There's some good replies and trolling here and there but god damn do I hate reddit brained people.
If I still used Reddit I’d be the Chad “yeah I‘m a tankie. Why do people oppose Stalin sending in tanks to save Jewish people from being lynched in the streets by Hungarian WW2 Nazis anyway?” and just turn off reply notifications.
I simply say "I'm a communist, yes" since that's what it amounts to, anyway.
"why are you so pissy about getting criticized from your left?"
Yeah, even better. I've seen Syndies, Anarchists and even less-milquetoast Reformists get hit with the term.
I thought it was about sending in the tanks at Tiananmen Square
No it was an uprising in Hungary in the 1950s.
The narrative in the west is those brave Hungarians just wanted their freedom, and they only lynched a few Jewish people, as a treat.
The tankie / historically accurate account is that Hungary was one of the more enthusiastic Nazi allys in WW2 and it was mostly the fascist element, mostly ethno-nationalists, mostly the same people who fought in WW2 in most cases, running riot murdering socialists and having another pogrom. Yes they wanted independence from the Soviets but they wanted to restore the far right ethnonationalist government of the 40s so it’s good they were crushed. The “freedom” they were after was the “freedom” to reimpose fascism.
Another fun fact re Tiananmen Square is that those tanks were actually leaving the city center when tank man stood in front of them.
The cia internally estimated 150-500 casualties, which coincides with the Chinese account which states 300 were killed in over 200 locations. Which stands in contrast to what the BBC still reports to this day of 10,000 being killed in the square, descriptions of piles of bodies of which for some reason there is not a single photo or eye witness account, and this claim is all sourced to a British diplomat who says “a friend told me” and that’s what the public account rests on. A trust me bro.
Edit: fuck i can go on too. It’s the Tiananmen Square protests were actually mostly a protest against market liberalization because it sent food prices high which makes people angry. Some student movement which was simply one element of the protests were neoliberals wanting “western style democracy” but nationwide the movement was actually mostly inspired by people pissed off that price controls were being removed from food which affected their cost of living. It wasn’t exactly an anti-capitalist protest since it was really more specific to the price of food and anger about corruption but the way it is portrayed as “please we just want western style capitalism” followed by authoritarian mass murder is a near total fabrication.
Also the British story is literally that the square is so clean because the tanks just ran over people so many times that they turned into goop and were hosed down into the sewers, and presumably then they just hosed down the tanks also without any trace left.
Edit: Also theres no sign of water on the tanks or square the very morning after because the Chinese CCP are just that tricky and sneaky.
That's such a shaky lie and yet so many repeat it without thinking twice
The more I deal with liberals, the more I think this essay is right:
Let us look at a specific example. A claim like “There’s cultural genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang” is simply unreal to most Westerners, close to pure gibberish. The words really refer to existing entities and geographies, but Westerners aren’t familiar with them. The actual content of the utterance as it spills out is no more complex or nuanced than “China Bad,” and the elementary mistakes people make when they write out statements of “solidarity” make that much clear. This is not a complaint that these people have not studied China enough — there’s no reason to expect them to study China, and retrospectively I think to some extent it was a mistake to personally have spent so much time trying to teach them. It’s instead an acknowledgment that they are eagerly wielding the accusation like a club, that they are in reality unconcerned with its truth-content, because it serves a social purpose.
What is this social purpose? Westerners want to believe that other places are worse off, exactly how Americans and Canadians perennially flatter themselves by attacking each others’ decaying health-care systems, or how a divorcee might fantasize that their ex-lover’s blooming love-life is secretly miserable. This kind of “crab mentality” is actually a sophisticated coping mechanism suitable for an environment in which no other course of action seems viable. Cognitive dissonance, the kind that eventually spurs one into becoming intolerant of the status quo and into action, is initially unpleasant and scary for everybody. In this way, we can begin to understand the benefit that “victims” of propaganda derive from carelessly “spreading awareness.” Their efforts feed an ambient propaganda haze of controversy and scandal and wariness that suffocates any painful optimism (or jealousy) and ensuing sense of duty one might otherwise feel from a casual glance at the amazing things happening elsewhere. People aren’t “falling” for atrocity propaganda; they’re eagerly seeking it out, like a soothing balm.
