My first months on Lemmy were spent on Lemmy.world, which was the biggest instance at the time. I had no experience with Hexbear because .world had defederated that instance. I sometimes saw it being described as a “tankie” instance, but it was nothing specific.
After I moved to .zip, I came across !games@hexbear.net, which seemed to be free from anything overtly political and reminded me of r/Gamingcirclejerk, so I subscribed to it and occasionally made comments related to gaming.
Today I made multiple comments to a post about an article on the STALKER game developers having removed the Soviet symbols and the Russian audio in the remastered edition of the game. I would argue that in the thread, there were no comments from me that could be construed by a reasonable person as defensive of Nazism, fascism, or even hinting at it. For example, in one of the comments, I linked a Ukrainian law that prohibits the use of Nazi symbols, though I highly advise looking through all my ten comments as to avoid any misunderstanding or false impressions.
Conversely, one comment posted by another user dismissed Holodomor as Nazi propaganda, which I reported, but a moderator of that community just ended up calling me out for that and taking no action, followed by them banning me.
The thread containing all of my untouched posts is still available via lemmy.zip. My comments are also available for viewing via my user page. They are not available on hexbear due to the ban.
Hexbear tankies really are something incredible. I’ve been around left-wing politics most of my life and in the real world I’ve met like one or two people actually like them. Difficult to understand where they all came from. I’m thinking maybe it’s a r/Pyongyang where it started as a joke and then they started taking it seriously.
They came from the response to rising right wing authoritarianism
No I do not condone or endorse tankies, just telling you why there are so many of them now
Reactionaries, in a nutshell
r/chapostraphouse, if that subreddit rings any bells. Lemmy was the place they came for refuge after getting nuked off of Reddit for brigading (shocking, I know).
I don’t remember such aggressive Russian and Chinese propaganda on that sub
I think that the nature of the community has changed, whatever it was before certainly doesn’t reflect who they are now — aside from the brigading.
I think they’re just the people who’ve gorged themselves on the most propaganda
I call them the MAGA of the left, they hate it, but they’re just as big of zealots for their own beliefs as MAGA is, they defend tyrants who’s values appear to align with theirs on paper and don’t understand the concept of nuance.
They believe in only black and white and the idea that gray exists, and the thought they could be (are) morally gray, along side almost everyone else, is intolerable to them, they have to be “Good”, no shades of gray allowed and the way they prove it to themselves is by constant virtue signaling and purging to stay on top of the imagined “morally pure” pyramid they’ve convinced themselves exist - a lot of them are ableist and don’t consider disabled people in their grand schemes
Life is messy, people are imperfect, they’re almost never a completely correct option that serves everyone equally. They want logic, which is simply making something internally consistent, context is irrelevant, they do not want philosophy which strives to incorporate as much context as possible in order to come to a conclusion
I agree, most of the tankies we’re plagued with online simply don’t exist in irl leftist spaces, because no one likes them and most people in irl spaces understand that you don’t get to call yourself a leftist and support authoritarianism in the same sentence.
If a tankie ever went public in the Baltics countries and said that shit out loud they would immediately get a well deserved beating. From some perspectives they’re equivalent to nazi sympathizers because thats what they basically are.
I know. I was fuming watching some halfwitt useful idiot propagandist saying that the animosity many Polish people have for Rusisia is a product of propaganda and not, y’iknow, the USSR’s horrendous treatment of their country in the 20th century.
I know. The same thing happened with The_Donald. It started out as a meme space. It’s where Donnie as “The God Emperor” all started. But then people actually started taking it seriously.
So I guess we have Reddit to blame for the situation that America is in right now.
Thanks Reddit!
In the comments to their repost of my post here, they’re mocking my use of the word politics, but it’s all twisted like you described. On Gamingcirclejerk, it’s used satirically to mock bigots who say that people of color, trans people or women are political and thus unwanted in video games, but here in the Hexbear reading I’m suddenly the same as those people for not expecting a gaming community to be about the actual politics of authoritarian communism.
alot of cities, or regions were infiltrated by other right wingers, or tankies in the subreddits.
I wouldn’t be surprised if these aren’t real people or they are being manipulated by very effective propaganda the same way the qanon are.
If you look objectively, the various tankie movements are a net negative when it comes to promoting socialist ideologies. Its having an inverse effect of whatever they’re trying to accomplish.