I fucking love that he chose to call them stalinists. In addition to it being true, it send a fuck you to the alt-right and the alt-left (who love to talk up stalin as of late)
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
maybe some whackos online
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.
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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]
Aw I thought he called the sanatists but I think either would work
Modern Satanists are actually extremely progressive. The Satanic Temple makes a point of using legislation intended to promote Christianity to promote their own religious organization.
It pisses off the reactionary religious zealots and shows them to be hypocrites, and there's nothing legislators can do about it without blatantly giving preferential treatment to the "correct" religion.
To be fair, the Satanic Temple isn't exactly satanic per se. It's more of a parody religion to point out the unfair law exceptions churches get. They are more anti-church (or maybe even anti-religion) than actually satanic.
I'd be very surprised if a significant portion of members of the Satanic Temple actually seriously believe in the existence of satan.
It's about the same as e.g. the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
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stalin also evetuanlly purged his own loyalists after becoming paranoid.
I mean a less harsh version of that has been going on. Trump has ejected many people that used to be in his inner circle, and has, or has tried, to fire almost the whole federal government, too many people who got there without him to trust
Oh don't worry, he's still trying to get feds to quit, and they're drooling at adding sycophantic bullshit to the hiring process. All while eroding union protections, benefits, and pay.
All while the Democrats vote down attempts to combat Trump, but have all the time in the world to sabotage the primary resultant nominee in NYC. Why have a primary if you're not going to go with the results? That's not a primary - that's just bullshit.
This country is a fucking joke.
Why have a primary if you’re not going to go with the results? That’s not a primary - that’s just bullshit.
Welcome to the DNC. Their primaries (at least the bigger ones) have been bullshit for a long time. Like, they're notorious for bullshit regarding primaries. I like to point to my own state in 2016 as an example, where Clinton won the primary despite getting around 35% of the vote while Sanders won in every county and Clinton didn't even manage second in every county.
The main difference is that this time the "wrong" candidate won despite the bullshit, so now he needs to lose the general, whatever that requires. Again, welcome to the DNC.
Too many people here just blindly hating on Bernie and nitpicking how "Stalinism is technically incorrect". Where's the Trump hate? Bring some of that shit out. I'll start.
Fuck Trump, MAGA, and their entire cult of personality.
It turns out the Red Scare was about the wrong Reds the whole time.
Been saying it for a while, better dead than red.
The Democrats should OFFICIALLY declare the Republican Party dead, and only refer to the MAGA Party from now on. Do an actual press conference, and make an official announcement - the Republican Party no longer exists, and has been replaced by the MAGA Party. That will make the traditional Republicans absolutely crazy, and the Dems should keep it up.
Never use the word Republican ever again, refer only to the MAGA, or MAGA Nazi Party. On talk shows, interviews, sound bites, fundraising texts, etc., use the term MAGA Party exclusively. When asked about it, simply say casually and matter-of-factly "The Republican Party is dead, they are the MAGA Party from now on," and leave it at that. Make the MAGAs cry.
use the term MAGA Party exclusively
MAGA - Morons And Genuine Assholes.
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The Party Formerly Known as Republican
The Republicans tried doing a similar thing to the Democratic Party by calling it the "Democrat Party", but members of the Democratic Party basically just ignored this and treated those who used it as stupid, or offered "helpful corrections" to the user's "inadvertent mistake". Eventually, it lost currency because it failed in its goal of upsetting people.
I voted for him in the primary, then in the general as a write in and I would fucking do it again. Bern the billionaire's faces off.
I'd argue it's a satanist party as well. They're doing all the shit that was prophesized that the devil would make dumb people do, worshipping false idols, worshipping money, getting the mark of the beast, that sort of shit
This is coming from an staunch atheist who just notices the irony
I was confused on what was Satanic until I realized you were talking about the Christian version on Satanic and not the Church of Satan.
I was super surprised by the irony after I saw all those golden idols of trump. If I was a Christian I would be highly offended at these people trying to align with me. Those are $100 bills with trumps face on it, that they covered the goat idol. 2 separate events. 1 was a CPAC and 1 was at Mara Lago. 🙄
Satanists are cooler than these assholes.
