this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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Who in the alt left is talking about Stalin lol maybe some whackos online
Mostly the tankies on .ml
Checks out.
Who, you know, MIGHT be real people but probably aren’t for the most part..
I just assume any .ml account is a propaganda bot. Because even if they are real people.. they are propaganda bots.
Lemmy is far too small to bot.
lemmy.ml is just friendly to those people, so it attracts them.
lemmy.ml was built by those people, sometimes it feels for the express purpose of spreading their bullshit.
Yeah, that's plausible.
Lemmy.ml only has ~2100 monthly active users. I would guess that likely at least half of them are randos who just joined what they thought was the default instance.
That leaves about 1000 or so (likely even less) active tankies. That's not a lot of people. I'm pretty sure you could find more than that amount of tankies in pretty much every single metropolis worldwide.
If its only a thousand people, can we just ignore them then.
Currently, Lemmy only has 46 000 monthly active accounts in total, so 1 000 is quite a significant share of that. Especially considering that these 1000 are very vocal.
Remember, this is not Reddit or Facebook with billions of active users. Lemmy in its entirety is smaller than some phpbb forums used to be.
I mean, ~3500 of these monthly active accounts are from lemmynsfw.com alone, and these are most likely double accounts for people who have accounts on a non-nsfw instance. And in general it's quite likely the the amount of monthly active accounts is much larger than the number of actual monthly active users, considering that a significant portion of users will have more than one lemmy account and that there are some moderation bots and stuff like that around.
They're robots, Morty, I don't respect them
From someone who has gone to more than a few political protests and rallies in Boston:
Every fucking time Socialist Alternative shows up, it’s fine until some edgelord dipshit unfurls the fucking huge Soviet flag with Stalin and Mao silk screened on it. It’s like they’re trying to alienate reasonable people as well as historically-informed people. I consider myself a staunch socialist. I also outright detest Stalin and Mao because they were fucking authoritarian despots who wrapped their regimes in “communism” banners.
Sure, some of the systems at lower levels were socialistic, but at the end of the day, it was all in service to the cult of personality in charge of the whole gig. And yes, that’s what the US has devolved into (and arguably had done so quite a while ago, just not so overtly), but that doesn’t excuse Stalin or Mao, nor does it justify being an apologist for them.
From that perspective, any thoughts on Ho Chi Minh?
Of all the leaders good, bad, and, ugly over the last century, he doesn't seem to be brought up as much by propaganda machines.
Why is it always Mao or Stalin? Can't they at least go with folks who shed the blood of fascists like Tito or Castro? They werent particularly good either but at least they were doing the best with their dealt decks. Mind you I fucking loathe elevating folks to positions of respect unless they were my ancestors or damned well earned it via death and glory.
Oh man, a thousand times this, fucking tankies are a pain and a ball and chain on the leg of progress.
You could easily say the same of Washington or Eisenhower or Churchill or DeGualle.
Hell, Lincoln got got by a guy who was literally shouting "Sic Semper Tyrantus".
The thing that sets Stalin and Mao apart from the Francos and Mussolinis and Tojos and Chang Kai-Sheks and Churchills was their break from the old line aristocracy. The thing westerners hate more than anything was their overthrow of the local monarchies.
That's why you have folks weeping big crocodile tears over Anastasia and Puyi, while they whistle past the graveyard of the countless Chinese and Russian victims of Romanov/Qing Dynasty misrule.
They also dont like sadistic mass fucking murders which is every communist regimes favorite thing.
Stalin took the Russian state from an agricultural backwater to a Space Age superpower in a matter of twenty years.
If he'd started out a Virginia plantation owner instead of a Georgian bank robber, capitalists would have loved him. He'd be bigger than Churchill.
American liberals love (the whitewashed version of) FDR because they see the quasi-socialism of the mid-20th century as the morally correct path. Eastern Europeans - who came through two world wars and repeated genocides on every front - have a lot more of an appetite for Iron Fisted Dictator[Communist] after enduring generations of Iron Fisted Dictator[Monarchist]