Anonymous #1 1w

If you use the words “tankie” or “anarkiddy” unironically you are definitely a deeply unserious person

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Anonymous #2 1w

I am admittedly quite fond of “suckdem” but socdems literally believe in capitalism so I think that’s different.

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Anonymous #2 1w

But you would never hear that shit out of my mouth irl, because I understand that you gotta be nice to the socdems to get them to stop being socdems

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Anonymous #1 1w

I would like to point out Tankie as being a direct pejorative of people who deny the atrocities of authoritarian communists. The most famous example is the genocide denier, Noam Chomsky.

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Anonymous #4 1w

Chomsky is a genocide denier?

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Anonymous #3 1w

Of the Bosnian genocide perpetrated by Serbian forces under the socialist president Milosevic. He also has handwaved away communist atrocities in former soviet bloc countries of being not even bad when compared to US backed dictators in South America. Chomsky penned articles in support of fucking Pol Pot while Pot was genociding Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Chinese people.

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Anonymous #3 1w

He has intentionally misrepresented academic articles to defend Milosevic’s war crimes because Chomsky’s simps for the last European socialist regime from the 20th century.

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Anonymous #4 1w

I don’t think Chomsky argues “Milosevic good” as much as he argues “NATO bad” and that the US would not have engaged in that “humanitarian intervention” if Milosevic had been doing the same human rights violations minus the socialism. Which I think is true and shown by the historical record, the US doesn’t give a single solitary fuck about human rights, except as a cudgel against regimes they already have a problem with.

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Anonymous #4 1w

America always talks about human rights when we wanna go to some dumb ass war somewhere, but we’re also besties for the resties with the Saudi royal family. Human rights are nothing but a playing card to the liberal empires, to be played when it suits them and put back in the deck when it doesn’t.

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Anonymous #4 1w

I didn’t know all that. The information landscape was also a lot different at that time so I wonder if he’s changed those stances

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Anonymous #3 1w

He still makes them. He told an audience to their face in Czechia back in 2010 that their fight for freedom from Soviet tyranny wasn’t a big deal compared to Central and South America. He still defends Serbian war criminals who perpetrated the Srebrenicia massacare. He never walked back his defense of Pol Pot after the Vietnamese Army discovered how much Brother #1 exterminated minority populations.

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Anonymous #2 1w

Yes and I am not someone who will go to bat on American intervention. Clinton sent the marines to stop the Serbians from bombing tens of thousands of civilians, and from running rape camps for women and girls as young as fucking 12. That was one singular use of American peacekeeping that worked. And I will walk it back to say that it doesn’t balance out the 10s of thousands of Iraqi civilians that died during Desert Storm and is a focal point for so much ME conflict since then.

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Anonymous #2 1w

To agree with you. Fuck the Saudis. They kill journalists and dissenters, while using oil money to bomb Yemeni civilians with weapons the US sends them.

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Anonymous #4 1w

I’d never defend Pol Pot or Milosevic, but I’ll point out that the Marxist Leninist projects of the 20th century accomplished incredible things for humanity before they were vanquished. China, for example, has raised more people out of pocket than ever before in human history

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Anonymous #1 1w

My counterpoint for China is that Marx-Leninist is overstated because China has a 2000 year track record of mobilizing thousands or millions of people at a time for great works or for very effectively administering millions of people under one incredibly strong central government. Marxism in China would not have taken off without the institutional history the country already had established. Barring when the royal dynasties collapsed in 1911.

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Anonymous #1 1w

Did ML market practices work? To an extent sure. But I must underscore that China has done things at a different scale for so long, Marxist ideology would not have the same success for a country that size without effective, centralized administration.

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Anonymous #4 1w

That’s disappointing to hear since many of his writings have been hugely influential on leftist philosophy and ideas and are quite poignant.

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Anonymous #3 1w

He is an important figure in the fields of linguistics and political philosophy. But he also commits academic dishonesty in the name of defending crimes of socialist/communist regimes that have the blood of millions on their hands.

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Anonymous #4 1w

What about the soviet union’s role in decolonizing the world? What about it’s heroic patronage of states like Cuba that were under siege because they dared to exercise their sovereignty? How come almost everyone you meet in Russia misses the USSR dearly and will freely tell you how its collapse was the biggest disaster of their lives?

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Anonymous #4 1w

Then how come that massive poverty reduction only occurred under socialism, and not any time previously in Chinese history?

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Anonymous #4 1w

That said I’m not saying that one can jump immediately to an ML style state or that it could be implemented anywhere, in America it would have to take on a more decentralized character ofc

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Anonymous #1 1w

The Soviet Union didn’t decolonize. Russia is in fact an empire state, then as now, that did subjugate millions. That said, its structure provided consistency and stability meaning food and healthcare that many saw great benefits from. Those sort of socialist structures can be seen in former soviet bloc countries as a means of caring for their populace.

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Anonymous #1 1w

Poverty reduction certainly occurred at a wide scale thanks to a lot of ML structures, I will not discount that. What I do need to bring to your attention is that poverty reduction wasn’t without tens of millions dying of starvation in the great leap forward because of incredibly misguided farming and industry practices that were upended before Mao died. Those structures to mobilize and collectivize helped but it will not have happened in China without existing institutional structures…

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Anonymous #4 1w

…that make up Chinese bureaucracy. I’m not going to point at free market economics lifting millions from poverty by the 80’s. But the increase of globalization made for China to be a premier destination for the largest labor pool on planet earth.

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Anonymous #1 1w

As for previous times in Chinese history not lifting people out of poverty, their meritocracy did allow for commoners to rise through the ranks by their own ability. But monarchy is monarchy and the Chinese emperors lived in their own universes, ignorant of the difficult lives of the rice farmers who fed his worthless ass until the Mandate of Heaven said “No.”

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Anonymous #4 1w

Caveat on meritocracy. It was exploited by wealthy elites. This news should be of no surprise to anyone in this thread.

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Anonymous #1 1w

For people missing the USSR, well you’d certainly miss a time in your life where food and pensions were secured and there were great works in housing millions. That cannot be disputed. There are old people who miss Tito for that reason, as monstrous as he was. No one in Romania misses Ceausescu.

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