Update:
The comments from this post will not be removed as to preserve the discussion around the announcement. Any continued discussions outside of this thread that violate server rules will be removed. We feel that everyone that has an opinion, and wanted to vent, has been heard.
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Original post:
Yesterday, we received information about the planned federation by Hexbear. The announcement thread can be found here: https://www.hexbear.net/post/280770. After reviewing the thread and the comments, it became evident that allowing Hexbear to federate would violate our rules.
Our code of conduct and server rules can be found here.
The announcement included several concerning statements, as highlighted below:
- “Please try to keep the dirtbag lib-dunking to hexbear itself. Do not follow the Chapo Rules of Posting, instead try to engage utilizing informed rhetoric with sources to dismantle western propaganda. Posting the western atrocity propaganda and pig poop balls is hilarious but will pretty quickly get you banned and if enough of us do it defederated.”
- “The West’s role in the world, through organizations such as NATO, the IMF, and the World Bank - among many others - are deeply harmful to the billions of people living both inside and outside of their imperial core.”
- “These organizations constitute the modern imperial order, with the United States at its heart - we are not fooled by the term “rules-based international order.” It is in the Left’s interest for these organizations to be demolished. When and how this will occur, and what precisely comes after, is the cause of great debate and discussion on this site, but it is necessary for a better world.”
The rhetoric and goal of Hexbar are clear based on their announcement: to “dismantle western propaganda” and "demolish organizations such as NATO” shows that Hexbar has no intention of "respecting the rules of the community instance in which they are posting/commenting.” It’s to push their beliefs and ideology.
In addition, several comments from a Hexbear admin, demonstrate that instance rules will not be respected.
Here are some examples:
“I can assure you there will be no lemmygrad brigades, that energy would be better funneled into the current war against liberalism on the wider fediverse.”
“All loyal, honest, active and upright Communists must unite to oppose the liberal tendencies shown by certain people among us, and set them on the right path. This is one of the tasks on our ideological front.”
- https://lemmy.world/comment/121850
- https://lemmy.world/comment/1487168
- https://lemmy.world/comment/1476084
- https://lemmy.world/comment/171595
- https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3648500
Overall community comments:
- https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3526128
- https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3526086
- https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3652828
To clarify, for those who have inquired about why Hexbear versus Lemmygrad, it should be noted that we are currently exploring the possibility of defederating from Lemmygrad as well based on similar comments Hexbear has made.
- https://lemmygrad.ml/post/158656
- https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/882559
- https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/540170
- https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/446529
Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. However, based on their comments and behavior, no positive outcomes can be expected.
We made the decision to preemptively defederate from Hexbear for these reasons. While we understand that not everyone may agree with our decision, we believe it is important to prioritize the best interests of our community.
If you want to meet leftist, you will meet people who are against NATO and who know all the evil the USA has done. Those are entities that have spent the last 100 years genociding left leaning people with the help of fascist groups all around the world, so of course we aren’t friendly to them. If you aren’t aware of that, you may be from Europe, so I suggest you research Operation Gladio to have an example of what they did here, to their supposed allied countries.
If you’re not open to those ideas, I really don’t understand why you were hoping to meet leftists.
Being against NATO is concisely being Pro-Russian. You cannot separate the two as NATO only continues to exist as a counter to Russian nuclear imperial ambitions.
It is possible to be critical of the US without pro-Russian stances.
what? lmao you can absolutely be against NATO and not be hollering and hooting for Russia. This isn’t a Marvel movie, you can have nuanced takes with what is a proxy world war decades in the making
Sure, I don’t think anyone is really arguing against that. However when you’re against NATO right now when most, if not all, of its members are currently helping Ukraine against Russia and you are coming from an over-the-top Communist instance like hexbear it looks like nothing more than Tankies being Tankies.
the person i replied to said that you cannot be anti-NATO and anti-Russia, that is what i was responding to
Ah, sorry that misunderstood. Carry on!
What does it even mean to be “against NATO”? Is it, like, saying “the NATO alliance ought to disband because the terms of the alliance are bad for my country actually”? Is it like “I hope NATO countries lose all their wars”? Or like “NATO is a dangerous thing to exist because it allows an invasion of Country X, which is likely to happen, to result in a global thermonuclear war”?
A bunch of countries could be arming Ukraine without the sort of all-for-one, one-for-all terms of NATO specifically that make it likely to figure prominently in any explanation for why we have all died of nuclear weapons.
Not really. NATO only has a single purpose: Containing Russia’s imperial ambitions. No NATO, Russia goes whole hog reclaiming the land they consider “theirs” as we are currently seeing in Ukraine.
It is like saying “I can support worker’s rights but I’m against unions”
If you take away the protection the imperialists will do the imperialism thing.
https://www.nato.int/nato-welcome/index.html
It would seem that NATO itself disagrees with you.
