I think a little clarification is needed. No. I don’t actually think everyone there is insane. I don’t care about the bans so stop trying to use that. HB enthusiasts coming here and trying to call me out achieves nothing besides proving my point
Edit: Feel free to keep trying to brigade me. It’s not going to scare me to take this down
Many of them, yes. They’re among the most radical of the leftist instances, which means that they attract a lot of propagandists and tankies. They have some perfectly reasonable people too, but you know, vocal minority. Its the main thing most people notice about those instances.
Many people block hexbear, Lemmy.ml, and lemmygrad for these reasons.
the original origin of the term was a group british communists attacking anyone who supported the Soviet Union’s crushing of the hungarian uprising in 1956. it then morphed into a term used to attack anyone who supports the use of force and authority in general to suppress counter revolutionaries. it’s final degeneration is that it is now used to attack anyone to the left of an american democrat like facebones said.
here is a good article about it. To be clear: this is written from the perspective of a marxist leninist, who are normally the number one target of being called a “tankie”. Still, it is very short, and redsails is a really cool website that has the footnotes with citations pop up as you read long
Did not know about this site. It was a nice read and their mission statement is cool. Thanks for sharing! :)
It’s extremely unconvincing to say “Sure it was horrible last time, but next time it’ll be different.” Trotskyists and ultraleftists compensate by prettying up their picture of socialism and picking more obscure (usually short-lived) experiments to uphold as the real deal. But this just gives ammunition to those who say “Socialism doesn’t work” or “Socialism is a utopian fantasy.” And lurking behind the whole conversation is Stalin, who for the average Westerner represents the unadvisability of trying to radically change the world at all. No matter how much you insist that your thing isn’t Stalinist, the specter of Stalin is still going to affect how people think about (any form of) socialism — tankies have decided that there is no getting around the problem of addressing Stalin’s legacy. That legacy, as it stands, at least in Western public opinion (they feel differently about him in other parts of the world), is largely the product of Cold War propaganda.
That’s the gist. Then he goes on with another paragraph of whataboutism but of course not a single mention of the tens of millions of dead both, Stalin and Mao, were responsible for.
Of course he’s also an western armchair socialist. People that actually lived in the Sowjet Union (and not in today’s Russia) draw quite a different picture.
In theory, the things the other replies said.
In practice, anything left of the average Lemmy.world liberal/democrat.
I don’t Lemmy enough to say there are zero hexbear users who are pro China or pro wtfever people say, but I see almost none of the ridiculous shit the rest of Lemmy claim exclusively happens there. What I DO see is liberals (usually from lemmy.world if we’re swinging at instances) talking ridiculous trollish shit to hexbear users than using the silly trollish responses they get in response to justify these “all hexbears want to give America to Xi Jinping” posts.
I dunno, I ended up blocking the instance way before I knew about their reputation (like, when I first joined Lemmy) because all of the users their kept posting the most unhinged shit.
I have definitely seen blatant apologism for China/Russia from them.
FWIW, I’m much further left than your average Democrat (I consider myself a leftist/anarchist). I personally don’t consider what I’ve seen from them to be very “left”, just authoritarian.
“Leftists” who are more interested in authoritarianism than leftism. At their very worst, they even ally with the far-right.
Pro-China sycophants. They’d be the ones driving the tanks at Tiananman Square.
I’d also argue that these people only put up a facade of being leftist. I’ve never once seen a hexbear user actually make arguments for leftist policies, socialism, or communism. They just shitpost a bunch of anti-American memes and rally for the Russian and Chinese governments.
I have yet to see any reasonableness from hexbear.
Hell, I had a few members tell me that I was part of the evil capitalist elite because I had a job.
They brigade like annoying unwanted fleas that you cannot get rid of.
I had a few members tell me that I was part of the evil capitalist elite because I had a job.
Definitely a joke, I’m having trouble imagining a person who could believe this in earnest, let alone enough to say it out loud. I’m even having trouble accepting that you can imagine that a person would say this with no sarcasm. No one actually believes that.
edit: just realized that maybe you’re trying to be funny and I’m slow on the uptake
Hell, I had a few members tell me that I was part of the evil capitalist elite because I had a job.
Anytime a person claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link to it, they are lying or misrepresenting what happened literally 100% of the time.
Tankie is such a weird thing to call these communists. They are way way less violent than liberals and conservatives are. They don’t even support any on going genocides like the others do.
The historical through-line is that the term originated from British Communists that supported the USSR putting down the Hungarian Counter-Revolution, which involved tanks and violent fighting.
Nowadays, Tankie is used for everyone left of liberalism that agrees with the Marxist theory of the State, rather than the Anarchist, it’s muddled and has no meaning.
