People here complain about tankies and ban the shit out of them if they start defending dictators so you will naturally see only the anti side.
People on lemmy.world complain about tankies, and tankies complain about being yelled at for merely supporting deportations, murder, terror bombings and crimes against humanity.
People on lemmy.ml/memes complain about being called tankes to other tankies. They agree that every country between USA and Moscow is a puppet state of the CIA and Putler did nothing wrong. Back pats and handjobs all around.
.ml tankies are more subtle, generally sticking to posting their wonderful takes in the comments rather than overt posts, though they do that to, just check out yogthos's wonderful posts over on .ml
Hexbear/Grad are generally more in your face about it, which is why many instances defed from them a lot easier. It's also likely that .ml is more subtle about it to prevent a wider defed movement from taking place like what happened with Hexbear and grad
One thing I don't understand is how they treat liberals as some sort of boogeyman. Like, I get that the Democratic establishment is a bit shit because they carry corporate water most of the time, but they are leagues better than the alt-right Republicans who are currently dismantling the entire system in favor of an oligarchy.
If anything, they should be sympathetic instead of antagonistic. But perhaps this is a way to drive a wedge between the coalitions on the left? But for what purpose?
There are like 5 people who post 90% of the content on lemmy. Cm0002 is one of them and really hates tankies / anyone to the left of them.
Most of the content on the "tankie triad" is general left wing anti-us stuff. Occasionally they'll be some post praising China then some liberal will comment something about tianemen square or uyghurs, get banned , and then complain that the whole instance is full of genocide apologists.
It's not like there are regular posts praising Kim jung un or maduro like the liberals make it out to be. There are a decent amount shitting on liberals, like the reverse of this post, which perpetuates this dumb instance war. It'd be best if it stopped as were all "radical leftists" in The eyes of the rest of society and were gonna need some sort of solidarity to accomplish the 90% of things we agree on.
I had an account on .ml that I made a few years ago back when lemmy was in it's infancy, and I came on to actually use lemmy when shit hit the fan with the Reddit third party API thing so I had missed all of the shit leading up to the instance wars. I was fucking floored as to why so many people were hostile towards me and had someone call me a tankie over saying the US needed more gun control. Thats when I had had enough and switched instances with a new name. I dont understand most of the instance drama myself, people are not their instances and will have opinions regardless. I picked mine at random from a list.
Damn you got me! I'm just a bot and def not a human user who's against authoritarianism regardless of if it's a right wing flavor or left wing flavor or anything
Because the bots/trolls/feds have shifted over to driving a wedge between leftists to keep solidarity from occurring. Thus "tankie" is being thrown around heavily, people constantly bring up early Soviet support of the nazis as a reason to say "tankie=nazi" while ignoring that tankies (sue me, it's a real term that has uses) is a broad term for all "authoritarian fascists," many of whom came after the nazis, were very anti-nazi, and like all historical figures often had a mix of good and bad qualities.
Certainly its funny to harp on tankies while America falls to literal fascism. Who ever could benefit from scape goating and demonizing communists? Who historically, poetically even, is the famous first victim of fascism due to the strong threat they represent?
Many of us have no problems with socialism or the theory of communism. But all current examples, such as China or Russia, are of Authoritarian regimes with a history of human rights violations from genocide to suppression of free press and free speech and deserving of criticism as such
I for one would love to see the fall of capitalism in my lifetime, but not at the sacrifice of the rights of privacy, freedom of speech and many others