It doesn't help at all that the definition of "Genocide" has become so muddied as to be almost a liability rather than a useful term. China detaining Uighurs (often spuriously) suspected of extremism and making them sing patriotic songs is genocide. Russia invading Ukraine is genocide... somehow. I honestly don't know what Libs think Russia is doing that is genocide because I got sick of listening to them ages ago. The 1932 famine is genocide, and even if you finally get them to admit that it wasn't intentional and there were many factors that combined to lead to the deaths, and that the Soviets did, eventually, badly, try to provide relief, they'll still say it was genocide because the word is just vibes now.
And most of them here "Genocide" once and assume that China is feeding Uighurs in to a giant wood-chipper. Like, don't get me worng, China's treatment of Uighurs a few years ago when their counter-terror operation was going was unfair and clearly in violation of western concepts of civil rights, but what provably happened is that people were arrested, held in detention for a few months (and made to sing dumb patriotic songs for reasons i can't fathom), and then released. I'm sure that caused a lot of hardship and upset, but it's so far from genocide that the accusation is farcical. And the actual goal of the government; Quashing Salafist infiltration and terrorism in the region, is never mentioned or considered because that would require evaluating it against the west's "Kill em all and let god sort them out" approach to counter terrorism.
Same with Ukraine. People act like Russia is rounding up Ukrainian's and feeding them in to wood chippers. There was all that totally fabricated BS about mobile crematoriums early in the war, reporting that Putin was going to destroy Ukrainian people and culture. They presented the massacre of civilians at Bucha as part of a systematic program of extermination, even after it turned out that most of those people were probably killed unintentionally by shrapnel from air bursting artillery (not excusing this, it just wasn't part of any official or unofficial program of mass killing). When in reality the RF was shockingly restrained in it's attacks on infrastructure and places with a high likelihood of civilian casualties for months and months in to the war. The US's approarch to shock and awe warfare is to flatten everything and destroy as much infrastructure as possible on day one, while the RF spent months carefully avoiding damage to the infrastructure that Ukrainians relied on. And forgive me for being an optimist and believing in humanity, but the only reason I can see for that restraint is that they didn't want to cause unneccesary suffering and hardship for Ukrainian civilians. That might have been hard headed pragmatism; Don't antagonize people who might form an insurgency against you, but it also might just be, you know... Russia and Ukraine are deeply interconnected nations and cultures that had a friendly relationship with borders that were basically a formality for nearly a century, and this ultra-nationalist Nazi turn only really took power in 2014.
And ignoring the fact of active genocides going on within their own societies, and in many cases with their enthusiastic support.
I can't remember the name of the BBC reporter right now who was there, but he maintained for years that he did not see a massacre in the square but a massive, occassionally rowdy and physical, protest. He only started changing his story to the accepted Western narrative of a massacre many years later when he became very much part of the BBC and British establishment.
(My tired insomnia-ridden brain wants to say it was an Attonbrough or Dimbleby, but I'm not sure that's right and you can't google anything mentioning TS without just getting fifty pages of recent propaganda articles from the Atlantic or whatever)
IMPORTANT EDIT: Yeah, I muddled some of the details (I really need a good night's sleep, this week's been awful for it) but I remembered and doubled checked online and with a friend who used to be a journo so here it is...
John Simpson is the veteran BBC journalist who was there with a camera and film crew. They shot a good deal of what went on to be in the BBC report edit that you see whenever it comes up (some is from AP and CBS I believe). And while he never denied there were deaths his reporting at the time was very different from the accepted story he tacitly supports or at least doesn't feel the need to correct now (10k killed, driven over by tanks etc).
