Serious post warning, sleep-deprived wall of text ahead.
Someone who I dare say I respect publicly discouraged joining or supporting Lemmy on the basis of being The Tankie Place, linking this raddle post, a collection of horrifyingly flimsy evidence that Dessalines (lemmy.ml admin, maintainer of the wonderful dessalines.github.io/essays/) is a freedom hating redfash tankie who likes it when the evil CCP genocides uyghurs and bans femboys.
Naturally it all sucks but now i’m investing too many brain cells into thinking: how do you even refute this garbage?
I’m not proud of it, but I was an “anti-authoritarian leftist” too. I unironically said “tankie” once. And if i were told there is no Uyghur genocide, i would react exactly as if they had told me there was no holocaust. To the westerner, China really is as bad as nazi germany and straightforwardly saying otherwise, in their mind, is no different than if you replace Uyghurs with jews and China with germany. When this narrative is so deeply ingrained, how do you fight it? How the hell did I get here?
i really have no idea how to address it when, to them as it once was to me, it is so obviously true that anyone suggesting otherwise is not even worth listening to. these are fundamental beliefs and challenging them is grounds for instant block and report. its not open for discussion. all i can do is hope they find the truth on their own.
i’ll stop rambling now and sleep instead. so i wont respond for a while. sorry if theres a better community to post this in i just needed to get this out before i spontaneously combust. good night comrades.
I don’t think it is intended to be a moral condemnation. Rather, I think it just points out that approaching people in the imperial core as noncomplicit, brainwashed and unwitting participants in propaganda is a serious error that will lead nowhere and burn out comrades who think that people are one good article or piece of data away from changing their minds. I think Day does a good job relating this back to the western ideological tendency to cast issues as being entirely orchestrated by a cabal of sorts and imposed entirely on a helpless population. I definitely think the author could do a better job of filling in the edges of his argument though.
But these liberal online spaces that OP is talking about are comprised precisely of westerners intentionally seeking out propaganda to reinforce their world view that their system and society is superior. In my view, understanding that these people are making, on some level, a deliberate choice to accept this propaganda indicates that they are not who we should be seeking solidarity with. I think this idea helps avoid frustrations that OP is experiencing and helps us re-orient to find individuals we can actually build movements with.
I agree but I think there is a tendency, though not necessarily present here in full force, to vulgarize this article into an excuse to further separate oneself from the “masses”, and feel even more smugly self-satisfied in one’s superiority
Only thing I vaguely disagree with in the article itself is the author’s random condemnation of depictions of “utopias without work”, which makes sense when you think about it, but comes out of nowhere on first read
A more nuanced (and correct, in my opinion) way to phrase it would be that current depictions of a perfect society without work or suffering create an idealistic image that is nearly impossible to achieve, and cause people to lose hope. However, desiring less work or less suffering are both reasonable goals that we should focus on