Just blocked lemmy.ml from my Lemmy account, and I swear to god it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done on this platform. My homepage feels actually clean now.
For the past few months I’d been seeing a lot of tankie posting and pretty much far-left propaganda on my feed. It got tiring enough that I finally checked my blocked-user list, and realized pretty much everyone I’d blocked was from lemmy.ml. So I just blocked the whole instance instead.
Saying this as someone who considers themselves a leftist: I used to think Lemmy itself was an echo chamber. Turns out lemmy.ml was the problem the entire time. Probably the reason I tolerated it for so long is that I agreed with a lot of what they posted, but like an oversaturated meme, I’d had enough. Browsing the platform was starting to feel way too tiring instead of fun, which defeats the point of being here in the first place.
The breaking point was seeing some dude post a “meme” implying North Korea and China are basically communist utopias and that the West sucks. I mean, the West does suck, but come on - you’re saying North Korea is the ideal the West should strive for? What the hell…
“Tankie” is essentially a pejorative for those that support AES states. Tankies are everywhere on the fediverse, the reality is that so-called tankies aren’t the evil people that want to eat babies or anything like those loudly complaining about us believe.
It’s my understanding that tankie refers to people who think of themselves as left-wing but actually back authoritarian states and make excuses for their war crimes and human rights abuses.
All states are authoritarian. All states are monopolies on violence, in the interests of the ruling class of society. The major difference with socialist states is that the ruling class is the working class, while owning classes are subjugated by the authority of the state. Further, so-called tankies aren’t really concerned with excuses, but with dispelling bourgeois mythos. Information warfare is incredibly complex, and directed against anything that serves as an alternative to the dominance of western hegemony and neoimperialism, led by the dominance of finance capital and multinational corporations on a global scale.
Would you mind rewriting that so someone not as versed in theory as you can understand it?
What part was difficult? I’ll do my best.
The whole thing is full of jargon.
I’ll try to define anything one might struggle with then, I guess.
Authoritarian - to hold a monopoly on authority, ie the political legitimacy to the use of force
Ruling class - that class which owns the commanding heights of the economy and controls the state
The state - the special administrative body for managing the affairs of the ruling class
Owning class - that class which gains their means of subsistence through ownership
Working class - that class which gains their means of subsistence through labor.
Tankies - those who defend socialist states
Bourgeoisie - those who own capital and employ it to profit off of the labor of others
Hegemony - the dominance of a given subject
Neoimperialism - the current, highly financialized system propogated worldwide whereby the more developed capitalist countries profit dramatically off of exploiting lesser developed countries
Finance capital - the monopolist merging of bank and industrial capital