It’s a legitimate risk. Rail theft by the mole-people is up 12% in the last quarter.

It’s actually the CPC, the Communist Party of China, the CCP is the Cuban Communist Party, hope this helps

engaging sexual intercourse with the cpc now

So brave!

Why? Because he’s spitting facts? You really need to log off and have some fresh airs outside

You’re such a redditor

It’s also kinda hard to have 99% of people dislike China if 18% of the global population lives there and is very satisfied with their government, not even counting anyone in Russia, other parts of Asia and the Pacific, Central and South America, or Africa.

You’re really showing whose opinions you actually care about. A bunch of propagandized to the brim, comfortable Americans, Canadians, and Europeans

Go read about BRI infrastructure projects in Africa and Asia. The global south is generally very positive about Chinese politics because Chinese give them hospitals and roads and ports.

That’s ridiculous since the Chinese like China and we’re 18% of all humans.

Here’s an article about Americans getting salty that views on China in South America are largely positive as opposed to sub 50% approval rating in English speaking countries.

Here’s Voice of America saying the same thing about Africa and how Africans see China.

Your opinions on China is not only in the minority, it’s a waning minority. Those are western sources I used in case you wanted to cry propaganda.

In the real world 99% of people in US think about where their next meal is going to come from instead of perseverating about China the way you’re doing kid.

What makes it spam? We’re invited to lemmy.ml, it shows up on our homepage the same as it does yours (probably even higher because instances more likely to downvote or ignore political posts don’t link with us atm).

If you meant flooding, it’s not that either. We’re a big instance (1k users weekly) with a general interest in politics and a historical anti-lurking culture, so we’ll be disproportionately active in political threads compared to a general instance like lemmy.ml, just like programming.dev is in tech threads. Are we meant to just not share an opinion because too many other people in the same instance already posted their (different) opinion?

You can just make your own instance where only people with brains as smooth as bowling balls are allowed and defederate with the rest of us. I guarantee you that everyone will be much happier.

Hey there it is!! “Brutal regime” describes things like the ongoing cultural genocide of indigenous peoples, which itself is a continuation of the brutal mass murder and subjugation of those peoples. A BR (brutal regime) does things like enforce debt against Haiti for having the audacity to free itself from slavery and using the debt to ensure the white financiers who bought those slaves don’t lose any money while simultaneously refusing to engage in any form of reparations. A BR separates children from their parents for an an unbroken multi-century program of violent oppression against non-whites. If you rank every country in the world by the most bombs dropped on it, there’s only one BR that is responsible for the top 3 most bombed countries in the history of the world.

But do go on about how those ebil Chinese are so compliant in approving their government for 15 years at a rate of 95% (just ask Harvard) despite that government being a “brutal regime”. Must be something in their culture, right?

It could be that. Or it could be the exact opposite (which it is, would you want to see my hukou?), and the fact that you can’t tell the difference while thinking that you could and that it matters makes you an angry little person.

The Chinese propaganda made to counter the satellite images, testimony from victims, and video evidence consists of some YouTubers visiting the same handful of uncomfortably smiling Uyghur families under the careful eye of Chinese censors and fluff pieces that amount to “nuh-uh”.

China is trying to erase the culture of people within their borders, again, and there is a long tradition of this forced assimilation in China. They are not pluralistic, and don’t want to be, and their attitude towards non-chinese within their borders lead me to have very low expectations on how they will treat minorities outside.

Tankies [1] don’t usually believe that Stalin or Mao “did nothing wrong”, although many do use that phrase for effect (this is the internet, remember). We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the bourgeois politicians who are typically put forward as role models (Washington? Jefferson? JFK? Jimmy Carter?), and that they haven’t been judged according to the same standard as those bourgeois politicians. People call this “whataboutism” [2], but the claim “Stalin was a monster” is implicitly a comparative claim meaning “Stalin was qualitatively different from and worse than e.g. Churchill,” and I think the opposite is the case. If people are going to make veiled comparisons, us tankies have the right to answer with open ones.

To defend someone from an unfair attack you don’t have to deify them, you just have to notice that they’re being unfairly attacked. This is unquestionably the case for Stalin and Mao, who have been unjustly demonized more than any other heads of state in history. Tankies understand that there is a reason for this: the Cold War, in which the US spent countless billions of dollars trying to undermine and destroy socialism [3], specifically Marxist-Leninist states. Many western leftists think that all this money and energy had no substantial effect on their opinions, but this seems extremely naive. We all grew up in ideological/media environments shaped profoundly by the Cold War, which is why Cold War anticommunist ideas about the Soviets being monsters are so pervasive a dogma (in the West).

