I was gonna try to defend my comrades for not being that brain dead then I saw the only other Lemmy.ml guy on this thread actively proving your point lmao
Its okay if you still want to. I find that they have a point in their grievances or pointing out how we in the west often fail at living up to our own proposed values of democracy and equality. I do get why they feel so strongly that they push to take it all, but the all or nothing is often counter productive I feel. Particularly given how much work they need to do with the general public that is not ready for some topics.
I’ve been called all sorts of names just for asking for real evidence instead of flimsy suggestive bullshit. It took SO much pressing to get anything at all on the Ukrainian Nazi line they love so much, and I got SO much hostility for it.
Eh, I’ve seen enough to agree that some elements within Ukraine and the Ukrainian military are using Nazi-associated symbols. But then again, so are some of the people invading Ukraine. And I don’t really begrudge Ukraine for thinking that repelling an ongoing invasion and occupation is a more urgent problem than a few Nazi nutjobs on their own side. (Honestly, you’d be hard-pressed to find any military anywhere that doesn’t have Nazi nutjobs in it. Military service is very attractive to that type of person.)
Yeah, that was kinda my takeaway when I finally got decent info. The Nazi groups seem to be getting big enough to be legitimately problematic, but like you said, I can’t entirely blame Ukraine for focusing on bigger problems for now, especially when those factions are willing to help defend the country. It’s kind of a cursed bargain, but it’s not like they have better options right now.
Propaganda will do that. I’ve never met a single communist who denied that there was a major famine in China. The problem is that liberals seem to think Mao invented famine, when in fact China was experiencing famines every 2 to 4 years for over a century by the time the communists came to power. They had a theory for how to address the cycle of famines and increase food surplus, and their theory failed. But liberals think that Mao deliberately killed millions of people because he was an evil dictator instead of acknowledging the reality that Mao was leader of a massive government and they all failed as an organization by producing the conditions for famine. The context is also lost that eventually the Chinese revolution did end the cycle of famines permanently, and they were trying to solve it without any help from Western agriculture because the West was too busy protecting the fascist dictator that was holed up in Taiwan who was actively mass murdering and imprisoning political dissidents.
The Holodomor is another one of those things propaganda skews and breaks our ability to agree to a shared reality on. I have never met a single communist that denies that there was a famine and that many people died. What they often cite, which liberals can’t reconcile, is that the famine affected many more populations than just the people who were supposedly targeted and that research into the incident shows that the crop yield was severely negatively impacted by weather and made worse by not just bad decision making but also bad decision making that was in part driven by punitive thinking. The famine happened, but propaganda would have us believe that the famine was unquestionably a deliberate attempt at ethnic cleansing or genocide, when the evidence seems to be far more in support of a natural famine made worse by poor management with an added dose of maliciousness that ultimately rolls up to bad management.
In contrast, you don’t seem to have any problem with most Westerners having never even heard of the famines that were in fact deliberately caused by the West and for which the only explanation is the active choice of making a colonized population suffer.
Both the Holodomor and Chinese famine were caused by politicians that ignore actual agrarian science from actual farmers with actual farming experience. The bad yield was caused precisely by this ignoring of proven science. And the Holodomor had been especially bad for Ukraine because it was the USSR’s bread basket because the Soviet authorities extracted as much food as possible, mirroring the Great Famine in Ireland when the British imperialists exported food from Ireland despite the massive starvation.
The Chinese failure of agriculture was under embargo from the West’s proven science and supply chains. They were forced to come up with their own solutions from scratch from a starting position that was far far behind the rest of the world.
Lysenko was operating in a world where the West had developed the theory of the gene but not yet proven the gene existed and the West immediately developed it into eugenics from its racist tyrannical fascist politics, and Lysenko and the politicians were reacting to that. While Europeans were going around saying “genetics is real therefore we should kill all the poors and the browns before they taint our bloodline”, the Soviets were saying “if we improve social conditions then people will heal for generations to come”.
I know we are literally awash in comic book level propaganda where the evil Soviets were dastardly lying to everyone for power and control, but if you actually read the history, the narratives we have been fed start to look a lot like outright lies.
100% if they had followed the science they would have done better, but science is not apolitical, research on heredity especially so, and without any molecular basis for the theory of genetics, it looks a lot like master race politics.
Chinese people and Slavic peoole arent geniuses even when they work together collectively. They make stupid decisions just like you and me and other Westerners do too. Honestly being a genius is like a 1 in a milloon thing whether youre a westerner , Chinese, Slavic or whatever. YOU WILL MAKE MISTAKES. THEY MADE MISTAKES.
And then they made the stupid decision to. believe that discrediting rich farmers with experience in China when they shoild have listened to some of their advice when it xame to growing and storing certain grains and livestocks. (YES the CHinese were stupid and humans just like you and I)
They DID learn from those mistakes. There was never anither recorded famine in the USSR after 1932.(well TECHNICALLY there was a famine when the nazis invaded BUT that was cause there were like 10 million nazi soldiers burning land and killing livestock accross western USSR. but ya you get my point). And there was never another recorded famine in CHina until Dengism became more popular.
Farmer knowledge and know how wasn’t embargoed by the West. Lysenko and Mao were just idiots who didn’t listen to experts despite warnings. Also, people already knew about genetic inheritance long before the 20th century, even if DNA wasn’t discovered yet. You are just white washing the truth.