Hah use their communist rhetoric back at them
I cannot imagine being enough of a sycophant to wear a hat that says "Trump was right about everything". Nobody's right about everything, and Trump is less right about things than most people because he's incredibly stupid.
So much of the last 30 years of Republicanism (maybe 60 years, if you're a Nixonian) boils down to Owning The Libs.
The guy with the "Trump was right..." hat will happily bitch about all the things Trump is doing wrong. He just won't do it in earshot of anyone he thinks is to his Left.
Trump is less right about things than most people
Trump is turning the rhetoric of the Reagan Era into reality. He's taking the orthodoxy of the party seriously, rather than using it as bait to gull the rubes into another round of tax cuts and privatizations.
It's this commitment to orthodoxy that his base loves. Also what makes him look stupid.
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The GOP has become a Stalinist Party
They haven't killed remotely enough fascists to earn this distinction.
Spot fucking on
I'm over here waiting to see whether the apocalypse is more Matrix, Terminator, or idiocracy. I'm leaning idiocracy, but I'm not giving up on the others.
Whatever it is, expect there to be a healthy mix of "The Stepford Wives" and "The Handmaid's Tale" thrown in there as well.
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On a similar note, I'm going to start calling republicans red coats.
Whoa man, Canadians don't want anything to do with that tangerine tyrant.
And I doubt Brits or Germans would either.
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This rhetoric adds nothing of subtance to the political understanding of either contemporary Trumpism or the history of Stalinism. Sanders only serves to obscure the meaning of this critically important understanding. Fascism and Stalinism are not the same.
To be clear, Stalinism took hold in the Soviet Union as a result of its historic backwardness and international isolation. The failure of the revolution to take root in Europe (largely a result of the historic betrayal of Social Democracy in the Second International) created conditions for the consolidation of a nationalist clique and a bureaucratic degeneration of the workers state that formed from the victory of the October Revolution. That is Stalinism. This political form was responsible for mass murder of the old cadres of the revolution who opposed it, systematic betrayal of the workers movement internationally, collaboration with imperialism allowing for the restabilization of capitalism during its repeated periods of crisis, and ultimately the destruction of Soviet Union union and the restoration of capitalism in 1991. A detailed and correct historical understanding of this history is critically important for the working class as it enters into a new period of revolutionary struggle.
Sanders use of the term as a political slur wrongly directed at Trump confuses the issue, and ultimately gives capitalism a pass for its own crisis. Trump is not simply an evil individual responsible for wrecking America. He is the product of the terminal crisis of capitalism at the center of world imperialism. He represents a financial oligarchy whose wealth and influence has grown increasingly disconnected from social development and the process of production. The historic content of Trumpism has a stronger relationship to the fascism of Mussolini and Hitler than the national labor bureaucraticism of Stalin.
This is no small error by Sanders. This is a deliberate falsification that is calculated to confuse political consciousness and hinder the development of revolutionary conclusions. It should be clear to anyone who takes more than a second to think about it that the comparison to Stalinism is shallow. The historic content of Trumpism is its own.
Fascism and Stalinism are not the same.
People who unironically support Stalinism in the modern day are red fascists. Whether they are technically the exact same thing or not isn't a meaningful discussion considering the commentary that Sanders is offering here. He is specifically operating within the context of modern American politics. Something average academic/armchair/larpy leftists are often completely fucking incapable of. His main use of analogizing Stalinism with Trumpism is the Cult of Personality not that they are literally the exact same thing. It is exhausting that this needs to be explained.
Sanders use of the term as a political slur wrongly directed at Trump confuses the issue, and ultimately gives capitalism a pass for its own crisis.
How does it give a pass to capitalism? Sanders himself would agree that capitalism contributed to Trumpism.
This is a deliberate falsification that is calculated to confuse political consciousness and hinder the development of revolutionary conclusions.
This is a level of paranoia suggesting actual brain damage, seek medical attention.
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One is fascism, the other is red fascism. Different ideologies but same cheeks from the same arse as one might put it.
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