In earlier talks and writing on it his focus used to be on a large protest that turned very ugly and violent due to a small number of student protestors attacking soldiers, using indiscriminate beatings, and throwing firebombs until finally Chinese soldiers responded and opened fire. As recently as 2013 he's talked about stepping in to try and stop the violent student protestors killing the injured soldiers they dragged from the famous burning armoured car.
The crowd was a very rough lot, not nice students, and they wanted blood. They smashed the head of one of the soldiers in, and then they started to smash another one in and I thought, ‘I can’t stand by and just let this happen,’ and so I waded in.
The numbers he gives have varied a bit over the years but even as recent as a couple of years ago on Twitter he said he estimated about 40 deaths that he saw or could tell from the aftermath. Even now he doesn't paint the picture that's constantly pushed by the West of an indiscriminate massacre of peaceful protestors and massive casualties, although definitely has a 'go along to get along' attitude towards not refuting or calling it out when he's been asked to talk about it, unlike when he was a younger man.
Interestingly, his original assessment seems to also be supported to this day by Jeff Widener, the photo journalist who took the Tank Man picture. He talks about the violence of the mob and barely escaping alive from them himself (to some quietly shocked CBS News anchors) in this modern interview piece. And as good sense and the latter part of the segment shows, he's not exactly pro-China back then or today.
What's striking to me is just the straightforward, uncontroversial relaying of the facts at the time, by the Western journalists there, compared to the absurd propaganda fantasies presented even by journalists now.
These two men aren't even particularly determined to correct the record, push back against the narrative, or give broader context. They're just defending the work they did and what they saw amongst the swirl of disinfo for the sake of their own reputations.
Just clicked "save" for this comment, top notch stuff. Would you happen to know where that fact that the CIA briefed the president and congress came from? I'm sure it's true but I've been arguing China-stuff with friends over the last couple days and a good chance Tiananmen comes up today.
It’s from the Secretary of states intel briefing
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB16/docs/doc13.pdf
I was going from memory and so I need to correct myself, they estimate those casualties in the square. My memory was this was in the associated protests across the country but they estimate those in the square.
My understanding is that none of the contemporary western journalists reporting from the square saw anyone killed in the square itself. It was all in street fighting several blocks away between insurgents armed with molotovs and stolen guns and PLA troops who were, at least initially, unarmed. And, like, from what it sounds like the PLA wasn't attacking, they were totally unprepared and were ambushed sitting in trucks and APCs with the hatches open. Like the PLA being there was a show of force, but the vast majority of them had no weapons. It doesn't seem like anyone, students or government, seriously thought fighting or violence would break out.
Also, afaik, everyone in China knows Tiananmen happened, but since it was just one protest with a relatively small amount of violence compared to the size of the movement, it's not viewed as being nearly as significant as western propaganda makes it out to be.
You should copy it to a Word doc since the comment probably will get archived
Also notable that all western sources reporting from the square at that time reported at most a few hundred casualties and none of them were students in the square. The students all left peacefully at the request of the PLA. By that point the protests had been hijacked by literal CIA agents trying to incite a massacre, a far cry from the original Student demands of a more permissive social atmosphere (things like couples being able to show affection in public without judgement, not even necessarily government.) There was also a large communist faction who wanted the government to move it's policies back towards communism instead of liberal reforms. And again, they weren't asking for anything drastic, nor were they trying to overthrow the government. The whole mood in the square, for the most part, was pretty chill. The Students were singing songs together with the PLA troops, getting them food, talking with them. The PLA troops were totally unarmed. No batons, no riot gear. Just hanging out in their uniforms.
Afaik what finally drove the PLA to clear out the square was that anti-communist paramilitaries were attacking PLA troops with fire bombs and stolen guns. A lot of PLA soldiers burned to death when their trucks or APCs got firebombed, and it lead to street fighting while the PLA tried to get soldiers with weapons in to the area to fight the insurgents. But even then, it was only a few hundred, maybe a thousand insurgents. All the fighting happened blocks away from the square.
