I'm anti-imperialist and pro-metricist.
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God how true this is for all the America bad people
Lemmy has wayyyy to many people who can't understand that America bad ≠ China good.
Gets it in one.
There's a reason everyone is currently demonizing liberal ideology instead of standing up for the rights that the conservatives are working to strip away.
Noooooo I want the empire that hides all the bad things they do so I don't have to think about it while I drive my SUV and buy Starbucks!!!! /s
Idk man, I feel like a lot of us "America bad" people are from Europe and don't support China or Russia either.
Yeah the problem isn't "America bad", it's "America bad, therefore China/Russia good"
I'm Black; what reason I have to think the country that murders my people not only in the streets, but sometimes in their own beds, is a good force on the world? It is a very easy calculus for me:
"ain't no Chinese, Cuban, or Russian that ever hard-r'd me. Plenty of Americans have. Ain't no Chinese, Cuban, or Russian that ever side-eyed me for just walking down the street. Plenty of white Americans have. Ain't no Chinese, Cuban, or Russian that ever held me at gunpoint unjustly, either. More than one sallow American pig has."
If that meterstick was good enough for Muhammad Ali in reference to Vietnam, it's good enough for me in reference to the people the white moderate claims should be my 'enemies'.
That's why I don't support governments or countries, I support people and anarchist liberation movements :3
Exactly! I'm so tired of being accused of being a liberal and/or a fascist every single time I note that China or Russia isn't some perfect leftist utopia, but in fact just another empire that is a pain in the ass not only to other countries but also their own citizens.
China is a fascist ethnostate, Russia is another neoliberal capitalist state, North Korea IMO cannot be described as socialist, Vietnam is pretty cool but mixed and only partially socialist, Cuba is not great tbh just in general, Venezuela is horrible, the Nordic states are just Social Democrat states, Israel has multiple worker co-ops but that doesn't change the fact that they're still a genocidal ethnostate, that just about covers all the tankie countries.
Russia has long reached the end state of neoliberal capitalism, fascism. The US is currently transitioning.
It's something that really bothers me about communism and socialism being derisive in the US, even in 2024, about 35 years after USSR fell.
The alternative to community-centric society is autocracy, typically devolving into monarchism.
Death to monarchists!
I mean "atheism" is still a dirty word in politics, thousands of years after the prejudice against that started. Apples to oranges, sure, but just goes to show how long it takes for public opinion to shift sometimes.
It's kinda unavoidable that if one major power loses influence, another will benefit from the vacuum. You can't really oppose your own country's imperialism without making the case that other countries taking advantage is an acceptable risk.
This is more or less the story of WWI. With the increasing tensions and military buildup, socialists of countries across Europe formed the Second International and agreed in the Basel Declaration, which said that they would use the crisis to rise up simultaneously against every imperialist power and put an end to both the war and to capitalism:
If a war threatens to break out, it is the duty of the working classes and their parliamentary representatives in the countries involved supported by the coordinating activity of the International Socialist Bureau to exert every effort in order to prevent the outbreak of war by the means they consider most effective, which naturally vary according to the sharpening of the class struggle and the sharpening of the general political situation.
In case war should break out anyway it is their duty to intervene in favor of its speedy termination and with all their powers to utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war to arouse the people and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.
But once the war actually broke out, most of them found reasons to rally around their country's flag. German socialists pointed to the conditions of serfdom under the Tsar and pointed to the massive colonial empires of Britain and France, while British and French socialists argued that Germany undemocratic under the Kaiser and had more responsibility for starting the war. They mostly agreed that both sides were bad, but they said they were only fighting to safeguard their countries "against defeat" rather than for victory, but regardless, for all intents and purposes it was the same thing. Of course, in all of these countries, there was considerable political pressure and propaganda pushing them to fall in line and to regard the enemy as worse, and many people did what was personally advantageous regardless of what they had said previously.
There was only one exception, where the socialists took advantage of the war to overthrow their government, without regard for the possibility that it could help the other side, and they did end up ceding a fair bit of land too, but they were able to put a stop that that theater of the meat grinder everyone was being fed into.
The way I understand the meme, it's not saying anti-imperialism is wrong. It's saying that being a tankie, i.e. simping for china and russia doesn't qualify as anti-imperialism.
Listen, I'm as anti-imperialist as the next guy. But realistically if the core of capital that has nearly unopposed dominion over the entire world recedes, another entity that deserves the moniker of 'empire' completely equally will step in to fill the void! And if that's the case, we should just support the most morally righteous empire. Ours >:-D
Nature abhors a vacuum.
Turtle Island managed to not have white people using such logic for thousands of years just fine
I also noted this was a problem with the Rebel Alliance (who just supports a republic of oligarchs), and was called a centrist for my efforts.
Too many reports for the comments of this post so I'm locking this
Tankies support the more problematic empires such as Russia and China.
Did you not read the meme? Imperialism is bad no matter who is doing it, and arguing over which empire is more 'problematic' is counterproductive, as we should oppose all empires instead of wasting all of our time and effort on getting on each other's throats.
And in doing so they may have pushed large parts of the Chinese-American community to the right. Tankies caping for the CCP were not a good look for the moderate immigrants who had been fucked over by the Chinese government in various ways.
Less problematic in some ways, more problematic in other ways. We shouldn't be supporting the "less problematic" empire. We should be fighting any and all empires.
Nation states are designed to divide the human race into more easily managed chunks.