Ask Lemmy

Keep it nice people!

Locking. Too many people breaking rule 1.

In my experience the attitude of many of the more prolific users there is something like "America and the West are doing evil things, so their enemies must be the good guys". Atrocities by Western-aligned states are readily accepted as facts, but those committed by countries on "their" side never happened and are merely Western propaganda. They'll cite North Korea's constitution to "prove" that it's a free and democratic country, but when you point out reports showing that the reality on the ground is quite different from what's written in the constitution, that's of course just Western propaganda and the people who fled the country are being paid to spread lies. That dismissive attitude makes it impossible to have a serious discussion with them.

That said, I now have a solid blocklist of their "worst offenders" and found that there are plenty of people with way more balanced opinions as well.

.ml Is made by and ran by Marxist-Leninists.

Marxist-Leninism being an entirely made up bullshit ideology from Stalin to paint any and all actions he committed as "communism" or "progress to communism".

Its also the adopted "ideology" of every self proclaimed communist state such as China, North Korea, Vietnam, etc. Any contradictions of the ideology between how these states practice it is brushed off by M-L fans as "Marxist-Leninism with <INSERT COUNTRY> characteristics".

To a M-L fan, none of the core principles of communism actually matter, and are never actually pursued. They don't care about::

1. Proletariat ownership of the means of production
2. Elimination of the system of Capital
3. Proletariat rule of society

And both hilariously and bafflingly, they will point to what benefits a respective M-L country has as "proof" that that country is following or pursuing communism, even if that country blatantly shows it refuses to adopt those big three above. They also blame the West, specifically the USA for those faux communist countries failing to achieve communism.

I.E. M-L fans fall for bread and circuses very easy as long as they're told its a communist bread and circus

So TL;DR, .ml's are Marxist-Leninists who don't actually care about socialism or communism and are voluntary NPC propaganda machines for authoritarian regimes that abandoned a pursuit of communism long ago.

These people are called "tankies". It's communists who like militarism and imperialism, as long as it's of their own flavor. The internet has many such "bunkers" where these people congregate. They unironically support the countries you mention, and they do not represent the entire left-wing community.

I'd argue that they aren't the result of capitalist policies being shitty. Such communities have existed on the internet since the early 00s. It's just their ideology.

Why are they on lemmy? My guess is that Reddit banned some of their communities for posting violent content (threats of violence etc.) so they moved to lemmy, which does not censor people to the degree Reddit does.

The .ml for lemmy.ml supposedly stands for "marxism leninism".

Short answer: the Kremlin.

Long answer: Kremlin paid propaganda leaking everywhere.

Wait... Do you think the Iron curtain was a literal iron wall?

It's not lemmy.ml as a source, but rather a symptom.

I see two things going on:

1. A general fall in trust in democratic institutions, as those institutions fail to represent people adequately;
2. A clear realization of global injustice perpetuated by democratc countries against the will of people.

There aren't many that that think that Iran's goverment is good for Iranian people, but they do see that they are defending their civilization. This umderstanding requires that the observer is able to maintain two observations at the same time, instead of requoring complete black & white intepretations.

Just block all .ml instances and move to something not lemmy based. Piefed is good. Plus blocking an entire domain fork thing, whatever you call these, is as easy as one click.

Because they don't live under them.

because they believe to make society better you must punish and control the people through fear.

And they fantasize about being the people who get to do this. Because they 'know' better than everyone else how they should live and you need to be 'educated' like they are if you are to be a member of this better society.

mirror images of conservatives, just look at them. they are more closer to liberterian-republicans, too afraid to be called republicans but support thier policies 100%.

Unresolved daddy issues.

Not even joking. Left or right, if you spend more than five minutes talking to somebody on the authoritarian side of the political spectrum, their relationship with their dad WILL get mentioned. They're obsessed with dads.

I can't speak for everyone, but a lot of people have learned to just ignore many reports from international news organizations about anything, since those same organizations routinely repeat the US government's released data, which has been filtered by international conglomerates with their own interests.

This is because those claims are often found to be untrue or wildly exaggerated after the dust settles.

That skepticism is the result of decades of "fake news" leading to a general doubt of any claim as a baseline.

...and that's just for starters.

So, first, you must agree on what the truth is with sources that you can trust. Good luck.