And while my details may be incorrect there isn't really any disagreement about what happened outside of the absurdly sensationalized propaganda story. All the western journalists who were present at the time reported - No one was killed in the square, fighting outside the square, a few hundred dead at most. The western contemporary accounts line up almost exactly with the official Chinese accounts. And afaik there was no crack down or anything afterwards. The protestors, for the most part, conducted themselves well and had a legitimate grievance, and left peacefully when asked, so the government didn't really feel threatened by the movement and felt it was better to let things settle down than escalate.
Edit: Believe it or not, the last time I checked the Wiki on Tiennemen square it pretty straightforwardly reported the real, non-sensationalized version, complete with sources. idk how good the details are, but the version on wikipedia right now (or at least last year, when I read it) is not the 10,000 run over by tanks BS.
Ironically, Maoists were demonizing the event as the "Khruschevite Social Imperialist Invasion" of Hungary.
"Are people actually complaining that the game portrays the USSR too positively? Do they think it was a cartoonishly evil hellscape where happiness and anything positive was outlawed?"
Yeah, it forever astounds me how 95% of all western people, with no exaggeration, believe this.
Everyone walked in a single file line to the work factory to do labor, to the “store” where they can only buy bread if they’re lucky, and go home. Everything was gray and the most popular pastime was staring out your commie block window while eating your stale bread
I remember hearing mocking jokes when i was a kid that it took three butchers to sell you a piece of meat at the Soviet grocery. And at the time it was like "ha ha sill inefficient Russians! Communism is when no efficiency" and now i'm like "Damn all three of those guys had food, housing, and healthcare, didn't they.
In the US at least that is barely an exaggeration from what they teach us in school. So if as an adult you don’t bother to do even the slightest unpacking and thinking critically about history, you’ll probably just stick with that.
They're never exposed to any information at all that isn't pure propaganda. Stranger Things had a main character imprisoned in a gulag where they were feeding prisoners to extradimensional monsters. A gulag. In the late 80s. Black Widow did, too. Like straight up, no complexity breaking a guy out of a soviet gulag in like 2016 or something. A couple of Call of Duty games featured... escapes from Gulags. Those are the only depictions of life in Soviet Russia I can think of it media off the top of my head. I'm sure there are far more that I just don't know about.
Stranger Things had a main character imprisoned in a gulag where they were feeding prisoners to extradimensional monsters. A gulag. In the late 80s
Clearly the mind numbing propaganda works too because I had someone literally cite Stranger Things as proof there were gulags in the late Soviet Union :agony-minion:
There was that one Comrade Detective show as well, set in Soviet Romania; but yeah, there's not much out there.
Reddit calls Social Democrats tankies now. It gets used anytime somebody mentions abolishing capitalism and Marx.
The SRA sub on :reddit-logo: talking shit on "tankies" every second they can is priceless
Because astroturfers and teenagers addicted to watching Twitch don't bother actually joining or going to real meetings would be my guess.
we DESPISE the subreddit. the only reason it exists is if it was shuttered, people would make a new one with even worse moderation and shit up the SRA name even more
I think this would be even more interesting if the Soviet closed city was a ship-in-a-bottle that had been captured years in the past by fascists and run as a Fallout style vault or Truman Show to see how to corrupt socialists, like the CIA is the BBEG. And you get to kill fascists.
Tbh you still definitely do it, sounds like an interesting premise and we need more punk sovietshock fiction pieces.
It’s pretty great because I don’t know any communists who care abut this game outside of talking about liberals talking about the game
It looks kinda mid, honestly. Like it could be good dumb fun but nothing about it really sold me. The Soviet aesthetics are the main thing that makes it stand out.
It's been amazing to see the anger libs have for this game cuss it isn't "soviets are satan", with many libs malding cuss we are in a war with Russia now I guess and people forgot that the USSR sadly doesn't exist anymore?
It's wild and bizarre how many people treat the RF as the USSR like 1991 never happened. Just living in a purely vibes based world, enjoying the shadows on the wall of the cave.
