Lead Lemmy Developer, Dessalines, denying the Tiananmen Square Massacre and praising the Uyghur Genocide
https://sh.itjust.works/post/8419342
Dessalines AKA “parentis_shotgun” on Reddit, is the main Lemmy dev, also the admin of lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml.
Their post and discussions on Reddit (archive as the original post must have been removed):
Please join the discussions for Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem:
https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
And the discussions for finding/creating alternative communities on other instances:
https://lemmy.world/post/16235541
What is a tankie?
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support acts of repression by such regimes or their allies. More specifically, the term has been applied to those who express support for one-party Marxist–Leninist socialist republics, whether contemporary or historical.
I’ve seen the label “tankie” be thrown around to describe so many different things to the point that it has lost all meaning to me. I’ve seen it used to describe fascists, I’ve seen it used as a way to discredit someone’s argument without engaging with it, I’ve seen it used used to invalidate arguments because they were to the left of the person throwing the label.
The definition presented uses the word “authoritarian” which, in my eyes, falls on a similar category of “used on so many things it lost all meaning”. (Example)
Using the words authoritarian and communist simultaneously doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense to me: As far as I am aware, a communist society is a stateless society. However, Wikipedia defines “authoritarian” as
“Authoritarianism is a political system characterized by the rejection of democracy and political plurality. It involves the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting.”
Notice the words “strong central power”. Isn’t that a contradiction of what communism is? Please do correct me if I’m wrong.
I’ve seen in the comments people saying that de-federation is not an option because of .ml’s large communities, but, in my eyes, that doesn’t make much sense. .world is a big instance, just recreate the communities from .ml that you don’t want to miss out on. Everyone on .world will be forced to use them, since they can’t post on the .ml version any more. If .ml is as awful as people make it out to be, everyone will de-federate and move to the .world alternatives.
You are defining “communism” to mean not whatever Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and friends did. That’s fine. Repudiating those monsters is great. However, when you do that you might as well call your thing anarcho-something and not “communism” to make it clear that you are not a fan of having a vanguard of idiots seize power and rule on behalf of a dictatorship of the proletariat in order to eventually hope to achieve a communist society by first having a strong central power as a transitional phase.
Keep on not licking the tank treads crushing freedom like the ones that destroyed the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 and you won’t be called a tankie
I certainly block every .ml community I see and it’s working great for me.
Agree with not liking Stalin is great, but calling that “anarcho-” is just stupid. Anarchos generally believe you can run big nation States in a capitalistic world without any central power comparable to today’s nations (not even a democratically controlled one) but instead jump right to the classless society by getting rid of all (or most) institutions and it will just work fine.
Communists/socialists on the other hand believe you need time, practise and fair game rules to form a classless society with enough time, especially in a capitalistic world, where the USA can just invade you, if you have no army and not even a generally recognized government.
Not liking the real life dictator countries, no matter what they call them self’s should be a disconnected question from the philosophical one on how to best archive a harmonic world
Sounds like the right approach to a tankie to me.
Read what Dessalines wrote on his reddit or essays, there’s no doubt that he supports authoritarian communism.
Communism can mean a classless, stateless society, or it can mean a country where communists are in charge. Marxist-Leninists do not believe that a stateless communist society can be established overnight, especially in countries without industrial development.