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TLDR: they are right-wingers pretending to be left wing
I love this image. Something that always confused me is that they are communist, but support russia? An extremely far right government?
Authoritarians like authoritarian regimes. They'll perform extreme mental gymnastics to reconcile their preconceived notions with reality, like the tankies that declare China to be socialist. Also, most of them see the US as the Great Satan that is responsible for any and all evil in the world. Therefore anybody who opposes the Great Satan must be good.
I can't help but wonder if tankies are the political equivalent of flat-earthers. I should probably ask that on NSQ some time, when I can figure out a way of asking that won't get me banned.
One way forward is to ask them for evidence for their viewpoints and investigate their sources for errors. The problem of the flat-earther is that there is objective evidence of a 3D rounded Earth that they can't adequately counter with objective evidence.
The only problem with that is that I don't have the political knowledge to be able to counter their responses, and nobody else responds to the thread, so it kind of dies there. If for instance they say (as they have) that North Korea is a perfectly normal country, I don't have any location-specific knowledge to be able to respond to that, and I'm aware our own media have their own agendas so I've no way of knowing objectively who's right.
North Korea is a particularly tough topic to have objectivity on. On one hand, their isolation in itself means they're not a typical country by any interpretation, and not gonna lie I'd be surprised if even their supporters claimed it was perfectly normal. On the other hand, its portrayal in the media is highly propagandized, to the point where some defectors (e.g. Yeonmi Park) have made ridiculous claims like that citizens sometimes push a passenger train to work in power outages, and reputable news outlets simultaneously report that everyone must have the same haircut as Kimmy and that having that haircut is also illegal, or claiming multiple officials have been executed with an anti-aircraft gun but it turns out they're alive. It's hard to have a meaningful discussion when this is the information we're given to work with! While NK is often open for work and tourism (albeit stricter tourism than in most countries) and those tourists often enough share videos or write articles, they're enough to get a peak inside and learn that ok, it's not a literal cartoon place, they have a water park and rail with a nicer metro than my city and people's lives are much closer to normal than what we often hear, but there's only so much we can really learn from these foreigners' experiences.
Some of the big points that often get overlooked are:
But, at the end of the day, with all that context, I would never call North Korea normal or typical, just nowhere near as bizarre as the mass media portrayal from even reputable outlets. And I suppose that's why some (imo silly) people will overcompensate and try to say that they're just the same as other countries.
What are you talking about? They usually counter with a whole monograph, with links to receipts, like you got just now.
That’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
America is largely fine. The problem it has is a violently coercive economic model that forces people to be profitable to other people or risk destitution, homelessness, or even death by exposure, and a political system that is militaristic, imperialistic, and dysfunctional.
My favourite quote is this:
There's no support for the Russian Federation. Support for the USSR? Absolutely, but not the RF. There's critical support, as in the RF currently takes an antagonistic stance towards the United States, which many Leftists see as the greater global evil, but no leftist genuinely thinks the RF is doing that out of "good intentions" or has any model that Leftists should replicate.
That sums it up.
I’ve spoken to plenty who were way too sympathetic to Putins ‘Ukrainians are Nazis’ chat with complete disregard of the nuances.
Wait, really? The ones responsible for, among other things, the Holodomor? Those guys? Why?!
Marxists support the USSR as the world's first Socialist State. They don't believe it was some perfect wonderland free from troubles, issues, problems, etc, rather, they acknowledge that the USSR was real Socialism with real victories, like free healthcare and education, an elimination of famine in a country where starvation was regular, doubled life expectancies, dramatically lowered wealth inequality while dramatically raising wages, and over tripled literacy rates to near 100%.
Hexbear aren't unique in general support for the Soviet Union, the overwhelming majority of Marxists see it as far better than Tsarist Russia and the modern Russian Federation.
"doubling" the life expectancy? Life expectancy was 30 years old prior to the USSR forming in 1922, so yes "doubling" to 67 took until 1967, and before they doubled it, they dropped it to 23.6 years old. Tens of millions of Soviet citizens died early deaths to get there. Starvation didn't end for many and rationing was commonplace. I suppose killing off a sizable portion of your population would mean less mouths to feed, but what a horrible approach to try to solve that problem.
Perhaps a better measure would be infant mortality. The USA, with its "worse" healthcare, has had consistently less than half infant mortality (or even lower) for every year the Soviet Union existed.
