Lead Lemmy Developer, Dessalines, denying the Tiananmen Square Massacre and praising the Uyghur Genocide

https://sh.itjust.works/post/8419342

Dessalines AKA “parentis_shotgun” on Reddit, is the main Lemmy dev, also the admin of lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml.

Their post and discussions on Reddit (archive as the original post must have been removed):

https://web.archive.org/web/20230626055233/https://old.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/

Please join the discussions for Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem:

https://lemmy.world/post/16211417

And the discussions for finding/creating alternative communities on other instances:

https://lemmy.world/post/16235541

What is a tankie?

Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support acts of repression by such regimes or their allies. More specifically, the term has been applied to those who express support for one-party Marxist–Leninist socialist republics, whether contemporary or historical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie

  • ssj2marx
    1112·
    22 days ago

    Two things:

    • We can be critical of the mistakes of past socialist systems without falling into the trap of believing every red scare era lie about them.
    • Not defending past socialist systems’ accomplishments makes current socialists look like absolute cucks.

    Winning the rhetorical war cannot be done if you stop to qualify every single thing you advocate for by disavowing every society that has ever advocated for that thing. The USSR was the most equal society that has existed on this earth since the industrial revolution, and served every one of its member countries better than they are served by their capitalist successor governments today. Meanwhile, basically every person who has been lifted out of poverty in the past thirty years has been Chinese, proving that socialism fucking works in a way that capitalism doesn’t, even when both systems contain markets, wage labor, and an investment class.

    • Allero@lemmy.today
      61·
      22 days ago

      We can be critical of the mistakes of past socialist systems without falling into the trap of believing every red scare era lie about them.

      Absolutely! But we should also own up to the mistakes that really happened. China did turn to markets, because capitalist world once again got a critical share, and the benefits of international trade could hardly be overlooked. Tiannamen square massacre really happened, as documented in many instances. The conversion happening in Xinjiang is barely peaceful. USSR really did send insane amounts of people to GULAG, despite the scale of this atrocity often being overblown by liberals (but even still it’s massive), and really did forcefully move entire nationalities.

      Don’t get me wrong, by any means, I do not denounce USSR or China and the roles they took in building a better future for everyone. In fact, the achievements they’ve made forced governments around the world to improve working and living conditions of the people - people that saw what the world could actually be. And inside countries, socialism has caused immense economic improvements - though, it must be said, the turn in both USSR and China was cruel and radical, which caused a lot of massive supply problems, famines, and more. But at the end of the day, they truly emerged the powerful forces on the world stage, and this really was an economic miracle and victory of the people.

      If I would personally assess the heritage of the socialist era, I would say it was a massive win for the world. But if we want for the socialism to finally take over the world, we need to be fair with ourselves and others on the shortcomings of the bygone times. At the very least, not to repeat them again.