https://lemmy.world/comment/1618443

Here’s a link to a comment with some polling

every state in the world is authortarian

The compulsion that you feel to distance yourself from past proletarian movements so that your attackers won't associate you with the supposed atrocities of those movements only functions to move you further and further right. It doesn't work because the attackers will do it regardless of how much you moderate yourself. This instinct leads you to not only distance yourself from their own goals, and to condemn your own movement, but to uphold reactionary lies about our movements, sometimes even outdoing those lies by exaggerating them, in order to further emphasize the attempt to distance. It doesn't matter how much we try to twist and turn and distance ourselves from atrocity propaganda, rubbish will be heaped upon the graves of working class leaders.

Functionally all this compulsion does is move you rightwards. You are attempting to make yourself more appealing to the right because you think that doing so will magically make people on the right suddenly like socialist politics. In the meantime they will attack you with every single piece of propaganda regardless, and you will moderate yourself even more. This deradicalises the movement and blunts the radical edge it requires to get things done.

It's exactly the same compulsion that liberals have that has caused them to move further and further right over the decades. Every time they get called a communist by the republicans they desperately try to move rightwards in order to get it to stop happening, it will never stop happening though because it is not said in good faith, and the tactic of accusing them of it works well in moving them right.

This is why I love the internet, for such takes as "Jeremy Corbyn, former leader of the labour party that 40% of people (12.87million) voted for is a tankie".

There certainly are tankies in the labour party and the british hard left. But all of the people above are the soft left, not remotely tankies. The issue is that american libs are so far right that you can't differentiate between the demsocs and those of us that want and support revolution.

With that said if you want to see more communist representation in mainstream britain you'll enjoy learning about the Durham Miner's Gala which I made a short post on after attending the 137th year of it just a couple weeks ago.

You're not getting communists out of mainstream european politics mate, communists built the entire labour movement, trade unionism wouldn't exist without it. Ironically it's also communists building your current american unions such as Amazon's union, you just aren't aware that people like Chris Smalls read Lenin because you're not tuned into the underground american left.

Corbin saying that those regimes on balance did more good than harm is not the same as directly defending genocide as some of the programmers of this site do.

This is literally what all MLs believe. All MLs acknowledge the mistakes of past socialist experiments the people that don't are a literally tiny insignificant number of people inflated into a meme that is used to attack socialism in general. There are only too positions that have been used to create this myth and that is the idea that holodomor was intentional (it absolutely was not) which is used by nitwits to claim a genocide was performed by way of famine, and the xinjiang issues that were inflated into nonsense and then backtracked on by the US state department.

The point generally is that tankie is a nonsense word used to attack the entire left and eliminate nuance. It prevents conversation. It is a thought-terminating word dumped into conversation by everyone that opposes socialism as a means of preventing any and all discussion that might make people think critically or understand any nuance that people in the left actually have.