this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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Lefty Memes

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An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.

Serious posts, news, and discussion go in c/Socialism.

If you are new to socialism, you can ask questions and find resources over on c/Socialism101.

Please don't forget to help keep this community clean by reporting rule violations, updooting good contributions and downdooting those of low-quality!

Rules

0. Only post socialist memes

That refers to funny image macros and means that generally videos and screenshots are not allowed. Exceptions include explicitly humorous and short videos, as well as (social media) screenshots depicting a funny situation, joke, or joke picture relating to socialist movements, theory, societal issues, or political opponents. Examples would be the classic case of humorous Tumblr or Twitter posts/threads. (and no, agitprop text does not count as a meme)

1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith interactions is enforced here

Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism.

2. Anti-Imperialism means recognizing capitalist states like Russia and China as such,

as well as condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavor.

3. No liberalism, (right-wing) revisionism or reactionaries.

That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" seen on lemmygrad and more specifically GenZedong (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).

4. No Bigotry.

The only dangerous minority is the rich.

5. Don't demonize previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.

We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.

(if you are reading the rules to apply for modding this community, mention "Mantic Minotaur" when answering question 2)

6. Don't idolize/glorify previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.

Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.

7. Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:

(This is not a definitive list, the spirit of the other rules still counts! Eventual duplicates with other rules are for emphasis.)

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

The thing is, the CIA might be as villainous as tankies think it is, but it’s far less competent. They see spooks in every shadow but many, perhaps even most CIA programs have been abject failures. Not everything wrong with the world can be attributed to the CIA, influential as they may be.

I think it the tankie mythos around them actually makes them more powerful.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

It's just that the CIA did sooo many fucking atrocities, that quite a few of them (most notably experiments and their silly stuff like trying to murder Castro) turned out to be failures.

And during the Cold War the CIA was some axis of evil shit. Any time some leftists came to power in the US's "backyard" (read the Americas and Caribbean. but tbh most of the world), you would either see a fascist coup or some either attempt to delegitimise them...

Guess who trained the mujahedeen in Afghanistan and the contras in Nicaragua, and gave money, resources and guidance to the fascist military in Chile? (just some historic examples)

Nowadays you still have the same shit but less. Especially in the US's "backyard". Like Bolivia a few yes ago bc they wanted to nationalise their resources (most notably lithium mines)

But a lot of the time the CIA just makes the preparatory work for US Invasion (Grenada, Iraq and Afghanistan to give some examples)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

the CIA is the reason the third world adopts neoliberalism thats so bad for ourselves. western imperialism is what keeps the third world fucked, we are still rich as fuck in natural resources.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago

I'm sure they would love for everyone to think they're useless failures and look away from the laundry list of fucked up yet known operations that have been successful.