One of the biggest topics of these days is that of mods in lemmy.ml banning and censoring people because they’re Tankies. This has had a rather sizeable discussion of people agreeing and even arguing for defederating ml. I’m sure a lot of people are arguing from good intentions, but there’s also bad faith actors among them, as I will try to show in this post. The original post was based on the moderation history of the ml instance so I respond in a similar fashion.
I browsed through the discussion for a while, and stumbled upon a comment of someone who had created an instance in response, namely de_ml@lemmy.blahaj.zone The original post in about the moderation in ml has to do with the Tiananmen Square Massacre, so I decided to make a few posts in this new instance about other historical facts which are less discussed, but that we should remember too, namely the Bengal Famine and the US support of fascism in Spain.
Initially these posts were well received and had some upvoted, but after a while I got a notification that one of them had been banned. To my surprise, I looked at the mod log of the instance and found this. So, both posts being about historical atrocities committed by capitalist countries were either banned or locked, and I had been banned from the community altogether for the reason “commie?”
I checked through the admin’s history of comments and found this.
Is this admin, who censors posts that talk about historical grievances committed by capitalism, who pins “fuck Tankies” to the instance, really a person without an agenda trying to protect a community from a supposed malignant moderation, or is it someone with an agenda trying to call everyone to the left of centrism a Tankie?
We should, in my opinion, be careful with accusing and polarising one of the biggest communities in Lemmy away, which is full of non-political content, and really examine what’s going on and what agenda there is behind it.
I checked Varoufakis, and I really don’t know what you mean. He’s openly against the Russian imperialist invasion:
“Without hesitation. Unconditionally. When I see civilians in Kharkiv or Kiyv preparing Molotov cocktails with which to defend their homes from the advancing Russian tanks, I cannot but cheer them on” “Today we must stand with Ukraine, unconditionally. And we must say it out loud: Putin is a war criminal” “To help Ukrainians find a path toward peace and freedom, we must also choose to put their interests above our ideologies and fixations. I am a left-winger. But, while people in the Ukraine are dying, I do not have the right to focus on whether the economic ideology or political biases of President Zelensky are to my liking. I must support him – to the extent that Ukrainians are looking to him for leadership now. Period. And I hope that those whose politics differ from mine do the likewise: place the task of pushing Russian troops out of Ukraine above their ideological preferences (e.g. a Ukraine that is a NATO or an EU member).”
He adds more stuff and says that we also must support Palestinians and whatnot, but he’s clearly, openly and unapologetically against the invasion, isn’t he?
I should have been a bit more clear when I said “Varoufakis is just the tip of the iceberg”, what I meant is that he is somewhat more empathetic than you typical western “leftist”.
That being said, if you read the details of his proposals regarding Ukraine (I will note he doesn’t speak Ukrainian, or russian, and has never lived in Ukraine, let alone Donbas), you can very quickly identify tankie-lite type gibberish.
The same article that you seem to quote also says:
Everyone in Ukraine wants to join NATO and EU. This is complete bullshit. But this is relatively modest stuff, it gets better:
The bitter end can be avoided by providing our country with any needed western weapons (including long range cruise missile) and providing us with both the right to strike the russians (anywhere in russia) and any relevant intel info to do so. This is already happening, but it took nearly 2.5 years, with a lot of slow walking (and a lot of death and destruction due to the delay). Varoufakis cannot even comprehend the possibility that weapons and the ability to strike your enemy is important when you are being invaded.
An immediate ceasefire followed by the withdrawal of russian troops? They are just going to leave? There is no way this statement was done without malicious intent. Ukraine was neutral before 2014; guess what happened to change this?
Once again Varoufakis demonstrates his malicious intent. Russia is not interested de-escalation and Varoufakis knows this. The Good Friday part is comical. It’s like a satirical comedy show about western “leftists” talking about Ukraine.
Now this article was written in 2022, but even in 2024, he continues to think in russo-centric terms. Here is an article from Jan 2024:
He is still rambling on about NATO and advocating for a return to the line on Feb 22. Don’t get me wrong, I think we will be very lucky to get back to those lines by the end of the war, but it’s russo-centric, pro-imperialist worldview that makes me wonder whether everything else he says is just bullshit.
Thank you for the write up! These snakes are so good at fooling most people into believing complete gibberish.