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):
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.
I’m from Israel, and no one is using “Zionism” in the second meaning.
Zionism is, by definition, support for Israel as a Jewish state.
There are those who say “real Zionism” is supporting settlements in Gaza and the west bank, but there are also those who say “real Zionism” is an Israeli state existing alongside a Palestinian state. That’s like a US democrat saying a “true patriot” would support supplying a social safety net for the well-being of all citizens, while a US republican would say a “true patriot” would support a small government that doesn’t restrict the will of all citizens.
Personally, I feel that referring to Zionism in general as support for Israeli control over the west bank and Gaza started as a (partially successful) tactic to de-legitimize the existence of Israel. Not saying everyone who uses the term incorrectly is an antisemitic or whatever, but that’s basically where it came from.
I don’t think they say this much anymore since all Republican policies are explicitly about restricting the will of their fellow citizens.
I never used it this way or considered it this way until the past few months. 🤔 Now you’d have a hard time convincing me that it’s not what it means.
Thant’s not really the point, though it does kinda feed into a general issue with the way both out countries (assuming you’re from the US) are divided - When was the last time you had an actual talk with a republican in order to understand what he/she thinks?
Err… that’s just the definition of the word? You can look it up on any dictionary.
We could talk about the current government, it’s policy or the opinion of Israelis but saying the entire concept of Zionism equals support for Israeli control over the west bank and Gaza is not only factually wrong, it collapses the Israel-Palestine issue into a winner-take-all situation, where both sides are encouraged to beat each other in the hopes one of them will give up before both are dead.
Every day until the Pandemic. My republican friends now work in a different office than I do. It’s not hard to see the policies and politicians they vote for though, and I can read the handwritten signs in their yards explicitly calling me an idiot, moron, or traitor for having different views than they do. (I see those every day BTW.)
I’m just looking at what I’ve spent the past several months witnessing via news reporting and video clips. I’m not debating what the dictionary says about it. (And in any case, dictionaries reflect usage not prescribe it.)