He must be new to the job. You just hit both buttons and see what sticks.
They try to feel out what would annoy you more.
It didn’t happen, but I wish it did! /s
“It didn’t happen, but if it did, it was totally justified”
Similar to the neo-nazi line: “The Holocaust never happened…but it should have!”
Tbh when I was younger and more impressionable… Neo Nazis pretending to just be conspiracy theorists and metaphysical truth seekers told me about how some things “Really don’t add up” about the “official story” and there’s no harm in “just asking questions”
And I might have bought into it, but they were too quick to follow it up with some shit about how Jews “would have deserved it”
Idiots shouldn’t have shown their hand until I folded.
Good thing I’m smart and Nazis are dumb
This statement is a certified Balkans moment
Speaking as a connoisseur of propaganda, of course both are true.
20 or 30 [certainly no more than 253] protesters, mostly drug addicts and mental defectives, were riled up by a vast CIA conspiracy to commit start a riot.
The CIA was driving the tanks.
The CCP is actually run by the CIA, therefore, any wrongdoings is Amerikkka’s fault.
Checkmate, Westerners! 🤓
From what I read (yes I actually read the walls of text they post) the two weren’t exclusive. There were violent protestors during that time, and the protests in the square were minor, nonviolent, and opposed by dispersion via an announcement rather than tanks.
I’m not sure if I believe all that, but it’s better to know what they’re actually saying, imo
The irony of being a tankie and pretending the tanks weren’t there at one of the more notable moments of the CCP’s existence.
I could be wrong but I think that’s where the ‘tankie’ name comes from
it’s actually from Hungary, but I’m not going to defend auth apologists lol
sweet, learn something every day!
“I’m not sure if I believe”
There’s nothing to believe. Tankie lies are exactly that
So instead of twisting the truth to fit a narrative, they just make shit up?
There were over a 100,000 people at the square protesting. There were priests in over 400 Chinese cities.
Jesus, I didn’t realize people had this opinion.
Lemmy instances deciding whether to be infested with Nazis or be infested with tankies.
I’m not saying there aren’t Nazis, but at least the Nazis aren’t going around screaming about how right they are and denying the Holocaust. Those tankies were just going wild. So many pro-russia/China comments on everything. Calling the Ukrainian Nazis every chance they got.
but at least the Nazis aren’t going around screaming about how right they are and denying the Holocaust.
Erm, they kind of are though. The UN has just last year adopted a resolution against this, because it is an issue. The Chinese and the Russian bots are prevalent, but other nasty factions are still here.
You saw the thread the other day too, huh.
Yeah that was fucked. Gave me some insight into some Lemmy users that’s for sure.
Would you mind sharing a link to that thread?
Can someone ELI5 of what tankies are? It’s just something I haven’t run into in the USA (that I know of), and I’m baffled where and how they would fit into my understanding of the left and right on the USA political structure
As someone who’s wondered this myself but only now found the enthusiasm to look it up because I can’t be arsed to do anything for myself but this is what Wikipedia says:
“Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to communists who express support for one-party communist states that are associated with Marxism–Leninism, whether contemporary or historical.”
Take it with a grain of salt tho people misuse labels like this all the time
I think that definition is pretty accurate about almost everybody I’ve seen being called a Tankie on lemmy.
The term was originated in the UK in the 60s by leftists who opposed the USSR’s tank-led occupations of Prague and Budapest. In that context “tankie” kinda makes sense.
I think this is actually pretty fair, but one thing I’ll add is that the implication of the word (being a reference to the use of tanks to put down revolts) is that tankies support the use of state violence against opposition
I have not found that to be true about many who are accused of being a tankie
And yet, they stan the CCP.
"Tankies are westerners that don’t think “China bad”
Excellent definition 👍
You slippin? The CCP and China aren’t the same.
Well fuck me, I thought the CPC was the single-party government of China, my bad.
Weird, does that mean being born in the U.S. automatically makes you a member of the U.S. govt?
Remember that, like other forms of authoritarians, they are very comfortable lying.
It’s simply communists who want communism not to make everybody equal, but because they want their turn at the top of the social hierarchy.
Hey! I’m not interested in the social heirarchy.
I just have the people skills of a hand grenade that was recently divorced from its pin. I crave a tightly planned economy to provide highly deterministic relationships and rules, so I don’t have to schmooze and soft-sell my way to success. The spreadsheet says I’m a good worker!
In the US, tankies are usually the people who worship Soviet Russia and the USSR. In current politics, they often support Russia in the Ukraine conflict.
