Ask Lemmy

These people are called "tankies". It's communists who like militarism and imperialism, as long as it's of their own flavor. The internet has many such "bunkers" where these people congregate. They unironically support the countries you mention, and they do not represent the entire left-wing community.

I'd argue that they aren't the result of capitalist policies being shitty. Such communities have existed on the internet since the early 00s. It's just their ideology.

Why are they on lemmy? My guess is that Reddit banned some of their communities for posting violent content (threats of violence etc.) so they moved to lemmy, which does not censor people to the degree Reddit does.

The .ml for lemmy.ml supposedly stands for "marxism leninism".

I've been thinking a lot of about this and my educated guess would be - rising distrust with current institutions and/or bad experience with societal failures.

If you look through history of .ml posters they are mostly in western europe or US and there's always a specific grievance they have like the current societal system did them dirty. Most normal people just realize that all systems are imperfect and sometimes you take an L and continue but there's this trend of sore losers extremists in both far right and far tankie left that just have full identity capture and radicalization because of a one or few conflicts.

I almost fell into these pits myself several times because being owned by a system that doesn't give you sufficient tooling or voice to feedback on does feel really terrible. Especially these days when burying issues is so easy under automation, culture of indifference and political unseriousness.

However, imo most of these are just weak people and I don't necessarily say this as an attack but all societies have weak links that can turn to extremism but that just means we should do a better job correcting for this.

TL;DR: trauma