I tried explaining my problems with tankies without calling them tankies. In fact, I used their own terminology to describe my disagreement with them. It, uh… well it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

George Orwell fought in the Spanish civil war on the side of the Marxists. His army was betrayed by the Marxist-Leninists. After that experience, he wrote 1984, in which a totalitarian government uses “newspeak” to suppress dissent by suppressing the very ideas that people are capable of communicating. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Marxist-Leninists describe their disagreements in terms that turn criticism of them into gibberish. I think it’s exactly what Orwell was writing about based on his experiences.

    • Genius@lemmy.zipOP
      11·
      11 hours ago

      Oh, I fully support non-western communist movements, such as the Haudenosaunee. Do you respect the Haudenosaunee as communists, or am I about to hear a racist rant?

      • SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml
        1·
        7 hours ago

        You could at least cite the Zapatistas, or something.

        The Haudenosaunee might be considered ‘primitive communism’ though I think that’s an unfair characterization, while I think Engles and Lewis Henry Morgan were ultimately correct in their broad assertions about origins of the family and class stratification, the particular focus on the Haudenosaunee was based on a lingering, erroneous, assumption that indigenous Americans were somehow more primitive, or existed in some ‘state of nature’.

        But it’s even more of a stretch to assert that the modern Haudenosaunee, as a cultural and political entity are Communist in the modern political sense. There is no coherent Haudenosaunee sovereignty movement that also has strong anarchist or Marxist ideological convictions, akin to what we see with Neozapatismo.

        But if you have a counter argument, I’d like to hear it.