are fundamentally selfish and must be forced into no longer committing evil.
I am a member of the terminally online left. And I can assure you my stance is that Russia can get fucked.
Yeah I’m a socialist and agree with a lot of what Marx wrote and no fucking way do I support anything Russia is doing in Ukraine. Tbh I’m disheartened that Russia hasn’t suffered more severe internal consequences for this illegal invasion. Ukraine has every right to fight and retake its sovereign land, including attacking assets inside Russia.
I do feel bad for the Russian people in general, but that’s not because of any politics, I feel the same way about Palestinians, Sudanese, Haitians, and the people of Myanmar. Anyone suffering under the tyranny of small dick leaders.
I’m now considering “terminally ill leftist” as something not to be recovered from, not something that will cause your termination.
I am not terminal, nor ill in my political outlook and desire to see all of my fellow countrymen, And all people on earth, survive and thrive.
