One of the biggest topics of these days is that of mods in lemmy.ml banning and censoring people because they’re Tankies. This has had a rather sizeable discussion of people agreeing and even arguing for defederating ml. I’m sure a lot of people are arguing from good intentions, but there’s also bad faith actors among them, as I will try to show in this post. The original post was based on the moderation history of the ml instance so I respond in a similar fashion.
I browsed through the discussion for a while, and stumbled upon a comment of someone who had created an instance in response, namely de_ml@lemmy.blahaj.zone The original post in about the moderation in ml has to do with the Tiananmen Square Massacre, so I decided to make a few posts in this new instance about other historical facts which are less discussed, but that we should remember too, namely the Bengal Famine and the US support of fascism in Spain.
Initially these posts were well received and had some upvoted, but after a while I got a notification that one of them had been banned. To my surprise, I looked at the mod log of the instance and found this. So, both posts being about historical atrocities committed by capitalist countries were either banned or locked, and I had been banned from the community altogether for the reason “commie?”
I checked through the admin’s history of comments and found this.
Is this admin, who censors posts that talk about historical grievances committed by capitalism, who pins “fuck Tankies” to the instance, really a person without an agenda trying to protect a community from a supposed malignant moderation, or is it someone with an agenda trying to call everyone to the left of centrism a Tankie?
We should, in my opinion, be careful with accusing and polarising one of the biggest communities in Lemmy away, which is full of non-political content, and really examine what’s going on and what agenda there is behind it.
The second biggest party in Russia is as communist as the biggest party in Germany is socialist: exclusively in name. The communist party of Russia was co-opted, and currently absolutely doesn’t espouse any ideal of communism, the only thing it does is to channel nationalist sentiment of people who were alive during the USSR, and redirect it towards support of the current regime. No communist in the west supports the Russian communist party, and I say this as someone from a western country who is involved in hardcore leftist spaces, where people generally espouse the opinion: “USA is an imperialist country, NATO is a US tool to further their interests and to skew policy outside the US in their favour, but also Putin is a kleptocrat and an olicarch. He pushes fascist policy like degradation of social rights in his homeland, imperialism and expansionism such as the Ukraine war, and he’s a consequence of the dismantling of the USSR and the auctioning of the country to the most corrupt bidder”. Hating NATO and hating Putin are complementary positions, not contradictory, and as I said, in my experience it’s what most hardcore leftists espouse.