Hey not trying to belittle you, English isn’t my first language so I understand making errors and being frustrated by corrections, but I feel the need to tell you it’s “levers” not “leavers”

anticommunists continue to run wild on an instance run by an anticommunist, what a surprise (/s)

This hits on something I feel very keenly, and have boiled down to “I’ve been where you are, you’ve never been where I am.”

if any of you are formerly religious and were convinced to stop being religious by a person who once belonged to your religion, maybe you have a useful anecdote for how they were able to arouse doubt in your beliefs without insulting your intelligence.

I’m Catholic, was before my radicalization and still am, but obviously had a lot of homophobia and transphobia to unlearn. More relevant to this question though, the way I thought about Marxists before I radicalized had to change, and while I still don’t use the label Marxist I’d say I use Marxist thought to analyze basically all social phenomena. I think the critical thing for me was understanding that the conflict between Communist states in history (and to some extent, the French Revolution) and religion didn’t stem out of the left’s hatred of religion, but out of the Church’s resistance to social change. I had to understand that the Church was kind of a load-bearing structural member of the social order and legitimized all the oppressive institutions, so naturally the radicals who aimed to abolish said social order needed to take measures against religious institutions. If I could talk to myself before I was politically conscious, I’d tell him that he should consider that the way things were arranged in the Russian Empire, Feudal China, France, etc. the only possible way to get the masses to throw off their shackles was to attack corrupt religious institutions that were literally conspiring and collaborating with the secular states to keep peasants down. That the violent measures that I was taught about were used as a last resort, and were only a reflection of the violence that the overthrown institutions had used liberally for centuries.

As to how this pertains to anti-authoritarian leftists, I think you could modify this argument a little bit, and apply it to whatever they think authoritarianism is. “Tankies” don’t want to use authoritarian tactics because they hate freedom, or because they want to restrict individuality. They want to use those tactics to achieve the same political goals as all leftists: to abolish capitalism.

The point im trying to make is that there probably aren’t a lot of serious atheists who go on to convert to religion; its a cognitive step that, once made, is hard to take back.

As a former serious Atheist who could currently be described as religious, I can confirm that this is true - I do not think I have ever met anyone else who went from Atheist to Theist. In my case, it required - as you said regarding the Liberal to Communist transition - further information about the world that I lacked when I was an Atheist. Granted, I am somewhat unusual in this respect, as I was raised as an Atheist unlike most in America but - even still, it required what I perceived as hard evidence that there was more than just the material. Of course, this perceived hard evidence came in the form of personal experiences that I cannot transmit to others, as typically seems to be the case with this stuff, for better or worse.

This often also seems to be the case for the Liberal to Communist transition - I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone actually be successfully convinced through rhetoric alone - it always requires some kind of personal experience that provides a bedrock of hard evidence that their current beliefs are inadequate for understanding and navigating the world in which they exist. After that bedrock exists - then rhetoric and reading and all that can have a meaningful effect.

three_arrows.jpg

Radlibs do not get send to the camps, they sit in the Reichstag singing Deutschland Deutschland über alles with the fash themselves.

Yes, we will (critically) support any means to justify the ends we want.

I won’t support, even critically, any means to justify the end we want. I will support some means and make a moral balance, but I won’t support just any means

And most importantly, it involves using violence to defend revolutionary gains.

To me, more than “using violence to defend revolutionary gains”, it’s being aware that the ones in power right now in class war aren’t afraid of using such violence, and we need to defend ourselves, sometimes preemptively, from such violence.

Liberals and focusing on communists while facists are taking power and being a 100x threat than even their made up communists are.

That’s because they either: 1. Believe Musk wasn’t actually doing it, or 2. Believe nazism is better than leftists

Well you see, the left is a low hanging fruit and you’re not allowed to criticize the right…but the left controls the mainstream narrative!

lol makes me think they don’t read what’s being reported if you just give the reason as “tankie”

Of course it’s the person who took over liberty hub after Ada let trolls drive off the comms mod team

Neurodivergence, a boatload of childhood trauma, and like a smidge of drugs (to manage the first two)!

The people throwing around “tankie” like this are nearly universally unaware of even their own stated political theoretical background. They hold these views because they have absorbed liberal anticommunism, including the anticommunism that their ideological predecessors absorbed and published about, like anti-Soviet propaganda that some US anarchists embraced in the 30s. Generally speaking, their complaints are not based in any coherent criticism that is actually rooted in political theory. So their entire complaint is often as ridiculoys as labeling people as authoritarian and leveraging this as a thinking-terminating cliché and throwing a tantrum when the absurdity is pointed out.

For example, there are several comments in that linked thread that are blanket declarations against hierarchy and calling themselves anarchist. There haa never been an anarchist collective that actually did anything that did not have hierarchy and being blanket opposed to all hierarchy is not, historically, an actual anarchist position. Instead, they have historically embraced a critique of hierarchy and seek to dismantle those that are unjust and most oppressive is the common theme, e.g. fighting capitalists and capitalism.

These are the “anarchists” that are just liberals with an aesthetic, not our comrades that work to dismantle oppression. They are appropriators of the tradition and are even hostile to it when you aak them to read about it. Hell, they complain about the Red Army’s suppression of Makhnovschina but get angry when you suggest reading publications by those in the Black Army when it doesn’t completely support their anticommunism.

They can be reached but I’ve only seen this irl when actual anarchists correct them.

i think the thing that keeps me on this side of the “tankie” line is I just can’t understand how anarchists plan on dealing with antagonistic capitalist states. Look at the world socialist countries exist in. You have to be decisive with putting down opposition and you should get nuclear weapons because otherwise the CIA is gonna be in there causing trouble. Without considering the realities of a communist state or whatever they want to call it coming into existence it’s just idealism.

Are tankies not an even lesser evil? What reasoning could lead you to think that they aren’t?

Cointelpro?

79% literacy rate strikes again

Also it’s Mali

They aren’t sending their best.

Look I’m trying okay?