Many people on lemmy.ml deeply respect and admire authoritarian governments and organizations.
Iran, China, North Korea, Soviet Union…
The West has many flaws. But our flaws are nothing compared to these guys.
Iran hangs homosexuals. Iran shot 30,000 people in less than than 2 weeks. The Soviet Union had to build a fucking Iron wall to prevent people from escaping. The Soviets lied about the Chernobyl nuclear explosion. China censors the internet. China wants to eliminate Islam. North Korea is a totalitarian hellscape. Watching anime is a crime.
Why is lemmy.ml so fascinated with authoritarians?
Please do tell me which conquest war China has engaged in the past 50 years.
It’s 2026, we’ve seen how western legacy media are owned by Zionists and social media are owned by oligarch Epstein class, we literally go into the Lemmyverse running away from this. Only thanks to Chinese-born social media such as Tiktok have we been able to witness the genocide in Gaza and open our collective eyes to the Palestinian cause. How, with this hindsight, can we criticise a country wanting to protect its citizens from this?
Additionally, seeing your interest against censorship, are you aware that most Russian media is outright banned in Europe? Have you seen how Chinese social media gets banned in the US unless it changes ownership to an American firm? And most importantly: does this desire for media availability from all over lead tou to read news coming from, say, Iranian, Chinese or Russian media? Do you actively consume such media, or do you consume your media de-facto equally to as if there were censorship of such media?
I believe you’re mistaken, the countries currently engaged in the genocide of Palestinians and threatening Iran with “the total elimination of a civilization” are the US and Isntreal, not communist.
Can you now bring up some points that are not projection of Western imperialism onto China?
Yes, this is why I had to qualify China with “probably”. But mark my words, if China moves on Taiwan with force, tankies will laud it. Mind you, not all communists are tankies, which is a point that has already needed to be made in this thread.
And you’ll notice I didn’t defend any of that, either. This whataboutism is a meaningless deflection predicated on the assumption that just because i disapprove of Chinese censorship must mean that I am either unaware or supporting of western censorship.
But if you want to compare them, only one of them is severe enough that all your communications are subject to government filtering. A known way to screw with Chinese hackers in video games is just to mention censored phrases in chat and have their connection drop.
Oh no, the most prolific liars of all the world’s industry of paid liars is blocked in the place the liars most often lie about. So when China censors the ENTIRE INTERNET, that’s protecting their citizens, but when the west censors a hostile nation’s state sanctioned propaganda center, that’s an egregious overstep.
I believe you need to pay a little more attention to the discussion at hand. The discussion at hand is what tankies support, not what nation states are doing today. Tankies, as a specific subtype of communist, which means NOT ALL communists, will generally support brutal crackdowns of just about any sort so long as a perceived communist or communist successor is the one doing it.
This level of absolute butthurt at the mention of China combined with the complete misrepresentation of both the discussion at hand and and my comments on it is astonishingly egregious. I almost struggle to believe it’s a mistake made in an attempt at good faith argument, and it’s representative of why some people suspect that .ml is heavily astroturfed by Russia and China masquerading as communists. ANY attempt to criticize Russia or China on .ml is almost always met with an attempt to paint the poster as a critically misinformed fucking idiot because SURELY only one such as that could EVER find the slightest flaw in our PERFECT state of Russia/China.
If you want to reply again, read closely first. If half my response is going to have to be me repeating myself, I’m just going to save my time and remind you your reading comprehension is still absolute trash.
Because you’re projecting western imperialism on China and guessing futures to make it sound imperialist.
That wasn’t “whataboutism”, that was justification of Chinese censorship of western media with hindsight. I was simply arguing that, with hindsight, banning western media and social media was the correct choice, and I can’t fathom why any self-proclaimed leftie would disagree with that seeing the rise of fascism in the “free press” western world.
Hahahaha cope. US propaganda is much more pervasive and prevalent than Russian propaganda, much to the dismay of Russia.
Notice how you avoided my question about your media consumption: do you consume media from China, Russia or Iran? Or are you, de-facto, living in a similar information bubble to people in a nation with stronger censorship?
Maybe, just maybe, the US and EU don’t censor not because “they’re free nations”, but because by means of global dominance over the previous century, they didn’t need to censor in order to prevent their own citizens from consuming media from designated enemy states. Once people start questioning this and they lose the global narrative hegemony, they’re forced to censor (tiktok, Russian Media, online ID verification soon, etc.).
Well, yes, tankies don’t work in hypotheticals, we work in facts. You can’t just imagine catastrophes and genocides worse than Gaza and pin those to tankies because you would be making them up.
Westerners simply can’t conceive that someone working outside western propaganda wouldn’t be a paid actor.
Not true. Reasonable criticism of those countries is well met, what’s not well received is constant bashing based on western-manufactured lies.