One Canuck built the #ttrpg tag and the #mecha tag. And that was me.
Cohost Cultural Institution: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots
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i think my number one leftist/anticapitalist opinion is that whatever you set up should have no ethnic cleansings. if an ethnic cleansing happens in it i think it's not good anymore.
like as someone who tends to lean anarchist i am generally down with the idea that anarchists and marxist-leninists have more in common than separates them. however i do feel like it really is stunningly hard to get MLs to say "ethnic cleansings done by communists are still bad"
it's a really low bar that is somehow weirdly common!
Definitely have had people get weirdly defensive when I bring up the Soviet genocides and displacements that happened
it's so fucked! i have an uyghur friend who constantly feels the same way around discussions of china these days and neither you nor they should have to feel like this around people ostensibly trying to make the world better.
From my recent experience listening to MLs and people attacked by MLs (including former MLs, even former deeply involved people who went so far as to run for office on a Communist Party ticket), there's kind of a split between the actions of most MLs online, and the actions of most MLs in-person. Online there's a lot of open talk about revolution, and in-person the public talk and actual activism tend to be indistinguishable in practice from vaguely progressive liberal groups.
As best I can tell, this split comes from ML being a seriously broad term historically (EDIT: and certain actions being far more acceptable to say rather than do), to say nothing of Marxist-Leninist-Maoists and other offshoots. It covers everything from people who think that Stalin didn't do enough murder to "idk, maybe Marx was right about capitalism being kind of a problem?"
So the only unifying bit, imo, is the aesthetic of leftism. Which, uh, kinda leaves open a lot of room for fans of ethnic cleansing and "Stalin was a better person than you think", and other such things that lead me to summarize most Marxist-Leninists pundits online as just red fascists. (Red as in the aesthetics of leftism. Fascist as in palingenetic ultranationalist, and following Eco's 14 points of fascism, just like Stalin did; I'm not using the term lightly.)
The core point of left-wing politics being anti-hierarchy just isn't something a lot of these people care about, so you end up with horrible actions being justified because it's the side they like on top. While some random person who calls themselves an ML might have more in common with an anarchist than not, I don't think that's true overall for many, especially those who make a career out of talking about ML things online.
(See also: Lenin killing anarchists and socialists when they got in his way. Not exactly a great history here.)
EDIT: long paragraphs were long.
Anarchist here, I pretty much only see the defense of "that didn't actually happen" when it comes to the ethnic cleansings or a very week "Of course that was bad but would never happen under a real ML plan". I would love to see more people being like "that was bad" as a reply.