Edit: NATO are the imperialists. By any definition. Please read any of the following authors’s works on imperialism/empire: Hobson, Hilferding, Lenin, David Harvey, John Smith, Michael Hudson, Zac Cope, Anievas and Nisancioglu, Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Paul Kennedy, or Niall Ferguson.
are weird ways to contain russia’s ambitions
it’s also really weird to refuse several offers of peace from russia in the last 20 years and instead march aggressively towards them, going back on every agreement back dating back to Yeltsin (really, further back than that but we’re talking Russia post-USSR here). seems like those leftists might have something of a decent critique around an organisation doing those things since its inception
Ah here goes the fun one where you explicitly support a genocide, confuse NATO with the IMF, and regurgitate Russian propaganda that countries that feared Russia blackmailing the US to join NATO was a “march on Russia”
This is why I said what I said, and stand by what I said: Anti-NATO is literally Russian propaganda dressed up.
i don’t know what you’re talking about with the genocide comment edit: oh you think because i criticized NATO bombing civilians, i’m pro-genocide. incredible
Greece had to take the IMF loans to continue being in NATO and the EU, that was part of the agreement
i don’t know what you’re talking about with Russian blackmailing, I was referring to the 00s expansions of NATO that violated the agreement between Russia/NATO to stop expanding
You brought up Kosovo, you know, defending the war where Slobodan Milošević was committing crimes against humanity, including genocide.
Again: The EU is not NATO. The IMF is not NATO. Greece did not take the loan out to “stay in NATO” and that’s a bad faith argument from you.
Poland blackmailed the west to become part of NATO.
The bad faith pro-Russian straight up propaganda argument comes out again. There was never an agreement to not expand NATO. There was one diplomat that offered it, but it never made it further than that. Never written down, and the Russian President agreed that it was not part of any agreement.
Stop citing Russian lies and I’ll stop calling you a pro-Russian useful idiot.
my sibling in christ you can look at the IMF loan document for Greece online for free. It states they needed funds to stay in NATO and the EU. Greece spent 7.5 billion on NATO contributions last year, that money doesn’t come from nowhere
i don’t know what you’re talking about with poland, i never mentioned anything about blackmail and I don’t think that
my language re: kosovo came from amnesty international. you can read their report here. nato used depleted uraniam weapons, cluster bombs, and indiscrimately murdered thousands of civilians, upwards of 5,000 in some counts though this report limits totals to the hundreds
What was NATO doing in Yugoslavia, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq? How many Russians are there in Iran, Korea, or Syria?
Lots? With plenty of bombs, aircraft, and chemical weapons?
NATO wasn’t in Iran, Korea, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya. Lotta swing and misses there. It really feels like maybe you either don’t know what you are talking about or are arguing straight up in bad faith, and at this point I think it’s bad faith.
EDIT: I do take back Libya. NATO enforced the no-fly zone, and the arms embargo.
You can pretend that NATO member states are separate from NATO if you like but we can’t really continue a conversation if you think the people behind NATO are not also the same people behind the wars and/or embargoes of the above states. Just because the swap the mask every now and then doesn’t mean it’s a different actor.
I would figure someone who spends countless hours arguing the minutia of Marxist thought would have some idea of how words have meaning and when they are used incorrectly, the person using them incorrectly likely has an agenda.
Your agenda seems to be being a useful idiot for a guy who is currently committing genocide and you’ll just make up whatever you can to validate your predetermined opinion. Don’t do Putin’s work for him.
Marxism is dialectical and historical materialism. It is the analysis of contradictory and internally-connected relations and processes. To detach NATO from the actions of its member states is anti-dialectical.
Additionally, as you say, words have meanings. When people criticise NATO it is as a stand-in for the imperialist world order. It includes the IMF, World Bank, the WTO, the ‘international’ courts and rules, and all their elements and capitalist lackeys. You’re making a semantic argument, which misses the crucial point: that NATO and its member states are concerned only with the wealth and power of their bourgeoisie, regardless of Russia.
I’m not trying to hide the fact that I have an agenda, that we can’t have world peace until there are no more imperialists, which includes and is often, in ordinary language, represented by NATO. If you interpret that as support for Russia, there’s not much left for us to discuss.
Nah, NATO and Russia can both be bad. Of course, I remember back when liberals used to criticize Dubya for “with us or against us”.
What do you expect to happen if NATO goes away in your eyes? Really lay it out for me.
World peace would be a step close, for a start.
In what fantasy land does dissolving NATO end Russia’s imperial ambitions. They’ve taken a chunk out of multiple neighbors, as long as they were not part of a defense pact, they were targeted.
I fear that we have reached an impasse in this conversation already. To continue talking would risk talking past one another. All I can do is proffer this meagre offering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2451jFeZp0
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=t2451jFeZp0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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