Yes, argicultural technology was absolutely embargoed from China by the West. What world do you live in? The Foreign Assets Control Act was relatively comprehensive and then a year later the “UN” adopted a total collective embargo.
It wasn’t embargoed from the USSR. But that was before the Green Revolution anyway. Everyone in the world was heavily subject to crop failures, like the 50% crop failure in the US Dust Bowl in the 30s. It’s not like there was a known good recipe to solving famine cycles during the first 2 decades of the Russian revolution.
The idea that Mao was an idiot is neither borne by the evidence nor useful as an explanation. He was clearly effective for long periods of time for highly complex problem spaces. But he made a similar class of mistakes to the mistakes that the USSR did in agriculture. Mistakes that they eventually corrected.
Oh embargo, the usual scapegoat for the inherent failure of tankie policies. The collectivisation which removed experienced farmers to work on lands, along with Lysenko’s deliberate ignoring of established agricultural science in exchange to his whatever supposedly science he conjured up with, led to the worst famine since the Irish Famine. Mao was told not to order to kill sparrows because they hunt rats and locusts, pests that have worse effect on agriculture.
Seriously. Was Holodomor a deliberate genocide? This is the hill you’re going to die on? Yes, the famine affected a lot of people, but we all know which people were least affected and it wasn’t the Ukrainians who were trying to actually grow the food. Much like the Irish Famine was only a tragic genocide because the British overlords wouldn’t put up with reducing their own take. The blight was real, but the decimation was pure unjustified cruelty.
I’m a leftist, but I’m an honest one. We gain nothing by denying the past and refusing to learn from it. It does a disservice to us all to hide the fact that old ethnic and cultural violence behind a window dressing of systemic failure. Systemic bigotry is still bigotry.
The kazhaks lost more people per capita than Ukraine did. Major non-Ukrainian Russian populations centers suffered equally or very nearly as much as Ukraine did.
So you may think you’re an honest leftist, but you might not be. As an honest leftist myself, I recognize that the Soviet government made tragic decisions, many of them punitive, none of them directed at ethnic cleansing, because the Soviet Union did not have an analysis that included specific ethnicities being material to their political goals as ethnicities. They understood, documented, wrote about, discussed, debated, legislated, and enforced the exact opposite of ethnic cleansing constantly. Yes, Ukranian suffered a lot through the transition to collectivized agriculture, more than most. But that’s because the majority of Ukranian peasants were freeholders of land, whereas the majority of Russian peasants were serfs. As freeholders, they would lose their claim to their farms. Serfs would suffer no such loss. This was structural. Russian peasants weren’t targeted for collectivization because under the Tsar they were already collectivized, whereas Ukranian peasants had private ownership of the land they worked.
Collectivization was not ethnic cleansing, the famine was not ethnically targeted, and the punitive actions of the Soviet Union were not ethnically motivated by an ethnic strategy of ethnic supremacy.
That’s honesty. Honesty is doing the reading, doing the research, and not discarding all the evidence that contradicts the obviously contrived narrative. Yes there was a famine. Yes it killed more Ukranians in absolute numbers. Yes the Soviet leadership made deliberate decisions that were intended to punish people who were Ukranians. No it wasn’t because they were Ukranian, no it wasn’t because the Soviet leadership thought that ethnic cleansing would achieve their intended goals, no it’s not because the Soviet leadership decided to artificially starve all of those people out of malice or ethnic supremacy.
Yes and proportionally the Romani were murdered by the Nazis at a higher rate than the Jews, but we don’t think of it as the Romani Holocaust. The Russians used a cannon to swat flies and murdered millions and you’re going to carry water for them based on official rationalizations? You sound like an American trying to justify racial red-lining.
Why don’t you take a knee and admit you don’t understand the situation and the context. At the end of the day, Soviet institutions were run by people, people with conditioned biases and baggage. I might have some sympathy for their ideological goals, but I will not overlook their atrocities. The Russians were ruled by monsters then, just like they are ruled by monsters now and the window dressing of their official ideology makes little difference.
Yes and proportionally the Romani were murdered by the Nazis at a higher rate than the Jews, but we don’t think of it as the Romani Holocaust.
…Youve just proven how thoroughly propagandized you are. loool. nato has always wanted you to remember the Holocaust as ‘a jEwS oNlY’ genocide cause they have wanted and have clearly succeeded, in convincing you that Isntreal has a right to exist cause of the Holocaust lol.
👏🏼👏🏽👏🏿Give yourself an applaid for being so thoroughly fooled anout the Holocaust AND the Sovoet Famine of 1932 you are. Nicely done ‘lEfTiSt’ . Nicely done 🥳👏🏿👏🏾👏🏽
Lol try picking up a book or looking up a study for once in your life 😂🤣🤭
Oh good. You’re one of those. No genius, people focus on the Jewish genocide because it was objectively more deaths. I’m the one that pointed out the Romani were hit harder proportionally and their murder was no less horrific. Two things can be true at the same time. I pointed it out because your red herring about the Kazakhs was bait. The fact that they targeted more than one ethnic group when starving people to death does not make it less of an atrocity, or any less of a parallel to other contemporary ethnic cleansing. Tyrants are going to be tyrants, irrespective and regardless of what philosophy they hide behind.