So here is what I find baffling - the people supporting Russia are the right wingers here, yet as far as I know they are not tankies… Nothing makes sense
Tankies defy logic and often their reactionary takes will land them on the same side of an issue with right-wingers. Usually using very different rhetoric, but in this one case… the right and the tankies sound pretty much the same.
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We’re defederated from the worst offenders. Do you have an account on an instance that’s federated with Lemmygrad / Hexbear? Because it’s bad.
For what it’s worth, we have a local tankie group at one of our college campuses nearby that really sucks in a lot of people from the queer community. They’re pretty much all universally combative, dominate any political space they’re in with “Voting has no point, just stop voting (shockedpikachu.jpg when fascists take office, consolidate power, and make life hell for minorities)” or “I’d rather vote for Trump to accelerate the decline of the world so the revolution is easier / faster” or “The holodomor was a Ukrainian man-made disaster to make Russia look bad, therefore wasn’t a genocide, and you’re a racist for believing it was”. Fortunately once they get off campus and into the real world most of them chill out, but Eternal September means they’re a constant menace to our local queer community.
Are they as big of a problem in the US as conservatives? Not remotely, though there’s some surprising overlap in their support of Russia that might make them a scarier force than expected. They’re still worth bitching about and deriding though.
The rest of the world, though? Russia and China are literally committing genocide, right now, and these people are cheering that on. There’s some European parties who are gaining in power who align with pro-Russia, pro-China goals. They might not be the main threat, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t a threat.
I’d rather vote for Trump to accelerate the decline of the world so the revolution is easier / faster
It always astounds me that people who have enough intelligence to read so much doctrine (some of which does have value) give in to such ends-means justification. The “revolution” is not inevitable, nor is its victory, nor is its success in making life that much better. Sacrificing others’ lives and well-being in the here and now has zero justification because there’s no guarantee that it will make any situation any better. They’re just zealots
For what it’s worth, the people I knew IRL who said this did end up voting and did not vote for Trump, but I still wonder how damaging that rhetoric could’ve been if people hadn’t been willing to argue with it.
But yeah, that was a mind-boggling
shouting matchconversation to have.
Tankies really sound more and more like a right wing psy OP the more I hear from them.
They’re just authoritarians. Right wing vs left wing doesn’t change how destructive authoritarianism is, it just changes who gets attracted to it.
These idiots are real and I encounter them in real life. What’s very common is nonsense about how the “West” and Nato blaa screwed over poor Vlad and so on.
You cannot put your phone down in real life.
It’s literally a current point of major conflict in the German Left party, half of the party aligns with Sarah Wagenknecht, and says that Putin is fighting NATO Imperialism by bombing Ukrainian hospitals.
If someone denies the existence of the WW2 Holocaust people come out of the woodworks to publicly tell them that they are wrong. At this point we collectively agree that believing that is idiotic.
The massacre on the Tiananmen Square, which my phone apparent doesn’t even have in its dictionary, is something being actively denied by a major world government. It’s a topic that the corporations that run a lot of or information exchange infrastructure are trying to avoid mentioning.
I think it’s that active avoidance of the topic that rubbs people the wrong way. And we all like to poke fun of people who are delusional.
Oh and also Holodomor. Until my old country started to roll tanks into Ukraine people on the internet kept telling me how I’m wrong and it didn’t happen. They they’d say that it was actually a logistics issue. How do you accidentally kill millions of people through starvation when it’s those same people that are producing the food to begin with? At least now we all agree that Holodonor existed.
I disagree with the “criticism is just giving them a platform” thing. It’s not giving them a platform. That would require allowing them to speak and letting their ideas go unchallenged. And there is a large leftist presence on here, which imo is a good thing. It provides an opportunity to combat misinformation. I will concede that online political shit slinging is often unproductive between the people commenting. But I’ve learned a lot as a lurker reading through these arguments. Reading arguments have given me things to read about and form my own opinion on. Perhaps the ones involved in the argument won’t have their minds changed but that doesn’t mean someone uninvolved reading it won’t be convinced or at least have their interest piqued.
A lot of mainstream political discourse excludes leftists. And I feel it’s a big reason people are dissatisfied with the state of modern politics (especially the US). When “both sides” are on the same side where it matters most, it’s obvious that neither of them have an interest in changing the trajectory the country/world is on. This leads to people looking for answers outside of the mainstream, because our states are failing and in denial. When you have an inherent distrust of the system and start looking for alternative perspectives and analysis, “stigmatized knowledge” becomes normal and informs a lot of your perspective. This creates a space for people acting in bad faith to take advantage of those who, through decades of concentrated effort by people (often within or adjacent to our own governments), have had their capacity for critical thinking and reasoning eroded. Leading to conspiratorial thinking.