The reason we “defend authoritarian dictators” is because we want to defend the accomplishments of really existing socialism, and other people’s false or exaggerated beliefs about those “dictators” almost always get in the way — it’s not tankies but normies [4] who commit the synecdoche of reducing all of really existing socialism to Stalin and Mao. Those accomplishments include raising standards of living, achieving unprecedented income equality, massive gains in women’s rights and the position of women vis-a-vis men, defeating the Nazis, raising life expectancy, ending illiteracy, putting an end to periodic famines, inspiring and providing material aid to decolonizing movements (e.g. Vietnam, China, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Indonesia), which scared the West into conceding civil rights and the welfare state. These were greater strides in the direction of abolishing capitalism than any other society has ever made. These are the gains that are so important to insist on, against the CIA/Trotskyist/ultraleft consensus that the Soviet Union was basically an evil empire and Stalin a deranged butcher.

There are two approaches one can take to people who say “socialism = Stalin = bad”: you can try to break the first leg of the equation or the second. Trotskyists take the first option; they’ve had the blessing of the academy, foundation and CIA money for their publishing outfits, and controlled the narrative in the West for the better part of the last century. But they haven’t managed to make a successful revolution anywhere in all that time. Recently, socialism has been gaining in popularity… and so have Marxism-Leninism and support for Stalin and Mao. Thus it’s not the case that socialism can only gain ground in the West by throwing really existing socialism and socialist leaders under the bus.

The thing is, delinking socialism from Stalin also means delinking it from the Soviet Union, disavowing everything that’s been done under the name of socialism as “Stalinist”. The “socialism” that results from this procedure is defined as grassroots, bottom-up, democratic, non-bureaucratic, nonviolent, non-hierarchical… in other words, perfect. So whenever real revolutionaries (say, for example, the Naxals in India) do things imperfectly they are cast out of “socialism” and labeled “Stalinists”. This is clearly an example of respectability politics run amok. Tankies believe that this failure of solidarity, along with the utopian ideas that the revolution can win without any kind of serious conflict or without party discipline, are more significant problems for the left than is “authoritarianism” (see Engels for more on this last point). We believe that understanding the problems faced by Stalin and Mao helps us understand problems generic to socialism, that any successful socialism will have to face sooner or later. This is much more instructive and useful than just painting nicer and nicer pictures of socialism while the world gets worse and worse.

It’s extremely unconvincing to say “Sure it was horrible last time, but next time it’ll be different”. Trotskyists and ultraleftists compensate by prettying up their picture of socialism and picking more obscure (usually short-lived) experiments to uphold as the real deal. But this just gives ammunition to those who say “Socialism doesn’t work” or “Socialism is a utopian fantasy”. And lurking behind the whole conversation is Stalin, who for the average Westerner represents the unadvisability of trying to radically change the world at all. No matter how much you insist that your thing isn’t Stalinist, the specter of Stalin is still going to affect how people think about (any form of) socialism — tankies have decided that there is no getting around the problem of addressing Stalin’s legacy. That legacy, as it stands, at least in Western public opinion (they feel differently about him in other parts of the world), is largely the product of Cold War propaganda.

And shouldn’t we expect capitalists to smear socialists, especially effective socialists? Shouldn’t we expect to hear made up horror stories about really existing socialism to try and deter us from trying to overthrow our own capitalist governments? Think of how the media treats antifa. Think of WMDs in Iraq, think of how concentrated media ownership is, think of the regularity with which the CIA gets involved in Hollywood productions, think of the entirety of dirty tricks employed by the West during the Cold War (starting with the invasion of the Soviet Union immediately after the October Revolution by nearly every Western power), and then tell me they wouldn’t lie about Stalin. Robert Conquest was IRD [5]. Gareth Jones worked for the Rockefeller Institute, the Chrysler Foundation and Standard Oil and was buddies with Heinz and Hitler. Solzhenitsyn was a virulently antisemitic fiction writer. Everything we know about the power of media and suggestion indicates that the anticommunist and anti-Stalin consensus could easily have been manufactured irrespective of the facts — couple that with an appreciation for how legitimately terrified the ruling classes of the West were by the Russian and Chinese revolutions and you have means and motive.

Anyway, the basic point is that socialist revolution is neither easy (as the Trotskyists and ultraleftists would have it) nor impossible (as the liberals and conservatives would have it), but hard. It will require dedication and sacrifice and it won’t be won in a day. Tankies are those people who think the millions of communists who fought and died for socialism in the twentieth century weren’t evil, dupes, or wasting their time, but people to whom we owe a great deal and who can still teach us a lot.

Or, to put it another way: socialism has powerful enemies. Those enemies don’t care how you feel about Marx or Makhno or Deleuze or communism in the abstract, they care about your feelings towards FARC, the Naxals, Cuba, DPRK, etc. They care about your position with respect to states and contenders-for-statehood, and how likely you are to try and emulate them. They are not worried about the molecular and the rhizomatic because they know that those things can be brought back into line by the application of force. It’s their monopoly on force that they are primarily concerned to protect. When you desert real socialism in favor of ideal socialism, the kind that never took up arms against anybody, you’re doing them a favor.

from https://redsails.org/tankies/