But go off child. Explain it like my own family didn’t lose people in holodomor and many other acts of cruelty, while others perpetrated crimes of their own. I bet you think your hands are clean too. I know a lot of Israelis do. Personally I’m more supportive of the Jews who know what’s being done in their name is wrong. Unfortunately most of them aren’t there to stop it. The ones that are there tend to be the ones who claim to know the history, but learned precisely the wrong lesson from it. And you’re walking the same damn road. The same road people have been walking since Sumer and Akkad. Why don’t you pick up a new book child, I’ve picked up many. The most misguided people I know are the one’s that only read one book and think they understand the whole story.
Do you have a link to tankies denying there was an unwanted famine?
Holodomor was an unwanted famine that was redurected (food taken from farmers). Later wider famines were made worse mostly by Lysenkoism. A con-job which effected Russia and China.
Yet Communism is compared to Nazi? That’s what’s ridiculous liberal/right propaganda.
What happened is much more forgivable (although still regrettable) than what say the millions killed by the East India companies through intentional famines under Capitalism (done for profit), or the hundreds of millions in war dead from Capitalism in the past 30 years.
That’s much more recent, but some redirected famine from the 1930s keeps coming up when talk of Socialism makes wealthy liberals a little too uncomfortable.
What is an “unwanted famine”? Nobody wanted a famine. Lysenko was wrong, and the government backed him because they didn’t know he was wrong. It was a mistake, not a deliberate strategem to harm people.
If its nit quite thr flex that they think it is please explain how ? (you wont be able to but please go right on ahead 🍿🤭)
Ill just say now that your argument is that Slavic people and Chinese people are not allowed to be dumb once in a while so good lucck arguing that seeing as how they are humans. Go ahead. The floor is yours …
As a .ml user, I hereby denounce the states’ rights to own slaves for which this war was fought. The confederates were not fighting against “the west”, they were fighting for racism and bigotry.
However, I do offer critical support to Hasan Piker, and think Americans should take a long hard look at foreign policy which led to the 9/11 attack. It’s the worst it’s ever been now, giving taxpayer dollars to Israel for them to purchase American politicians and order them to bankroll and provide cover for ongoing genocide and destabilization of the region so that Israel can steal more land. Like owning slaves, rank imperialism and land theft is wrong, especially post-globalization.
China bad because of their human rights record. Where as the west can judge them (being from the same culture and all) because the west has a perfect human rights record. What you disagree? \s
It’s super weird when Liberals forget about Iraq, Afghanistan, Indigenous Genocides, Racial Profiling and the war on terror, Gitmo, Palestine, and Slavery all at once.
“Oh but in the past China and Russia had famines”.
They don’t realize they’re effected by 100 years of conservative messaging.
I mean I kinda get it. The biggest obstacle to World Peace today is the US. So you could make the argument that anything that opposes US Hegemony gets us closer to world peace. Idk that I would go so far as to “support Russia” but I understand the logic.
Please don’t defend them. These kinds of arguments lack any kind of deeper thought or nuance. It’s literally just trolling and straw-men. Do not feed the trolls.
These kinds of arguments lack any kind of deeper thought or nuance.
I mean that’s what Zionists say about Pro Palestine group. That’s what Americans said about resistance groups in the middle east. That’s what Americans said about the Natives.
I just disagree with this entire philosophy. You should be able understand an argument you disagree with.
I didn’t say don’t understand them, I’m saying they’re literally not thinking that deeply about it. They want to get a rise out of you and someone showed them they can do that by opening with a straw-man like this. By deliberately misrepresenting what “Tankie” means they can completely disarm it and force you to defend a position they chose, which they know is indefensible. It’s pure rhetorical strategy, they don’t actually know or care what a Tankie thinks. They’re trying to make the word mean something it never has and never should mean. Is it possible someone on their side has done some work to rationalize their twisted interpretation. That rationalization is usually paper thin and almost no one on their side knows or cares about it besides its usefulness as a tactical fallback. They don’t believe any of this, its a rhetorical game and the point is their nihilistic disregard for consequences.
That sounds like a description of every troll. Tbh I keep hearing tankie thrown around, but I’ve never had the conversations people who complain about it have.
Tankie is a general term for someone who thinks there is a clear justification to use force or the threat of force to impose a socialist system on a state. The term originates with people who supported the USSR “Sending in the tanks” to annex other countries and crush dissent from people in their sphere. They are what people mean when they “If you go far enough left, you get your guns back.” These days they tend to be a tiny minority within the rather small minority of actual leftists. They do exist, and some of them are pretty out there, but not the way the .ml crowd tends to characterize them. They’re terrified of them, because in their heads the most terrifying thing in the world is a leftist that is willing to fight back, and they don’t recognize anything that doesn’t kill someone as “fighting.”
The Confederacy was fighting against the United States. Under tankie logic, that must mean that they’re virtuous and attempting to build communism. In reality, they were fighting to preserve chattel slavery.
Okay but Lenin considered the US Civil to be good actually
But what a pedant, what an idiot would anyone be to deny on these grounds the immense, world-historic, progressive and revolutionary significance of the American Civil War of 1863-65!
The representatives of the bourgeoisie understand that for the sake of overthrowing Negro slavery, of overthrowing the rule of the slaveowners, it was worth letting the country go through long years of civil war, through the abysmal ruin, destruction and terror that accompany every war. But now, when we are confronted with the vastly greater task of overthrowing capitalist wage-slavery, of overthrowing the rule of the bourgeoisie—now, the representatives and defenders of the bourgeoisie, and also the reformist socialists who have been frightened by the bourgeoisie and are shunning the revolution, cannot and do not want to understand that civil war is necessary and legitimate.
