Expressing concerns about moderation policy on lemmy.ml

The thing I find wild here is that this presumably Marxist mod is banning criticism of 2023 Russia and China. Russia in 2023 is straight up fascist and China while with more communist dressing is also a capitalist hellscape - like most of the world.

The one thing I'm hopeful about is as you say, these issues will sort themselves out in the long term. Lemmy.ml gets to be the popular one out of virtue of being first, but other instances have the ability to grow a lot over time as well.

Lemmy isn't perfect, it has many issues but I think it's got the right structure and ingredients to allow for thoughtful, active communities.

Now, when I joined, I was somewhat taken aback by the sheer amount of propaganda on Lemmy in general, and the somewhat belligerent attitude of some users.

With the new users it should change to be more centrist and we should see less and less this kind of post as they will get downvoted

Marxism-Leninism, a lot of people on the lemmygrad sub use ML for short

I fail to see racism and orientalism present in this thread. What I do see are people linking to lists of human rights violations committed by the CCP, people complaining that unequivocally pro-CCP messaging is disingenuous, and people upset that a ban reason was not adequately explained.

I'm a card-carrying communist who sees a lot wrong with China's handling of political dissidents and ethnic minorities. From what I'm seeing about lenny.ml, it seems like milquetoast criticisms are being met with bans and censorship, and I see prominent users defending this practice citing "imperialistic anti-China propaganda" as being the reason why the uninitiated doesn't blindly praise the CCP. This belief is rooted in some fact - American media tends to portray eastern countries in a harshly negative light - but I hardly think that means that all criticism is made in bad faith.

I'm reminded of unequivocally capitalist sites banning mentions of communism and critiques of capitalism, and I believe that this trend does nothing besides foster the echo chambers that I, at least, have been trying to escape from.

At no point did I support a genocide, I just agree with most of the world, including the Islamic world, that disagrees that a genocide is taking place.

White supremacists are convinced there's a white genocide going on. If you were to disagree, does that make you a genocide denier?

Also you should consider the source. The US dropped an average of 60 bombs a day, every day on the middle east, during the Obama era, and western media was 100% complicit. Are these trustworthy sources to tell you what their enemies are up to?

I doubt it was intentional but it's hilarious that they criticized lemmy's moderation with a mod action done on fucking beehaw.

Well, I think (since it's a common offense and not one a typical newcomer will understand as 'racism' or 'bigotry' in typical western discourse) I think it would be helpful to add the word "orientalism", maybe even with a link to an explanation, in the rules.

While it may be obvious to us, I think it's reasonably expected that a new reddit-refugee wouldn't understand that. It would prevent avoidable drama, lowering mod workload.

My objection isn't the actual decision to take those posts down, it's that the ban message leaves a typical user guessing and the rules can make it more clear to newcomers what not to do.

And you can see the main developer's comments in this same thread defending these actions.

I'm not 100% sure what you meant, but that would actually be pretty awesome if China funded the development of free, open source, federated services like Lemmy. Imagine all that could be achieved.

Marxist-Lenninists are the most common form of communist, with the most successful Socialist states in history, I do not understabd yout hostilities.

Calling China an ethnostate is ridiculous when we have hard examples like Israel and soft examples like Japan to compare it to.

China is none of the above outside of a definition of imperialism I think most of the newcomers here, and certainly anyone making those claims, would be unfamiliar with.

The combination of those claims suggests a highly xenophobic sourcing that has little to do with understanding China and a lot to do with a new cold war mentality that exploits Western, and particularly American, ignorance of other countries, e.g. being successfully targeted by the Western-facing Radio Free Asia government-affiliated media and/or the related complex of think tanks and hacks that get mileage not because they're well-grounded in knowledge or academic work, but because they vilify the new "enemy". This is in no way new and Westerners never seem to acquire generational skepticism, instead always getting duped into the intended hatefest, even while acknowledging they got the last ones wrong (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan).

Those claims are also highly projecting, as many do describe many Western/ally countries and cynically draw from a misuse of the language of the left.

Imperialism, particularly as an accusation like this, is about the forcible export of capital such that capitalist exploitation becomes transnational, witg structurally underpaid labor being extracted from one country to the one exporting capital. This is closely tied to the colonialism of Europe and America, but also applies to "inter-imperialist" conflicts. China lacks the apparatus to coerce, an apparatus that absolutely is used by the US and its clients to vilify and destroy countries not falling in line, as well as accept IMF terms that neoliberalize their economies. Rather, the left critique of China on this is more often that its survival strategy (which is working) requires the exploitation of its own labor and the import of capital. Luckily, this is changing.

China is simply not an ethnostate, this is pure projection and orientalism. Chins is an explicitly multi-ethnic country snd has widespread state support for ethnic diversify and what would be described by Westerners as affirmative action programs that are more generous and effective than Western ones. Attempts to pretend that being Han is akin to whiteness are absurd and, in addition to mischaracteeizing China, bely a problematic ignorance of how white suoremacy was invented, and why it had to be invented, as those histories don't apply to the Han in China. The simplified version is: it's a condition of racialized labor divisions to feed capitalism and particularly European colonialism, and in the US, settler-colonialism. You can find a modern ethnostate in Israel, a Western forward base and settler-colonial project engaging in apartheid.

Re: totalitarian, this term means very little as an accusation and is so overused and selectively justified that in this context all one can really infer it to mean is "bad". Often, it relies on a false consciousness of coercion or societal violence that arbitrarily vilifies state violence while tolerating the private violence ubiquitous in countries dominated by the capitalist class. Example: it is "totalitarian" for there to be government censors on certain topics in [bad country], but not totalitarian for stories supportive of ruling class interests to be favored by privately-owned media (i.e. the dominant media in the West) and for those perceived as a threat to those interests to be systematically downplayed, unfunded in the first place, selectively misrepresented, and coopted and misdirected. Anyone active in, say, the George Floyd protests got to watch the lying happen in real time, with the cop-and-pricate-property-friendly "uncensored" media playing the lead role. Lazy accusations of totalitarianism are really just dog whistles for unexamined hypocrisy and a lack of awareness of the ubiquity of social violence.

China is not totalitarian nor an ethnostate, and the imperialism allegation is debatable.

Do you know what the most common profession for members of the NPC, the national people's congress, the main governing body of the PRC, is? Industrial engineer

Guess what the most common profession is for liberal democracies? Lawyers.

I don't say this because I don't like lawyers 🤣 , I have one in the family. I say it only to point out that most of what you've learned about China, is coming through a heavy media filter, from a media who only seeks to demonize a country they're in a trade war with.

whereas anything from a western source is seen as cultured, measured, dignified, etc.

No leftist has ever believed that, and it is a bad faith argument.

Racists don't deserve to be informed.

It's literally the first rule in the sidebar. If you want to create a "how to not be racist and xenophobic" post to help racist and xenophobic Redditors here, you can always do that.

I don't think that's how social policing really works, though. You don't learn because someone gives you a guidebook, but because you get called out for spitting in public or feel unsafe if you show off Nazi tattoos. And all the schools theoretically say Nazis are bad, but I see tolerance for Nazis rising, and tightly bound to this is a lack of social policing. Look at the people who took so little convincing that the Sonnenrad isn't so bad so long as the Good Guys (TM) are wearing it.

You can help out with this by calling out the orientalism on display in this thread as well.