...in Russian. If you spoke a different language, like Ukrainian, it was forbidden by USSR law from teaching it in schools. This happened to dozens of languages in other Oblasts.
On the surface this looks good, but that would be with a Western view of what earned wages could buy. Even with money there was limited food to buy for decades at a time during the Soviet Union. Further, you couldn't just do something like go a buy a car. You had to get on a wait list for years to even have an option to buy one.
Better than the final Tsar or Putin, probably, but those are both really low bars to gauge a win by.
I'm not saying everything about the Soviet Union was bad, but holding it up as an example to aspire to would be rejected by most folks that would be forced to live that life (or die an early death under its heel as a consequence of actions of the state). Do the Marxists you're referring to really pine to live in 1940s or 1950s Soviet Union?
A bit dishonest to point to the drops in life expectancy and the general 1940s and 1950s period without mentioning World War II, where the Nazis waged a war of extermination and genocide on those they considered genetically inferior, don't you think? Same with comparing a highly developed country that saw no land fighting in World War II to the country devastated the most by it that was a feudal backwater only a couple decades prior when it comes to infant mortality. The bit on literacy is also misleading, the vast majority of all SSRs pre-Socialism were illiterate.
Outside of curiously leaving out World War 2 and the massive devastation it brought (80% of combat in World War 2 was on the Eastern Front), as well as comparing directly to the United States that never saw the same destruction and started the century several laps ahead, your only real criticism was a lack of consumer goods. This is true, light industry was lacking and being closed off from the Global Economy was indeed a contributing factor to its dissolution, but you could have pointed to that honestly.
No, most Marxists don't want to go back in time to the first Socialist state, they would rather learn from what worked and what didn't and be part of building a Communist future.
No I don't think so. For one reason part of the massive losses were Soviet Military tactics of meatwaves (which Russia still uses today) during WWII. For another, the Holomodor was an extra 10 million citizens of the USSR starved to death that occurred long before WWII when Stalin took all the grain from the people that grew it and let them starve to death. Starving your farmers to death is a monumentally stupid decision for a nation that struggles with food supply. This is the hypocrisy of Soviet Communism. Marx and Engels wrote about empowering the masses, equality in everything, and society without class or station. Yet the USSR was anything but that. History shows that the actions of the state saw massive numbers of dead citizens as a means to an end in both war and peace. Trotsky himself was a victim of the Stalin's USSR. Famous and brilliant Soviet orbital rocket designer Sergei Korolev, was another victim dying from complications from living in gulag. Do you think Marx and Engels would have seen their ideas at work in the Soviet Union?
The infant mortality was more than double the USA every year for the entire existence of the USSR. Or are you claiming WWII was still to blame for the higher infant mortality 45 years after Hitler ate a bullet ending war in the European theater?
Is there consensus in the Marxist community about any nation today practicing this Communism 2.0 or is it all just political theory at this point?
You don't think it's important to consider that the specific life expectancy you reported as a cause of Socialism was in-fact during World War II, when the Nazis invaded the Ukrainian SSR (the whole USSR's breadbasket at the time), deliberately starving the populace in an attempt to weaken them? Where the Nazis torched the land they took and destroyed so many buildings that the Soviets were forced to mass produce the "Soviet Bloc" style apartments in order to provide housing after the war? Slavic people were considered genetically inferior by the Nazis and were subject to genocide.
As for the "human waves" tactics, reports of such originate with Americans that went into Russia during the Civil War in order to support the fascist White Army that wished to reinstate the Tsar. Not only is this a dubious source at best, historians agree that during World War II Soviet Tactics were roughly on par with the Nazis. The "Human Waves" myth has always drawn on racism, trying to draw parallels between the asiatic slavic peoples and the idea of the Mongol Horde, a propaganda tactic employed by Goebbels.
There was famine in the USSR, during the 1930s and during World War II. Outside of those periods, food became far more secure over time, as collectivized agriculture was better than the previous system.
As for comparing to thr US, that's akin to comparing a trust fund kid to someone who grew up poor. The United States began the 20th century as one of the most developed countries in the world, while Russia began as a semi-feudal backwater. In the mid 20th century, the US began to profit massively off of World War II, while the Eastern Front saw 80% of the total combat in the entirety of the war. To compare the two directly is just bad science.