Further complicating things, there are a lot of conspiracy theories that are correct and true. COINTELPRO and MKULTRA for example. They both sound like some tinfoil hat bullshit but the CIA has literally admitted to both and hundreds of documents on these programs have been declassified. When people are in the process of deconstructing the ideologies they’ve been raised on, these bad actors are in a perfect place to manipulate them. With these things in mind it’s easy to see how going from “capitalism is bad” and “western propaganda misrepresented daily life in post-revolution USSR” can be twisted into “tianamen square was a psyop” and “modern Russia is justified in their invasion of Ukraine”.
These things are further complicated by concepts like critical support and a vague, misguided sense of anti-imperialism, which are common in authoritarian left spaces. A sythesis of these two concepts leads to support of nations and parties that are objectively terrible in many areas that should not be ignored. When your ideology is twisted into “the west is bad and must be eliminated at any cost” you see countries like China and Russia as allies and as something to be replicated. It’s all very intentional.
Conspiracy theories and bad takes infect every ideology. Democrats, republicans, fascists, Marxists, anarchists and everyone else aren’t immune to conspiratorial thinking. It’s something that needs to be consistently combatted. And the best way to do that is by speaking the truth unapologetically. Consensus reality has been broken and there is a power struggle going on every day to win hearts and minds. This in itself isn’t a bad thing, the status quo is cruel and coercive. But it’s created a ripe space for those with bad intentions to steer the conversation towards areas that are favorable to them.
You weren’t wrong. The reason is because a unified left is an incredibly powerful and dangerous thing, so there is a ton of effort put into dividing the left, and since much of it is crafted to appeal to base moral superiority far too many on the left are happy to take the bait without hesitation.
Tiananmen Square Protests Wiki
Read about the death toll in and around Tiananmen itself. Around 300 people from both sides died in Beijing, but there is little evidence to support that thousands of protesters were killed in Tiananmen. There have been articles from western sources from reporters who admit that they weren’t actually present when they wrote about the incident.
I’m not a tankie, but half-reading and twisting what they say to ridicule them only makes you look bad. The situation was actually much more complex than you want to believe.
It’s not about the numbers, it’s about the denial and/or the justifying of it. Maybe the official government numbers are correct, but still doesn’t justify what they did.
Schools in the US has been teaching me about the fucked up shit the colonizers did. No history teacher that I had ever tried downplay slavery or tried to justify it. (This is not in a red state, so I can’t say what red states are like)
By contrast, my older brother who went to school in China until what’s equivalent to US’s 7th grade was never taught about the events in Tiananmen. It’s been erased from the history books.
I wouldn’t say the US is the most benevolent country ever (far from it, in fact), but modern US doesn’t hide it’s history for the most part, China’s government hiding it’s history isn’t really making them seem any more trustworthy.
I’m not a capitalist btw, I’m a left-wing anarchist. Both the US and China aren’t anywhere close to being desirable countries to live in.
Red states like Florida are trying to make slavery out to be something that was beneficial to black people. So we aren’t far off from China. I grew up in a purple state (WI) and my history classes were all over the place. Didn’t help matters that I was tossed in the remedial classes cause of my ADHD, which just dumbed things down a lot instead of doing anything helpful for me.
We still have the first amendment. Kids can still search for information online, even in red states. But once the first amendment is gone, that will be the death of the republic.
I grew up in a red state. Looking back now that i’ve read more and had opportunities to learn from others of different backgrounds, I can definitively say they omitted events and details to present a more white-washed (pun intended) version of history. I wouldn’t say my teachers tried to justify slavery, but there was an outsized emphasis placed on the “states’ rights” explanation of the civil war, and they were maybe a bit too quick to point out when former slaves went to work for their former masters (as if this was some evidence that they “were worse off” after emancipation, as opposed to being a reaction to poorly implemented, and/or straight-up racist, reconstruction policies).
I’m glad your teachers didn’t shy away from the seedy underbelly of history. But I do want to point out that I didn’t even know how myopic my history education was until I got to college (not even from the classes, although those helped, but simply having a more diverse set of friends to talk with). I still learn new things that open my eyes to a whole other topic that I didn’t even know was a thing. Don’t assume, because you don’t know of any gaps in your education, that you don’t have any. (I’m sure you already know that, but I’m up on my soap box right now, and it seemed a nice conclusion)
I agree with this, I just think that we shouldn’t call out lies by using more lies.
Those are both true though?
Even Wikipedia says there wasn’t a massacre in the square and that there were violent clashes where protesters killed cops.
