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Daily reminder that ALL atrocities are bad. Yes, even of your favorite polity
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this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2026
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Are you trying to suggest that the Great Satan USA isn't responsible for every single genocide in world history? Preposterous!
Indeed, everything bad that happened in any other country was caused by the USA, thereby proving that capitalism is the most powerful thing in the world. USA! USA! USA!
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It's called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism, tankies love this fallacy for some reason.
It’s “appeal to hypocrisy”. It’s very similar to butwhataboutism, but butwhataboutism relies on constantly shifting the focus and making the opponent jump through hoops while the butwhatabout-er never concedes anything. Hypocrisy is saying “you did bad shit too so you don’t get to talk.”
Historians looking for genocide in history:
Let's try the commie shit again and see if it's better this time around
Sure, but no Lenin 2.0 please. Oligarchies and dictatorships tend to go down the same tired old path.
Are you ever going to read theory? Communism literally cannot exist without a dictatorship of the Proletariat....
Are you ever going to read theory? Communism literally cannot exist without a dictatorship of the Proletariat….
I can't tell if this is meant to be a joke or not.
The dictatorship of the proletariat, as outlined by Marx, is not a literal dictatorship. Bourgeois parliamentary democracies were considered the dictatorship of the bourgeois.
I had a tankie tell my that same line of bullshit when they said that the only way to run a dictatorship of the proletariat was through a literal Lenin style dictatorship, and not any form of democracy.
Which is just insane.
Read more theory, and you come across the Levelers, and more pointedly, the Diggers.
The Diggers were completely in favor of abolishing basically everything, money, government, kings and lords, property ownership. All of it in favor of an extreme Christian communism, They also advocated for forced labor for lazy malcontents, who they did not define as the poor or the destitute.
The English civil war was wild. It laid the groundwork for Marx, and the American and French revolutions. Sadly, the English never could get it together and ditch the monarchy completely.
God, it's so refreshing being on a thread where we all hate tankies
Real left-leaning hours 💪
Have you ever successfully convinced anyone of anything by asking them if they have read more theory?
In theory or in practice?
Are you ever going to read any political theory that isn't on cowbee's little list so that you actually understand first principles instead of just regurgitating jargon you don't understand?
Just one more revolution, bro!
It's more like "communism has never been tried" and "that wasn't true communism". We'll make sure it's done right this time.
The nth time's the charm!
tbf, gods only know how many anti-monarchial revolutions were between the first attempted peasant revolt and the mass fall of the anciens regimes
tankies punching air rn
Well, the Alliance would never have invaded Draenor and put orcs in concentration camps if the orcs didn't invade Azeroth in the first place!
I don't think there's any evidence for genocide, but my pet peeve for this is how the indigenous people of the Americas are held up purely as victims, as if the concept of violence didn't exist until Columbus arrived. When the Europeans first arrived in North America, the tribal villages they encountered were surrounded by fortified wooden palisades. Those weren't just there as decorations. Everyone sucks.
I have yet to encounter this explicitly where someone would say that Native Americans were "purely victims". At best, they aggregate and dehistoricize all tribes into a conglomerate term, "Native Americans". I'm sure there are some who cling to the "noble savage" trope, but I don't see it these days.
What ever intertribal conflicts happened, they never reached the level of disease spread, displacement, and systematic violence aimed at cultural erasure. The unprecedented scale of violence unleashed by colonialism, which led to devastating consequences for these communities is important and to flatten the intertribal violence along side the colonial conquest is narrow minded. They may have sucked, but some far more than others.
What ever intertribal conflicts happened, they never reached the level of disease spread, displacement, and systematic violence aimed at cultural erasure
Not because they were noble savages though, just because they lacked the ability to do that to their enemies.
That's a huge statement. Do you have equally damning evidence to support that statement?
Do I have damning evidence that humans are humans and behave the way humans always do?
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I don’t think there’s any evidence for genocide,
Back up, there may not be evidence for a single, concerted policy of genocide, but there are many verifiable genocides of Native American peoples by colonial polities and societies.
I think they meant there isn't evidence of Native Americans committing any genocides per se, but there is evidence of violence between them before colonists showed up
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What I mean is genocide by one native group of another native group prior to the arrival of Europeans.
My apologies, I definitely misread it then.
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People just been fully convinced to hate themselves for shit that happened 100+ years ago
The opposite is more common in my experience - people playing apologist for shit that happened 100+ years ago because of some vague sense of common identity with the perpetrators.
fuck tankies, but to be fair, capitalism is responsible for more suffering and death than any other ideology
Only insofar as one is willing to subsume multiple economic systems without even marginal ideological similarities between them as a single system that bears the guilt for the actions of the polity.
I wouldn't say central planning has caused most deaths attributed to ML countries, and I wouldn't say capitalism has caused most deaths attributed to non-ML countries. Both have caused more deaths than they have any right to, but the fundamental problem lays in political and military power more than the exact structure of economic hierarchies. They can feed each other, but then we must get into questions of how much guilt and in what proportion - especially since ideological application in the real world is rarely 'pure' - each piece holds.
Not only that, but these two economic systems have dominated an age where an order of magnitude more people live on the planet than previously. It may be technically true, for example, to say that capitalism or central planning has killed more people than feudal economic systems, but that does not really capture the actual moral value of each of the three.
Capitalism is shit. We need to get rid of it. But that's not the same as saying it's responsible for more suffering and death than any other.
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Historians tells us that after the war the nazis vanished without a trace. But after Hess died they sure did come out of the woodwork.
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