Yes. But these topics about tankies are about reinforcing ‘us/them’ rationalizations for those who already have their prejudice. The comments here certainly do.
By providing a critical thinking from Lenin, you instead become the tankie, and therefore become incapable of critical thinking, per the meme. Therefore anything Lenin might’ve said or written can just be dismissed.
And so the tankie can be mocked as a confederate chud nonetheless.
I think you’re mistaking the lunatic left for the lunatic right. The left usually did their homework at least. Better than the right who refuse to acknowledge what they call “Capitalism” has nothing to do with the foundational principles of the theory.
This is a straw man. Tankie logic clearly understands the concept of factions and factional disputes within a larger system. The US had two major bourgeois factions within it - agrarian raw materials producers/merchants and industrialists. These two factions were fighting for their faction’s existence and ultimately the power to dominate their colonized subjects in the way that seemed most beneficial to their faction.
If you aren’t American: Depicted are American civil war reenactors with the flag of the Confederacy which seceded from the Union of the United States in the 19th century due to built up tensions regarding slavery. The Confederacy were ultimately fighting to keep slavery as a government institution.
The target of the joke are tankies (described briskly above), which we will see on Lemmy, often see any action taken against the US or the EU (the West) as praiseworthy, blatantly disregarding or downplaying equivalent or worse actions from non-western nations.
The subversion of expectation here is that a tankie would see the pro-slavery Confederacy as praiseworthy because they’re fighting the US government, despite the Confederacy’s blatantly immoral cause.
Caveat - I say this with bias as someone explicitly against authoritarian bootlickers, like tankies.
Thank you for your efforts, I really do appreciate it. It makes discussion a lot more accessable to people who do not know the details of US history. I am not american myself but unfortunately I have family who live in Kennesaw. I hope that’s self explanatory 🥲
I guess the joke doesn’t make sense because Lenin thought it was based that the civil war happened because slavery is wack.
Strawman. Tankies literally have a phrase for this. It’s called “critical support”, which means supporting the efforts of anti-imperialism while reserving the right to criticize without that critique rising to the level of reversing the support for the anti-imperialist action
Who is “them” exactly here? Are you listening to teenagers on TikTok and extrapolating a whole ideology here? Tankies aren’t anti-American by definition. Someone is feeding you some pretty twisted propaganda.
The kind of revolutionaries they support are morally bankrupt. Like Che Guevara was a complete dick who committed war crimes in order to help install an authoritarian regime in Cuba. Or how Mao got more people killed than anyone in human history and not just his enemies, his supporters too.
What was confusing was the example chosen because it is something Lenin had a position on. Which was the opposite of what was shown. I am coming to understand it’s meant as an absurd example to criticize “tankies” but I guess this example only makes sense if you don’t know that.
I’m also confused about the usage of critical support being contrasted to critical thinking because critical support means applying critical thinking to a situation instead of blanket support. But I guess if you aren’t looking at something with the same values that can be hard to see.
Lenin agreed with the union, because slavery is bad. Tankies, because they cherry pick the history they pay attention to would likely ignore that and cheer for the Confederacy. It’s what they do. It’s not that confusing.
I thought tankies was a rude name for Marxist Leninists? I couldn’t tell if the meme was making fun of people who use the term tankie or Marxist Leninists which is why I said I didn’t get it, but I get it now.
I don’t get it.
Lemmy.ml users in particular will defend fucking ANYTHING done in opposition to The West. Like they love to support Russia against Ukraine.
I was gonna try to defend my comrades for not being that brain dead then I saw the only other Lemmy.ml guy on this thread actively proving your point lmao
Its okay if you still want to. I find that they have a point in their grievances or pointing out how we in the west often fail at living up to our own proposed values of democracy and equality. I do get why they feel so strongly that they push to take it all, but the all or nothing is often counter productive I feel. Particularly given how much work they need to do with the general public that is not ready for some topics.
Also any time you say NK is a dictatorship they come out of the basement to say how awesome it is.
I stopped replying to one of them when they denied the holodomor or the chinese famine.
Its quite disheartening that we can’t even agree on a common reality.
Ah so about the ‘hOlOdOmOr’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kaaYvauNho&pp=ygUVaG9sb2RvbW9yIGJhZGVtcGFuYWRh, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L3d0GJlzgc&pp=ygUVaG9sb2RvbW9yIGJhZGVtcGFuYWRh , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu5-tqHHtaM&pp=ygUjVGhlIHNvdmlldCBmYW1pbmUgbWFyeGlzbSBleHBsYWluZWQ%3D
I’ve been called all sorts of names just for asking for real evidence instead of flimsy suggestive bullshit. It took SO much pressing to get anything at all on the Ukrainian Nazi line they love so much, and I got SO much hostility for it.
Eh, I’ve seen enough to agree that some elements within Ukraine and the Ukrainian military are using Nazi-associated symbols. But then again, so are some of the people invading Ukraine. And I don’t really begrudge Ukraine for thinking that repelling an ongoing invasion and occupation is a more urgent problem than a few Nazi nutjobs on their own side. (Honestly, you’d be hard-pressed to find any military anywhere that doesn’t have Nazi nutjobs in it. Military service is very attractive to that type of person.)