Kinda weak to talk shit about a group of people when you’re not even federated with em though…
Ok so we have to be federated to a nazi instance to talk shit about nazis? What’s your point?
Yeah, I guess that is my point. Fight them instead of talking shit.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests_and_massacre
“At the State Council press conference on 6 June, spokesman Yuan Mu said that “preliminary tallies” by the government showed that about 300 civilians and soldiers died, including 23 students from universities in Beijing, along with some people he described as “ruffians”.[229][238] Yuan also said some 5,000 soldiers and police were wounded, along with 2,000 civilians.”
300 dead and 7,000 wounded sure soundss like a massacre
You gotta read the whole thing. There wasn’t significant violence in the square, but there absolutely was elsewhere in the area. So they’re right to say there wasn’t a massacre in the square.
The soldiers don’t count towards the total unless you wanna claim it was a massacre of pap and pla members.
Understandable!
Is lemmy.ca just as bad as Lemmy.world?..
The US 4th Psyops literally advertises their involvement in organizing the Tiananmen protests in their recruiting materials.
Yes the earth is flat, the CIA covered it up in a giant dome… yayaya
Actually the earth was flat originally but the cia rebuilt it to a sphere 🤓🤓🤓
I think you mean Iluvatar reshaped it when men tried to cross the edge
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A lot of responses are fair for acts of treason. Cooperating with a hostile third-party to strip down the government is an act of treason.
I’m unfamiliar with this one. Can you cite a source?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VA4e0NqyYMw
According to YouTube, it’s an official government account. It shows a number of historical events (Tiananmen, Euromaidan, others) and asks the question “who was pulling the strings?” then alludes that it was US intervention (which is, of course, why you should join them).
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It’s both, and the rioters were the ones that burned people.
Wake up you shat yourself.
There’s another theory, which capitalists don’t wanna hear. It would disturb them.
Well, let’s hear it
Don’t wanna tell, because it would be a lot of work - let’s give a few hints: The protesters were singing The Internationale and Deng Xiaoping was a revionist and not a marxist.
I don’t think you know anything.
“It’s too much work” - yawnnnn
I can prove that it was a hoax. I just don’t want to.
the proof goes to a different school
the proof is left as an excercise to the reader
In Canada
It would include a lot of translations and giving links to videos, which are probably already deleted. So, it doesn’t make sense to elobarate. Nobody would believe anyways.
What an easy way to peddle bullshit. Just say something is true and then refuse to do any work to prove it.
“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on” - Not actually Twain
https://www.zdf.de/dokumentation/dokumentation-sonstige/tiananmen1989-128.html here are videos, you can give me feedback, if you can watch them.
https://www.zdf.de/dokumentation/dokumentation-sonstige/tiananmen1989-142.html at 35:10 you can hear them singing.
Also that with Deng Xiaoping is common. Everyone knows it. He also openly admitted it.
My feedback is for you to simply state the point you’re trying to make, and skip the “hints” and vague references.
What is the theory, in your own words?
Any links that aren’t German so we can actually understand what’s being said?
We don’t wanna hear about it so badly that critics won’t even talk about it when asked. Damn.
Could you give a one paragraph tldr off the top of your mind?
Nobody will believe it and I got over 100 downvotes. So here you go: China was making liberal changes after Mao and moved away from marxism. The leadership changed and Deng Xiaoping moved ahead to shitty deals for the citizens. Deng openly admitted, that he believed in confucianism and wanted to make changes towards it. A lot of the citizens were unhappy with it and wanted more socialism - which includes more democracy - but also changes to better working-conditions. Because Deng and the new leaders didn’t want that, they moved forward with tanks and military.
tl:dr: socialists were on the streets and were fought with tanks - the tankies were confucianists, who wanted more capitalism
tl:dr: socialists were on the streets and were fought with tanks - the tankies were confucianists, who wanted more capitalism
Damn that was a lot of work indeed. Can’t believe you managed to do it.
Neat so China is an evil capitalist entity that wants to destroy socialism
There may be a grain of truth in that. I’m glad you explained yourself. I definitely appreciate that these things are nor black and white.
Would you say the protestors wanted more socialism’s but not more Mao-style communism?
Yes, basically the protestors were socialists who believed in democracy. The government abandoned socialist ideals and wanted an authoritarian state-capitalist country, but called it “socialism with chinese characteristics”.
Got that last part right.
I’d love to hear it for entertainment value
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“My girlfriend lives in Canada, you wouldn’t know her.”
So you cant proof that you have one -> you dont have one mimimimimimimiii /s
There’s a theory that you guys don’t want to hear because it would disturb you 😏
Actually we do want to hear it
… no.
And where’s the disturbing part?