"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"
Welcome to MoG!
Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!
What is a Tankie?
(caution of biased source)
Basic Rules:
Sh.itjust.works Instance rules apply! If you are from other instances, please be mindful of the rules. — Basically, don't be a dick.
Hate-Speech — You should be familiar with this one already; practically all instances have the same rules on hate speech.
Apologia — (Using the Modern terminology for Apologia) No Defending, Denying, Justifying, Bolstering, or Differentiating authoritarian acts or endeavours, whether it be a Pro-CCP viewpoint, Stalinism, Islamic Terrorism or any variation of Tankie Ideology.
Revisionism — No downplaying or denying atrocities past and present. Calling Tankies shills, foreign/federal agents, or bots also falls under this rule. Extremists exist. They are real. Do not call them shills or fake users, as it handwaves their extremism.
Off-topic Discussion — Do not discuss unrelated topics to the point of derailing the thread. Stay focused on the direct content of the post, rather than engaging in arguments that lack mutual agreement.
Brigading/Trolling — If you're here because this community was linked in another thread, please refrain from maliciously voting, commenting, or manipulating the post in any way. This includes alt accounts. All votes are public, and if you are found to be brigading, you will be banned. Good-faith and honest communication is an exception.
Tankies can explain their views, but may be criticised or challenged for them. Any minor infraction of the rules may result in a warning and possibly a temporary ban.
You'll be warned if you're violating the instance and community rules. Continuing poor behaviour after being warned will result in a ban or removal of your comments. Bans typically last only 24 hours, but each subsequent infraction doubles the duration. Depending on the content, the ban time may be increased. You may request an unban at any time.
Long accepted historical facts are misinformation. Wikipedia is imperialist propaganda. Stalin was a good guy. Don't you dare mention that he had defectors who tried to warn him about Hitler's invasion executed for their trouble. That's an inconvenient historical fact, so it's fake news.
LSC is a tankie bar. As is leftymemes.
I pointed out on LSC that the USSR was able to go from an agrarian society to space age (the OP used these terms) in about 50 years under communism because Stalin killed tens of millions of people.
Someone tried to argue with me that even though the deaths weren’t justified it got results.
Got called a fascist for having a .world account.
Had my entire comment thread deleted for being “irrelevant to the topic”.
I think Tankies are at least as terrible as MAGA. Maybe worse.
EDIT: clarification on who said “agrarian” and “space age”. It was the OP and not me.
People did have faith in communism, they worked hard because they believed in the goal. Stalin took care of that nice and quick.
What do you actually need to get to "the space age" in the middle of the 20th century? All you really need is enough money to develop some very small, very niche industries. The question is really anyone would want to waste the money on it, and the answer for the USSR was that it was engaged in an arms race with the US.
A lot of the labor in Stalin's time was essentially slave labor. The workforce in gulags in particular.
I think you mean "at the cost of killing tens of million people, and it wasn't worth the cost of their lives" which I totally agree with. After all, killing people doesn't send us to space. Sorry for my pedantry
Yeah I don’t mean that Stalin’s purges are what got them to space. The OP was using “the space age” as a stand in for modernization.
Now at risk of doing leg work on their behalf: I think tankies often get confused about what they're arguing for, and usually/initially don't even believe it was "worth killing millions," but rather they believe that millions were bound to die anyway just because the economy was in such rough shape. It takes a situation like that for communist revolution to spring up.
Tankies then lose sight of why they're even defending people like Stalin in the first place, and get caught up in the arguments presented by other people, so they forget to present this idea. This level of person-worship is also a mistake in and of itself, because if they didn't cling to the idea of a king, maybe they'd be able to defend his actions with more clarity
It's crap that moderators go on power trips. The entire .ml vs .world is a constant whirlpool of shit. It'll never stop, it's like generations of people hating another set of people, it's here forever and it's stupid.
We need our own leftymemes without tankies.