Yeah, that was kinda my takeaway when I finally got decent info. The Nazi groups seem to be getting big enough to be legitimately problematic, but like you said, I can’t entirely blame Ukraine for focusing on bigger problems for now, especially when those factions are willing to help defend the country. It’s kind of a cursed bargain, but it’s not like they have better options right now.
Propaganda will do that. I’ve never met a single communist who denied that there was a major famine in China. The problem is that liberals seem to think Mao invented famine, when in fact China was experiencing famines every 2 to 4 years for over a century by the time the communists came to power. They had a theory for how to address the cycle of famines and increase food surplus, and their theory failed. But liberals think that Mao deliberately killed millions of people because he was an evil dictator instead of acknowledging the reality that Mao was leader of a massive government and they all failed as an organization by producing the conditions for famine. The context is also lost that eventually the Chinese revolution did end the cycle of famines permanently, and they were trying to solve it without any help from Western agriculture because the West was too busy protecting the fascist dictator that was holed up in Taiwan who was actively mass murdering and imprisoning political dissidents.
The Holodomor is another one of those things propaganda skews and breaks our ability to agree to a shared reality on. I have never met a single communist that denies that there was a famine and that many people died. What they often cite, which liberals can’t reconcile, is that the famine affected many more populations than just the people who were supposedly targeted and that research into the incident shows that the crop yield was severely negatively impacted by weather and made worse by not just bad decision making but also bad decision making that was in part driven by punitive thinking. The famine happened, but propaganda would have us believe that the famine was unquestionably a deliberate attempt at ethnic cleansing or genocide, when the evidence seems to be far more in support of a natural famine made worse by poor management with an added dose of maliciousness that ultimately rolls up to bad management.
In contrast, you don’t seem to have any problem with most Westerners having never even heard of the famines that were in fact deliberately caused by the West and for which the only explanation is the active choice of making a colonized population suffer.
Yup. About the Soviet Famine of 1932 that killed Kazakhs, AND Souther Russians, AND Ukranians …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kaaYvauNho&pp=ygUVaG9sb2RvbW9yIGJhZGVtcGFuYWRh, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L3d0GJlzgc&pp=ygUVaG9sb2RvbW9yIGJhZGVtcGFuYWRh , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu5-tqHHtaM&pp=ygUjVGhlIHNvdmlldCBmYW1pbmUgbWFyeGlzbSBleHBsYWluZWQ%3D
Both the Holodomor and Chinese famine were caused by politicians that ignore actual agrarian science from actual farmers with actual farming experience. The bad yield was caused precisely by this ignoring of proven science. And the Holodomor had been especially bad for Ukraine because it was the USSR’s bread basket because the Soviet authorities extracted as much food as possible, mirroring the Great Famine in Ireland when the British imperialists exported food from Ireland despite the massive starvation.
The Chinese failure of agriculture was under embargo from the West’s proven science and supply chains. They were forced to come up with their own solutions from scratch from a starting position that was far far behind the rest of the world.
Lysenko was operating in a world where the West had developed the theory of the gene but not yet proven the gene existed and the West immediately developed it into eugenics from its racist tyrannical fascist politics, and Lysenko and the politicians were reacting to that. While Europeans were going around saying “genetics is real therefore we should kill all the poors and the browns before they taint our bloodline”, the Soviets were saying “if we improve social conditions then people will heal for generations to come”.
I know we are literally awash in comic book level propaganda where the evil Soviets were dastardly lying to everyone for power and control, but if you actually read the history, the narratives we have been fed start to look a lot like outright lies.
100% if they had followed the science they would have done better, but science is not apolitical, research on heredity especially so, and without any molecular basis for the theory of genetics, it looks a lot like master race politics.
THANK YOU!
Chinese people and Slavic peoole arent geniuses even when they work together collectively. They make stupid decisions just like you and me and other Westerners do too. Honestly being a genius is like a 1 in a milloon thing whether youre a westerner , Chinese, Slavic or whatever. YOU WILL MAKE MISTAKES. THEY MADE MISTAKES.
They made the stupid decisions to not save food from the Ukraine and to not expect a drought in the Ukraine in 1932
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kaaYvauNho&pp=ygUVaG9sb2RvbW9yIGJhZGVtcGFuYWRh, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L3d0GJlzgc&pp=ygUVaG9sb2RvbW9yIGJhZGVtcGFuYWRh , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu5-tqHHtaM&pp=ygUjVGhlIHNvdmlldCBmYW1pbmUgbWFyeGlzb (YES the Soviets were stupid and human just like you and I)
And then they made the stupid decision to. believe that discrediting rich farmers with experience in China when they shoild have listened to some of their advice when it xame to growing and storing certain grains and livestocks. (YES the CHinese were stupid and humans just like you and I)
They DID learn from those mistakes. There was never anither recorded famine in the USSR after 1932.(well TECHNICALLY there was a famine when the nazis invaded BUT that was cause there were like 10 million nazi soldiers burning land and killing livestock accross western USSR. but ya you get my point). And there was never another recorded famine in CHina until Dengism became more popular.