Libs be like: I eat hot chip, lie, and ignore how the post soviet collapse led to western capital raping Eastern Europe of its resources.
Dunno. Reviews are all over the place - some saying mediocre, some saying ok, some saying great in parts. A lot bitching about the Russia angle obvs.
A pre-release build was leaked yesterday or the day before, dated November I think. Some GPU features aren't switched on but the game is complete. Haven't installed it yet, I'll probably wait for the official Fitgirl repack.
edit - I should say the prerelease is apparently without Denuvo so might be worth a download and saving.
Are you sure about that? I've heard that November build isn't completable without console commands beyond about the halfway point of the game. Missing scripts n stuff.
Only just started it but I can already tell the world building is pretty great and I found myself going through the start of the game very slowly just because of how much I was enjoying seeing all of the red flags and large statues of :marx: and :lenin-heisenberg:
:ussr-cry:
Honestly even if the game ends up doing a :both-sides: I'm willing to bet those two sides will be communism and liberalism considering that in the first 5 minutes the nazis are already accurately portrayed as the evil sore losers they are and ya know what? I'll take it, even most of the worst case scenarios of this game's plot is good for us
We just need to not react, sure we know that real leftist politics are vastly superior to liberalism but in this rotten neoliberal world a message that communism is only as flawed as liberalism is a win for us
So long as the game doesn't take an unexpected reactionary turn we should just enjoy the libs getting :wojak-nooo: levels of mad about this
gameplay footage makes it look very grindy tbh. like too many hits to kill a standard enemy. a lot of strafing and backpedalling and fleeing.
The combat did look kinda mediocre on the gameplay videos I've seen tbh.
The game looks absolutely gorgeous tho, I'm considering getting it for the visuals only.
No idea, apparently the gamepass version was not the full retail release cuss people were not able to get into the car.
I'm personally gonna wait a week to see what the actual scores and feelings on it will be (so far just lots of horny posting on the ballerina robots).
Seems to be getting pretty good reviews so far, 7-8/10 seems to be the average.
Ukrainian devs try not to virtue signal their chuddiness [Challenge: IMPOSSIBLE]Nvm devs are Russian, must be thinking of something else
there should be a big flashing sign saying "THIS DEV IS UKRAINIAN" /baltic/polish in the top corner of the screen whenever a dev from there makes a dystopian game. You can really see where the "write what you know" sense kicks in
It’s a Ukraina dev? What was all the liberal hand wringing about it being funded by Russia?
From what I've seen, combat is like Bioshock (which I think is a negative, but others may like), writing is trying to be also like Bioshock but open ended. Its good that you do actually get a lot of dialogue options, but unfortunatly IMO the writing is shit. I've heard some people like it, as it is Corny on purpose, but I find that corniness overly cheesey, grating, and unfunny... but its humor, so YMMV.
This is my opinion from watching some gameplay, and reading some reviews, so I'd recommend if you're interested, to watch some gameplay. Worse case, you 'spoil' yourself on the first hour or so of gameplay/story.
The protagonist can only be described as the most aggressively Russian man ever.
Playing the game on gamepass atm and its alright. Feels a bit clunky to play and the dialogue is hilariously bad but i just slapped on Russian va and ignore it most of the time.
Its very pretty to look at, if nothing else I like when a game is pretty and can give everything else a pass if i got something nice to look at.
How's the gunplay? So far from the clips I've seen it looks pretty interesting
A bit disappointing. Artistic direction for the game is impeccable and so very unique all the way down to the guns but the weak sound design, lack of impact from melee or shooting and overly tanky enemies that don't really respond to being hit kinda make it feel flat.
Animations are intended to be slow, weighty and deliberate but lack the impact and damage you'd expect from such a wind up.
Well that sucks, here's hoping they get some much needed feedback and patches. Might pick it up on sale in a year or two once I got a more powerful rig to enjoy the visuals.
