It is inappropriate to suggest, in the middle of a Mossad/US hasbara operation, to provide suggestions for Iran governance. Permitting Zionazi speech results in Zionazi rule in democracies. Whether you said something dumb instead of hasbara, referring to Mossad paid rioters as protestors was the faux pas that overstepped their senstivities.

Regarding the original comment, I don't believe it deserves deletion, let alone a lifetime ban. In my opinion, it was written in good faith and is in no way propaganda. As for the Crimethinc article, it's clearly not "imperialist propaganda" as well, but rather wishful thinking. If you read it carefully, you can easily conclude that there is no third "leftist" option for Iran, since the article fails to do the most important thing – name those "leftist orgs in Iran" that could have a real impact and that "need international solidarity now". When Iran truly could have taken a different path – in the late 1970s and early 1980s – there were many diverse leftist organizations, ranging from Tudeh to MEK, from Fadaiyan-e-Khalq to Sarbedaran, that waged open war against both the Shah's and the Ayatollahs' regimes. Nothing like that exists now, and the Crimethinc article actually confirms this, regardless of the authors' intentions. So, in modern Iran, there is nothing but a few left-leaning individuals with very limited ability to influence anything, and the choice is only between a brutal theocracy and a Trump-loving shahzadeh.

Firmly a PTB. Holy shit .ml is never going to ever stop being like this. "Left unity" once again just means Anarchists have to obey MLs, and MLs never have to listen to anarchists.

PTB.

But it’s .ml, they only care about pushing propaganda and hate non-ML leftist viewpoints.

Also CrimeThinc are fucking awesome and everyone should go check out the great work they do.

PTB. Geneva is a bit of a nutjob and this is far from surprising behaviour from them. You won't miss much from being banned from any community they moderate.

The contents of the shared article make this ban extra ironic:

And, of course, there are the pseudo-left campists—the self-styled “anti-imperialists”—who whitewash the Islamic Republic’s dictatorship by projecting an anti-imperialist mask onto its façade. They cast doubt on the legitimacy of the current protests by repeating the tired accusation that “an uprising under these conditions is nothing but playing on the field of imperialism,” because they can only read Iran through the lens of geopolitical conflict—as if every revolt is merely a US–Israeli project in disguise. In doing so, they deny the political subjectivity of the people of Iran and grant the Islamic Republic discursive and political immunity as it massacres and represses its own population.

PTB. Campists are already labeling the whole thing as "color revolution" and desperatelly trying to defend the brutal Theocracy currently murdering thousands in the streets. So this is expected at this point.

Pre-emptive to whom it may concern: Don't @ me with your shit takes about how I'm blindly supporting US imperialism.

Seems solid ptb to me. But yes, I don't think there's much likelihood of getting it reversed. You made the cardinal sin of calling for leftist aid for the people of Iran against their murderous anti west government. Which by the transitive property of being anti west, means that the power structure of the government is the good guy and victim here.

I knew the moment our hypocritical dumbass opened his mouth certain groups would use it to delegitimize the protests. But this is a learning opportunity. To understand who your actual allies are, and who's just reactionarily anti west.

Your first mistake was posting in lemmy.ml

I've tried blocking the instance but it keeps showing up anyway, so now I just block each community when I see it pop up

PTB, although I can’t say I’m surprised with the comm name. It’s annoying that so many leftist spaces just end up being campist authcom echo chambers

PTB - Power Tripping Bots

This seems like the normal ideological purging that takes place in any externally managed echochamber.

Remember, data scientists have proven that around 30% of all posts and comments leading up to the US election in 2020 were from automated accounts managed by threat actors linked to Russia, Qatar, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc.

Those same data analysis tools indicate that in the post-LLM era bot traffic has grown 10x since then.

We know that the strategy of these groups is to occupy, support and promote the most extreme positions on any topic.

It stands to reason that these same threat groups are active on Lemmy and that should make you INCREDIBLY skeptical when you encounter an account/community/instance that displays extreme ideology. You're never going to win an argument with them, because they're not people who are trying to defend a position... they're trying to make sure that anybody reading will only see their ~~position~~ propaganda.

This is done by using multiple accounts to post comments along with a brigade of cheap throwaway accounts which can be used for vote manipulation. It doesn't matter if you make a devastating argument that clearly shows the OP/commentor is wrong if you're buried under downvotes so nobody sees your comment.

This also extends to communities/subreddits.

An easy example that most people on the left are familiar with: r/conservative . It's very clearly not an organic subreddit made up of a random assortment of the population, the comment section is so heavily pruned that you think Reddit is broken when you click 'show 28 more comments' and there is nothing there. If you post there with any comment that doesn't imply your tongue is tickling Trump's duodenum you will be banned very quickly.

I look at any instance that houses these extreme opinions in the same way. While I'm sure there are real actual human people who arrived at their position on their own and hold some of the ideas being promoted there, I'm equally sure that there are a huge amount of the 'people' and moderators are operating in bad faith if not outright maliciousness.

Benn Jordan on YT (music/DIY tech youtuber, not a political content creator) lays a lot of this out, with citations: https://youtu.be/GZ5XN_mJE8Y