In fact Dengism is a form of capitalism and the BNPL statistics prove this. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GCf1obSZ334&pp=ygUPYnVyeWluZyBkZW5naXNt
Farmer knowledge and know how wasn’t embargoed by the West. Lysenko and Mao were just idiots who didn’t listen to experts despite warnings. Also, people already knew about genetic inheritance long before the 20th century, even if DNA wasn’t discovered yet. You are just white washing the truth.
Least obvious and prepared tankie shill answer.
Yes, argicultural technology was absolutely embargoed from China by the West. What world do you live in? The Foreign Assets Control Act was relatively comprehensive and then a year later the “UN” adopted a total collective embargo.
It wasn’t embargoed from the USSR. But that was before the Green Revolution anyway. Everyone in the world was heavily subject to crop failures, like the 50% crop failure in the US Dust Bowl in the 30s. It’s not like there was a known good recipe to solving famine cycles during the first 2 decades of the Russian revolution.
The idea that Mao was an idiot is neither borne by the evidence nor useful as an explanation. He was clearly effective for long periods of time for highly complex problem spaces. But he made a similar class of mistakes to the mistakes that the USSR did in agriculture. Mistakes that they eventually corrected.
Oh embargo, the usual scapegoat for the inherent failure of tankie policies. The collectivisation which removed experienced farmers to work on lands, along with Lysenko’s deliberate ignoring of established agricultural science in exchange to his whatever supposedly science he conjured up with, led to the worst famine since the Irish Famine. Mao was told not to order to kill sparrows because they hunt rats and locusts, pests that have worse effect on agriculture.
Least obvious PR tankie answer.
Seriously. Was Holodomor a deliberate genocide? This is the hill you’re going to die on? Yes, the famine affected a lot of people, but we all know which people were least affected and it wasn’t the Ukrainians who were trying to actually grow the food. Much like the Irish Famine was only a tragic genocide because the British overlords wouldn’t put up with reducing their own take. The blight was real, but the decimation was pure unjustified cruelty.
I’m a leftist, but I’m an honest one. We gain nothing by denying the past and refusing to learn from it. It does a disservice to us all to hide the fact that old ethnic and cultural violence behind a window dressing of systemic failure. Systemic bigotry is still bigotry.
Russians, AND Ukranians …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kaaYvauNho&pp=ygUVaG9sb2RvbW9yIGJhZGVtcGFuYWRh, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L3d0GJlzgc&pp=ygUVaG9sb2RvbW9yIGJhZGVtcGFuYWRh , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu5-tqHHtaM&pp=ygUjVGhlIHNvdmlldCBmYW1pbmUgbWFyeGlzb
ACKSHUALLY the Kazakhs were the most affected by the Famine of 1932 in a per capita basis.
And as I said elsewhere, technically the Romani were murdered at a higher rate than the Jews by the Nazis. That’s not the “gotcha” you think it is.
The kazhaks lost more people per capita than Ukraine did. Major non-Ukrainian Russian populations centers suffered equally or very nearly as much as Ukraine did.
So you may think you’re an honest leftist, but you might not be. As an honest leftist myself, I recognize that the Soviet government made tragic decisions, many of them punitive, none of them directed at ethnic cleansing, because the Soviet Union did not have an analysis that included specific ethnicities being material to their political goals as ethnicities. They understood, documented, wrote about, discussed, debated, legislated, and enforced the exact opposite of ethnic cleansing constantly. Yes, Ukranian suffered a lot through the transition to collectivized agriculture, more than most. But that’s because the majority of Ukranian peasants were freeholders of land, whereas the majority of Russian peasants were serfs. As freeholders, they would lose their claim to their farms. Serfs would suffer no such loss. This was structural. Russian peasants weren’t targeted for collectivization because under the Tsar they were already collectivized, whereas Ukranian peasants had private ownership of the land they worked.
Collectivization was not ethnic cleansing, the famine was not ethnically targeted, and the punitive actions of the Soviet Union were not ethnically motivated by an ethnic strategy of ethnic supremacy.
That’s honesty. Honesty is doing the reading, doing the research, and not discarding all the evidence that contradicts the obviously contrived narrative. Yes there was a famine. Yes it killed more Ukranians in absolute numbers. Yes the Soviet leadership made deliberate decisions that were intended to punish people who were Ukranians. No it wasn’t because they were Ukranian, no it wasn’t because the Soviet leadership thought that ethnic cleansing would achieve their intended goals, no it’s not because the Soviet leadership decided to artificially starve all of those people out of malice or ethnic supremacy.
Yes and proportionally the Romani were murdered by the Nazis at a higher rate than the Jews, but we don’t think of it as the Romani Holocaust. The Russians used a cannon to swat flies and murdered millions and you’re going to carry water for them based on official rationalizations? You sound like an American trying to justify racial red-lining.
Why don’t you take a knee and admit you don’t understand the situation and the context. At the end of the day, Soviet institutions were run by people, people with conditioned biases and baggage. I might have some sympathy for their ideological goals, but I will not overlook their atrocities. The Russians were ruled by monsters then, just like they are ruled by monsters now and the window dressing of their official ideology makes little difference.
…Youve just proven how thoroughly propagandized you are. loool. nato has always wanted you to remember the Holocaust as ‘a jEwS oNlY’ genocide cause they have wanted and have clearly succeeded, in convincing you that Isntreal has a right to exist cause of the Holocaust lol.