As for Marx and Engels, they would see the analytical tools and analysis of Capitalism and classes being used in the Soviet Union and would have generally approved. Today, they'd see the various Marxist states like Cuba, China, and Vietnam learning from the successes and failures of the Soviet Union and likeky approve as well. However, such a thought experiment doesn't mean much, as Marx was no prophet nor a god, just a man who developed a brilliant critique of Capitalism, philosophical framework of Dialectical and Historical Materialism, and broadly described Scientific Socialism as opposed to prior Utopianism.
Is that the technical term? I'm guessing your source for that is Enemy at the Gates lmao.
Soviet military tactics in WWII were quite innovative and effective. The Soviets developed the military category of "Operations," in between the levels of the strategic and the tactical. Soviet operations focused on breaching the enemy line in order to deal as much damage as possible to the support crew, then evaluating whether the position could be held and frequently withdrawing before reinforcements could arrive. This was reflective of communist ideology, which emphasized the importance of unglamorous work, and therefore, targeted the unglamorous work of the enemy during wartime.
This was in stark contrast to their adversaries, who held the exact opposite ideology act acted accordingly. The Nazis were obsessed with proving their superiority at every turn, and also terrified of disappointing their superiors. The Soviet approach of tactically retreating after a successful breach would've been unthinkable and ridiculed (and punished) as weak and cowardly. The Nazis had little formal doctrine and their military reports were generally full of lies and fluff to impress their superiors, while the Soviets took a much more rigorous and almost scientific approach.
The heroic efforts of the Soviets were the primary reason the world was saved from fascism, and it is absolutely absurd to lay the blame for the men, women, and children who were killed - including the brutal, indiscriminate mass slaughter and burning alive of civilians - at the feet of the people who put the perpetrators in their graves.
"Tankie" here, russia sucks
What makes you a "tankie" if you don't share their beliefs?
If you agree that "russia sucks" make someone not a tankie, then you'll conclude that 99% of Hexbear are not tankies.
Can you go over there and get a poll started?
Russia and China. The two groups who are well documented to use tanks against their citizens; hence the name. A tankie is someone who defends that, at least historically.
People usually call me a tankie
You called yourself a tankie
we don't, we just hate the us more.
It's obvious you hate yourselves most.
how so?
See, this is why capitalization matters.
im not a native speaker but wouldnt the word for this in this context be "ourselves"?
What does the Y axis represent here?
Technically, the X-axis doesn't represent anything either, as the far-right plot point curves upward, rather than continuing.
The amount of mental gymnastics being done to justify their ideology
Mental gymnastics is the term given to people who read books by the mental couch and potato chip crowd.
Separation from reality, maybe?
"Y" is the name of one of the major meme/shitpost contributors on lemmy.ml
It looks like another way of drawing the political compass left/right (collective vs individual rights) on the x axis and authoritarian/libertarian (obedience to centralized authority hierarchy vs distributed political pluralism) on the y axis. Tankies and far right would be in auth q1 and q2, far left q3, and not representing q4 labeling the quadrants from top left clockwise.
It's a reference to horseshoe theory with the addition of the left wing where it's actually democratic as opposed to communism authoritarianism which can resemble fascist authoritarianism in a war economy.
"tankies" (aka Marxist-leninists) fully believe in Democracy - they just reject the idea that neoliberal two party American democracy is the be all and end all.
For some reason they are more pro Russian suppression state, Chinese one-party censorship state and even apologise for DPRK. It's pretty tall order to call any of those democratic. Then from my discussion with tankies they often advocate for an armed revolution which are very undemocratic in their nature and often lead to one-party states or a military junta government.
Marxist-Leninism is a democratic ideology but the way tankies talk doesn't sound very democratic to me.
They really aren't. I keep seeing .worlders assert this but I've never seen it there. China and DPRK yes, but not Russia. (I also do consider China to be at least as democratic as western countries, not so much Korea, but I don't mind hearing opposing views.)
Is it the way tankies talk that make it sound not democratic to you? Or it the biases you went in with?
Why would supposed right-wingers be holding Leftist theory reading groups, hosting mutual aid comms, donating to Palestinian gofundmes, and supporting trans rights to some of the highest degrees on the fediverse? Irony? Seems like a silly hypothesis.
Okay, that is legit hilarious and makes so much sense in retrospect.