I think Lemmy has a lot of Far Left people on the site. In this instance, I’m referring to people who are staunchly against capitalism and often in favor of communism, even if they don’t support CCP or Russia. I’ve also noted a higher-than-normal instances of anarchists here.
As for specifically pro-China shills, I’ve only seen one, but they were very active in c/worldnews.
If Lemmy grows in popularity, I expect we’ll see the community shift more towards center, for better and/or worse.
Which is weird, because far left communists are the absolute last people I would expect to support Russia or China.
Not from what I’ve seen, at least with respect to China. Plenty of them seem to minimize the deplorable actions of the CCP while extolling it’s economic policies. They frequently hold China up as a shining example a successful communist state and seem more interested in the fact that it challenges the West and capitalism than they are concerned about it’s numerous human rights violations and total disregard for the sovereignty of its neighbors.
That’s what I don’t understand. China isn’t a Communist state, not since the 90s. They gutted their social safety net, lowered taxes on the rich, privatized most of their economy and then sold all their industry to multinational corporations. They’re farther from communism than the average EU country now, and about on par with the US.
Same with Russia. Russia is basically Galt’s Gulch now, which is why a segment of the GOP love it so much. It’s like he lemmygraders stopped paying attention around 1990 and think nothing has changed since then.
It doesn’t really cost much money to hire people to push a false narrative about your country. Honestly, it would be more surprising if they weren’t doing this. There might be some people genuinely spouting pro-China nonsense but they’re getting those talking points from somewhere.
It starts with state controlled media, then paid shills spread it all over the internet, eventually real people who are maybe pissed at their own country’s shortcomings start pushing the narrative as well.
We’re getting a bit off topic from the original question, but I’ll chime in b/c why not.
Technically, neither China nor the USSR were communist states. They were/are socialist states run the by the communist party. Neither were able to get rid of capitalism. China has taken an approach of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” for their “implementation”.
China is still “socialist” in a sense because socialism is a pretty broad spectrum. They’ve kept capitalism along side socialism, but try to keep capitalism beholden to the state.
People talk well about China b/c the economic policies have arguably worked quite well given where they’ve come from. That doesn’t mean you have to agree or support some of their …worse… policies. It’s a mixed bag. But so is the west.
As of now, China is the closest large economy for an existing implementation of socialism. There are other states, but they aren’t as large or successful as China.
But yeah, I do agree that the lemmygraders are a bit much. But that’s my thoughts on what I’ve seen since joining and why I think lemmy seems to trend where it does on that topic.
I don’t pretend to know much about how China functions, but I know enough to know its certainly more capitalistic than Mao would have liked. But this is why I’m not a fan of communism—the most developed countries that embraced it all became horrible dictatorships that betray the most central tenets of communism. In other words, it doesn’t seem to work all that well, at least not on a grand scale. For it to work as intended, I think it requires a fairly small community—like a commune. I’m not a fan of capitalism either though; my preference is something in the middle, more like Democratic socialism.
But the point is, some Far Lefties do seem to like China for whatever reason. Again, I think they mainly just like that they’re opposing capitalism and view the CCP through some very rose-colored classes.
I think the only people supposing the CCP these days are actual Chinese people. A distaste for China seems to be the sole unifying topic in the west.
So many people, in this, the age of social media, when they subscribe to an -ism, feel the need to stake that ground and defend it from anyone who attacks it. They mistake that feeling for the need to defend anyone else that ever claimed the same -ism.
It’s the same impulse that drives the American practice of “the republicans are defending this, so I, a democrat have to attack it.” (See: CNN under trump for a great example). This obviously works both ways, the more ridiculous ones usually go the other way from dem to repub. But followers of both parties do it. Same goes for everyone on the internet, almost, communists are definitely also very high on that list, suddenly denying all sorts of massacres. It’s nuts
Most also doesn’t. It’s just the tankies who does that. Many of the Lemmy devs are tankies, and the instance they set up lemmy.ml is as full of tankies as lemmygrad. So many of the popular communities hosted there will have a heavy tankie slant.
In the wild tankies are a fringe minority, but for these particular historical reasons, Lemmy has had a disproportionately high amount of tankies who have been dominating many communities. I think with the reddit influx their hold has somewhat diminished, and it should continually do so as the amount of Lemmy users grows.
I think because there’s not a ton of people here and posts don’t usually get hundreds of comments, a few very active users can really stand out. There’s one person in particular all over the Ukraine war communities that is obviously a Russian troll. It’s easy to just think Lemmy is overrun with pro Russians but if you pay attention, it’s mostly just one idiot that posts a lot.
Thats really the right way to go about it, support the ideas not the absolute piece of trash implementations that only served to enrich the few. Both ccp and ussr were clear examples of that.
I think part of it is because lemmy has historically been welcoming to people with different ideas. If your views aren’t welcome elsewhere, you can just host your own instance and say whatever you want.
But I also think we’re witnessing coordinated propaganda. It reminds me so much of the pro-russian trolling and memes that took over 4chan in 00s and early 10s.
But I also think we’re witnessing coordinated propaganda. It reminds me so much of the pro-russian trolling and memes that took over 4chan in 00s and early 10s.
Yes, it definitely reminds me of that!!! I have been noticing it a lot here as well and this is also the conclusion I’m leaning toward. I’ve seen a few comments that felt like they are trying to appeal to every side of American politics. I’ve decided to always speak up about it because this feels dangerous. Like they are trying to manipulate western opinions for something.
Never seen pro-Russia memes here
that post has the most comment’s i’ve ever seen so far. at least that i can remember. or maybe i just live a sheltered lemmy life, haha.
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I’ve mainly just seen in on the lemmygrad instance when I go to all. I find the content over there to be a bit silly (even as a socialist). I think you can block instances? I’ve blocked some of the more trolling/low effort communities.
But I also see it in the other direction. I’ve seen people ask open ended questions about the USSR and CCP for something they may have done well and people will downvote and “what-about-ism” for other stuff that isn’t/wasn’t so good, but is also off topic for what was asked.
There’s not a lot of effective discourse around the topic, I think. The conversation seems to be either entirely positive or negative for everything about them, even when the post is about one thing in particular. We can’t really say, “This thing was done well” without the what-about-isms, nor can we say “This other thing was not done well” without it applying to everything.
But to come back to your question, as you worded it “support for…”, that seems to be in line with the conversations here. It’s either “support” or “against” and not a whole lot of analysis. As in, if you say something positive then you support everything. Obviously, that shouldn’t be the case, but that does seem to be the narrative here.
Just unsub from lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml communities. You might still see them in All if your instance federated with them.
There’s some overlap between open source enthusiasts and anarchists/communists. It comes with the territory. Most of them are not tankies, but rather are anti-patent or anti-IP or similar, but there’s definitely a few on the fringe. And open source folks are among the earliest adopters of federated networks so a left slant is expected, to a limited extent.
So far I like it here. I’m a centrist (by Canadian standards). Ive seen a few extremists leaning tankie if alt-right in various threads, but that’s okay. The centre seems to be holding and voting them down.