Thats why globally most Holocaust museums and even synagogues are run by fanatical zionists https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPostCdgViI&t=2278s&pp=ygUodGhlcmUgaXMgbm8gZ2xvYmFsIHJpc2UgaW4gYW50aSBzZW1pdGlzbQ%3D%3D , … https://tariqacknickulous.substack.com/p/99-of-jewish-american-organizations nato won. ANd people like you continue and continue to prove that theyve won the information war.
👏🏼👏🏽👏🏿Give yourself an applaid for being so thoroughly fooled anout the Holocaust AND the Sovoet Famine of 1932 you are. Nicely done ‘lEfTiSt’ . Nicely done 🥳👏🏿👏🏾👏🏽
Lol try picking up a book or looking up a study for once in your life 😂🤣🤭
Oh good. You’re one of those. No genius, people focus on the Jewish genocide because it was objectively more deaths. I’m the one that pointed out the Romani were hit harder proportionally and their murder was no less horrific. Two things can be true at the same time. I pointed it out because your red herring about the Kazakhs was bait. The fact that they targeted more than one ethnic group when starving people to death does not make it less of an atrocity, or any less of a parallel to other contemporary ethnic cleansing. Tyrants are going to be tyrants, irrespective and regardless of what philosophy they hide behind.
But go off child. Explain it like my own family didn’t lose people in holodomor and many other acts of cruelty, while others perpetrated crimes of their own. I bet you think your hands are clean too. I know a lot of Israelis do. Personally I’m more supportive of the Jews who know what’s being done in their name is wrong. Unfortunately most of them aren’t there to stop it. The ones that are there tend to be the ones who claim to know the history, but learned precisely the wrong lesson from it. And you’re walking the same damn road. The same road people have been walking since Sumer and Akkad. Why don’t you pick up a new book child, I’ve picked up many. The most misguided people I know are the one’s that only read one book and think they understand the whole story.
Do you have a link to tankies denying there was an unwanted famine?
Holodomor was an unwanted famine that was redurected (food taken from farmers). Later wider famines were made worse mostly by Lysenkoism. A con-job which effected Russia and China.
Yet Communism is compared to Nazi? That’s what’s ridiculous liberal/right propaganda.
What happened is much more forgivable (although still regrettable) than what say the millions killed by the East India companies through intentional famines under Capitalism (done for profit), or the hundreds of millions in war dead from Capitalism in the past 30 years.
That’s much more recent, but some redirected famine from the 1930s keeps coming up when talk of Socialism makes wealthy liberals a little too uncomfortable.
What is an “unwanted famine”? Nobody wanted a famine. Lysenko was wrong, and the government backed him because they didn’t know he was wrong. It was a mistake, not a deliberate strategem to harm people.
That’s … maybe not quite the flex you think it is.
If its nit quite thr flex that they think it is please explain how ? (you wont be able to but please go right on ahead 🍿🤭)
Ill just say now that your argument is that Slavic people and Chinese people are not allowed to be dumb once in a while so good lucck arguing that seeing as how they are humans. Go ahead. The floor is yours …
Exactly.
As a .ml user, I hereby denounce the states’ rights to own slaves for which this war was fought. The confederates were not fighting against “the west”, they were fighting for racism and bigotry.
However, I do offer critical support to Hasan Piker, and think Americans should take a long hard look at foreign policy which led to the 9/11 attack. It’s the worst it’s ever been now, giving taxpayer dollars to Israel for them to purchase American politicians and order them to bankroll and provide cover for ongoing genocide and destabilization of the region so that Israel can steal more land. Like owning slaves, rank imperialism and land theft is wrong, especially post-globalization.
hasan piker has become nothing more than a Liberal zionist and BadEmpanada has been able to provee that like twice.
hasan himself proved that when he endorsed fucking brad lander of all people…wtf?!
I’m not entering this argument, but I can see how “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” may be a thought process there.
Yeah, in a vacuum, sounds like a solid idea. Russia isn’t that friend, though.
I think the argument is:
It’s super weird when Liberals forget about Iraq, Afghanistan, Indigenous Genocides, Racial Profiling and the war on terror, Gitmo, Palestine, and Slavery all at once.
“Oh but in the past China and Russia had famines”.
They don’t realize they’re effected by 100 years of conservative messaging.
That is the thought process being mocked, yes
I mean I kinda get it. The biggest obstacle to World Peace today is the US. So you could make the argument that anything that opposes US Hegemony gets us closer to world peace. Idk that I would go so far as to “support Russia” but I understand the logic.
Please don’t defend them. These kinds of arguments lack any kind of deeper thought or nuance. It’s literally just trolling and straw-men. Do not feed the trolls.
I mean that’s what Zionists say about Pro Palestine group. That’s what Americans said about resistance groups in the middle east. That’s what Americans said about the Natives.
I just disagree with this entire philosophy. You should be able understand an argument you disagree with.
I didn’t say don’t understand them, I’m saying they’re literally not thinking that deeply about it. They want to get a rise out of you and someone showed them they can do that by opening with a straw-man like this. By deliberately misrepresenting what “Tankie” means they can completely disarm it and force you to defend a position they chose, which they know is indefensible. It’s pure rhetorical strategy, they don’t actually know or care what a Tankie thinks. They’re trying to make the word mean something it never has and never should mean. Is it possible someone on their side has done some work to rationalize their twisted interpretation. That rationalization is usually paper thin and almost no one on their side knows or cares about it besides its usefulness as a tactical fallback. They don’t believe any of this, its a rhetorical game and the point is their nihilistic disregard for consequences.