I've read that Iran killed 30,000 people, but can't read Arabic or know the context of images I have seen, and this could be true, however, given the track record of US media, I would consider the number to be wildly exaggerated just as a matter of course.

Also, I know that even IF it is true, that Iran has killed 30,000 protestors, the "good guys" can't stop Iran and "win one for democracy and human civilization" without murdering many magnitudes more.

Anyway, I want to read about the IRON WALL the USSR built to stop people from escaping, please share

(not a tankie, and I think Muslims and all other religions should pay the same taxes as everybody else, which they consider to be a wild affront to their dignity)

I don't have an answer to your primary question, however...

I'm not at all in support of the Iranian regime, but be careful with that 30,000 number. It appears to be propaganda and falsified evidence created to help instill support for the ongoing war. There is also evidence Mossad incited the protests and created a false flag within Iran.

Do your own searching. Or don't. But I'd take that 30k number with a grain of salt.

The iron curtain was not a literal wall. The Berlin Wall was brick and whatever came to hand mostly.

They’re entitled to their opinion. It is wrong, but they are entitled to it. I’ve blocked that instance.

The same reason MAGA does. They want a daddy to force himself on them.

99.99% of users here do not love the regime in Iran, people oppose the war on Iran which goal is to create a failed state that would result millions of death.

Poople who love russia/china believe in the fairy tale of the real world being about good versus evil. Sometimes is about good vs good , sometime bad vs bad and sometime good vs bad

you need to think like a cave man, conspiracy theorist, and an idiot all at the same time. america bad, therefore not-Amera good. Wikipedia is anti-communist propaganda

Define authoritarian in a way that excludes the US and Europe but includes any country you listed.

Because that's Marcist-lenisim?

Stalin named it, and he's the one that set the definition of what that means.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism%E2%80%93Leninism

They don't call it "Stalinism" because that's way harder to defend.

The ones you see online don't even understand it, it literally requires supporting the left most party, but I've never seen a .ml account actually pushing for change thru the two party system, despite that literally being the first step:

Marxism–Leninism holds that a two-stage communist revolution is needed to replace capitalism. A vanguard party, organized through democratic centralism, would seize power on behalf of the proletariat and establish a one-party communist state. The state would control the means of production, suppress opposition, counter-revolution, and the bourgeoisie, and promote Soviet collectivism, to pave the way for an eventual communist society that would be classless and stateless.[12]

Most people online that say they're "ML" don't understand anything about it. They "learned" all they know from unsourced shitposts.

Which is crazy, because this is the closest actual ML has ever come, after trump the Dems are most likely to gain so many seats, it'll effectively be a one party government starting 2029.

If we get a progressive Dem that will name a progressive DNC chair after becoming president, we're fucking there. A one party government that's genuinely for the proletariat.

Any that claims to actually be ML and isn't pushing for the DNC as hard as possible right now is lying about their self professed label, or never understood what it meant

Sometimes i get their love for china or cuba or whatever, but i dont understand the love for russia.... there's nothing remotely communist or pro-worker in russia anymore... its just a bunch of oligarchs like amerikkka (who .ml claims to hate)

the authoritarianism in china has at least raised the standard of living and modernization for most people... but all the lack of freedoms still suck. But it's a deal that most of them happily accept... dont criticize xinnie the pooh, but also have a good standard of living and modern cities.

They are carzy over there don't even try. I once started debating an idea and the answer was "you support american captalism propaganda" These people and just like maga weirdos You can be agains everyone. I don't have to choose between comunism or captalist.

common sense is not for everyone

I've been thinking a lot of about this and my educated guess would be - rising distrust with current institutions and/or bad experience with societal failures.

If you look through history of .ml posters they are mostly in western europe or US and there's always a specific grievance they have like the current societal system did them dirty. Most normal people just realize that all systems are imperfect and sometimes you take an L and continue but there's this trend of sore losers extremists in both far right and far tankie left that just have full identity capture and radicalization because of a one or few conflicts.

I almost fell into these pits myself several times because being owned by a system that doesn't give you sufficient tooling or voice to feedback on does feel really terrible. Especially these days when burying issues is so easy under automation, culture of indifference and political unseriousness.

However, imo most of these are just weak people and I don't necessarily say this as an attack but all societies have weak links that can turn to extremism but that just means we should do a better job correcting for this.

TL;DR: trauma

“Its the antiimperialism of idiots”