That sounds like a description of every troll. Tbh I keep hearing tankie thrown around, but I’ve never had the conversations people who complain about it have.
Tankie is a general term for someone who thinks there is a clear justification to use force or the threat of force to impose a socialist system on a state. The term originates with people who supported the USSR “Sending in the tanks” to annex other countries and crush dissent from people in their sphere. They are what people mean when they “If you go far enough left, you get your guns back.” These days they tend to be a tiny minority within the rather small minority of actual leftists. They do exist, and some of them are pretty out there, but not the way the .ml crowd tends to characterize them. They’re terrified of them, because in their heads the most terrifying thing in the world is a leftist that is willing to fight back, and they don’t recognize anything that doesn’t kill someone as “fighting.”
Wait so .ml isn’t a community of tankies? I’ve been on here for 6 months and I just assumed that .ml was tankie central based on how people talk.
And sealioning, can’t forget that.
Blocking them and moving on is usually the best option. They’ll ruin your day given the chance.
Oh and if they violate the rules of where they’re posting, report them before blocking.
I think this explanation makes the meme even more confusing 😭
The Confederacy was fighting against the United States. Under tankie logic, that must mean that they’re virtuous and attempting to build communism. In reality, they were fighting to preserve chattel slavery.
Okay but Lenin considered the US Civil to be good actually
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/aug/20.htm
Yes. But these topics about tankies are about reinforcing ‘us/them’ rationalizations for those who already have their prejudice. The comments here certainly do.
By providing a critical thinking from Lenin, you instead become the tankie, and therefore become incapable of critical thinking, per the meme. Therefore anything Lenin might’ve said or written can just be dismissed.
And so the tankie can be mocked as a confederate chud nonetheless.
I had to read this a few times because I am high and thought you were being serious 😭
I don’t want to people to think I’m knowledgeable or well read or anything I just googled it because I wasn’t sure what the meme was trying to say.
And? You seem to be under the delusion that tankies have actually read anything by their heroes.
I think you’re mistaking the lunatic left for the lunatic right. The left usually did their homework at least. Better than the right who refuse to acknowledge what they call “Capitalism” has nothing to do with the foundational principles of the theory.
This is a straw man. Tankie logic clearly understands the concept of factions and factional disputes within a larger system. The US had two major bourgeois factions within it - agrarian raw materials producers/merchants and industrialists. These two factions were fighting for their faction’s existence and ultimately the power to dominate their colonized subjects in the way that seemed most beneficial to their faction.
If you aren’t American: Depicted are American civil war reenactors with the flag of the Confederacy which seceded from the Union of the United States in the 19th century due to built up tensions regarding slavery. The Confederacy were ultimately fighting to keep slavery as a government institution.
The target of the joke are tankies (described briskly above), which we will see on Lemmy, often see any action taken against the US or the EU (the West) as praiseworthy, blatantly disregarding or downplaying equivalent or worse actions from non-western nations.
The subversion of expectation here is that a tankie would see the pro-slavery Confederacy as praiseworthy because they’re fighting the US government, despite the Confederacy’s blatantly immoral cause.
Caveat - I say this with bias as someone explicitly against authoritarian bootlickers, like tankies.
Thank you for your efforts, I really do appreciate it. It makes discussion a lot more accessable to people who do not know the details of US history. I am not american myself but unfortunately I have family who live in Kennesaw. I hope that’s self explanatory 🥲
I guess the joke doesn’t make sense because Lenin thought it was based that the civil war happened because slavery is wack.
You need to tell that to the tankies. We already know it here. They are the ones having problems understanding that.
Sorry tell the tankies what?
Tankies: “Any enemy of the US is my ally”.
It is a zero sum game for them. They are incapable of thinking that while the US sucks, their enemies can also suck.
Strawman. Tankies literally have a phrase for this. It’s called “critical support”, which means supporting the efforts of anti-imperialism while reserving the right to criticize without that critique rising to the level of reversing the support for the anti-imperialist action
Who is “them” exactly here? Are you listening to teenagers on TikTok and extrapolating a whole ideology here? Tankies aren’t anti-American by definition. Someone is feeding you some pretty twisted propaganda.
The kind of revolutionaries they support are morally bankrupt. Like Che Guevara was a complete dick who committed war crimes in order to help install an authoritarian regime in Cuba. Or how Mao got more people killed than anyone in human history and not just his enemies, his supporters too.
What was confusing was the example chosen because it is something Lenin had a position on. Which was the opposite of what was shown. I am coming to understand it’s meant as an absurd example to criticize “tankies” but I guess this example only makes sense if you don’t know that.
I’m also confused about the usage of critical support being contrasted to critical thinking because critical support means applying critical thinking to a situation instead of blanket support. But I guess if you aren’t looking at something with the same values that can be hard to see.
Edit: used an abelist term without realizing it.
Lenin agreed with the union, because slavery is bad. Tankies, because they cherry pick the history they pay attention to would likely ignore that and cheer for the Confederacy. It’s what they do. It’s not that confusing.
I thought tankies was a rude name for Marxist Leninists? I couldn’t tell if the meme was making fun of people who use the term tankie or Marxist Leninists which is why I said I didn’t get it, but I get it now.
Because it doesn’t make sense.