Should political extremism, far-left or far-right, be an allowed part of Lemmy's Fediverse?
I'm simply asking this question because of Lemmygrad.ml existing, and that there isn't a far-right equivalent of it yet. If Lemmygrad has any standing for its right to exist under free speech, where is the line drawn for other extremist political ideologies? If Holodomor skepticism is allowed, then what stops Holocaust skepticism? (as it is generally accepted the Holodomor was man-made). I'm simply wondering what gives far-left politics a right to promote such extremist views in the Fediverse, when their far-right counterparts would be Defederated in minutes.
I always laugh at the term "far left" or "left extremism." Like oh no stop it with all the equality and rights. No no anything but those.
The victims of the Holodomor were not treated as equals by their killers.
Left and right aren't authoritarian or libertarian. The soviets were authoritarian and that’s why that happened. There’s no case to be made for equality and sharing resources to be a bad thing that could lead to something like that. It’s a problem with the implementation mainly the concentration of power that allowed authoritarianism. On the far right you have racism and suppression of “others” which clearly can lead to a nasty place very quickly.
The idea that the U.S.S.R. was socialist or communist, or that it's controlling party was working to make it so, was propaganda that was convenient for both the U.S. (which was already deep in the throws of reaction against the left, and pretty much had been since its inception, and wanted to use it against its budding Cold-War enemy) and the U.S.S.R. (where leftist ideas were popular, so the government pretending to embody it was helpful to the state). It wasn't. It was just a very widely-spread and useful authoritarian lie.
Lemmy is a federated platform run by instance owners. Owners have full power regarding moderating their servers including delegating that power to others. The owners can decide which other owners are censored through defederation. Lemmy, by design, is not free from political struggle. Lemmy handles power better than platforms like Reddit where server ownership is centralized.
Denying crimes against humanity is foul. Owners decide which ideas are promoted and which are denying history through federation with owners. Spaces for denying crimes against humanity will continue to exist. I would like to be in those spaces as a thorn to remind others of their awful ideas and possibly present better ideas.
Under present conditions someone must own the hardware to run the server. The owner cannot reasonably allow all content. Constituents of an instance place trust in the owner to censor in a transparent and responsible manner. Those same constituents can leave an instance for violating trust with regard to censorship. Freedom of association is an important component of Lemmy.
Far right and far left are a spectrum. I describe myself as an anarchist which is considered far left. As an anarchist, I see the fediverse as a possibility space for democratic control and power distribution over horizontally aligned hierarchies. I am excited for the possibilities to end domination heirarchies. My political alignment is tangent to the systems for power established by Lemmy.
Well said, all of it.
There's nothing the Fediverse as a whole can do to prevent extremism, by design; what we can do is choose not to interact with it, or to interact antagonistically with it
Because the people who run the majority of instances are leftists. And despite my many grievances with marxist-leninist ideology and particularly with stalinism, I'd rather talk with tankies who at least claim to respect me as a minority than nazis who actively wish death upon me.
Leftism should be tolerated because leftism advocates for the rights of the workers. Leftism is the way the world can and should be. Whichever flavor of it, they're all better than fascism. And wherever fascists will gather their sole purpose is to propagate hatred against minorities. Leftists are overwhelming welcoming and accepting of minorities. They are no threat to the acceptance of marginalized peoples.
Unless you're Jewish, the far left has had a huge blind spot for anti-Semitism over the last few years.
You might be mistaking denouncing Israel's treatment of Palestininians as somehow anti-Semitic.
I'm not saying that all leftists aren't bigots or that bigotry never happens in leftist spaces, but bigotry is the rule in fascist ones. Fascism is bigotry, it's a core part of the ideology itself. For that reason they're not comparable.
That sounds a little bit like the no true Scotsman argument
It isn't at all a no true Scotsman argument, what are you talking about?
You can be a leftist and not be bigoted. Bigots also join the left, we can't help that, but that's because they personally are bigoted, not because the ideology is. In fact, most modern leftism argues that bigotry is fundamentally at odds with the core ideals, and in my experience a majority of the left, at least in English speaking countries, wants to distance these people.
You cannot be a fascist without being bigoted. Being bigoted is part of the ideology. It aims to spread and teach bigotry, that's the purpose of it.
No true Scotsman would be "yeah but the anti Semitic leftists aren't real leftists", which isn't what anyone said.
I disagree, but if we argue, it'll go nowhere.
There's not really anything to disagree with. What you're calling a No True Scotsman isn't a No True Scotsman argument in the slightest.
Eh... I have met enough far-left authoritarians who are openly racist, anti-lgbtq, and who advocated for violence against people solely based on their family background that I don't think the extreme right has a monopoly on hate.
I don't think that level of intolerance should be tolerated, regardless of whether someone is on the right or left of the spectrum.
I have too, but let’s be realistic, and accept the honest fact that in far left spaces, racism, homophobia, transphobia etc us far, far less acceptable than in far right spaces. I’ve hung out with hardcore marxists and despite not necessarily agreeing with their political takes I’ve never had to feel uncomfortable with my race or sexuality in the same way that even mildly right-leaning folks have made me feel.
Yes, I’m sure racism and homophobia exist on the far left, but it’s an extreme minority on that side compared to on the right where it’s a pretty mild take, and treating the two as remotely equivalent is very harmful in itself.
Unless it's racism against Asians, that's rampant on the left.
I'd love to see any evidence of this
You're not arguing in good faith at all. You don't have any evidence, you just have wild accusations.
Try being an Uyghur in China, then, or a Ukrainian among Stalinists. You will not feel accepted.
Just want to clarify, nowhere did I equate the two. I'm simply saying I personally wouldn't tolerate intolerance regardless of the political ideology. The previous poster suggested that they didn't see such type behaviors from far-left folks, I had a different experience.
I totally agree far-right ideologies are inherently intolerant.
I love "i know all right spaces are intolerant but ive know some bad leftists so they are exactly the same" 😩
What does "far-left" mean to you, then? If someone with views entirely counter to progressive ideas just calls themselves "far-left" while spewing hateful garbage, do you just accept that they are part of the left?
Politics isn't team sports. Your political association is defined by your views, not by what side you claim to be on.
Then it’s just a “no true Scotsman” argument.
There are plenty of examples of leftist governments who were openly hostile to minorities.
This is like saying "No true Scotsman was born and raised in Istanbul, speaks only Turkish, and has never even visited Scotland or ever mentioned being intereted in doing so." For example, the "National Socialists" were not actually socialists even though they used socialist-like policies exclusively on an ethnic national basis, and no one serious is arguing that they were on the left. The left wing represents social equality and progressivism, while the right wing represents tradition and hierarchy. This has been the understanding of these terms since they were invented during the French Revolution.
And the left wing politicians during the French Revolution never prosecuted minorities in the name of the republic?
Damn, what happened to the entire Occitaian culture?
Oh wait, it was deemed an enemy of progress.
The monarchy had reasons to resemble the Tower of Babel; in democracy, leaving the citizens to ignore the national language [that of Paris], unable to control the power, is betraying the motherland... For a free people, the tongue must be one and the same for everyone. -Bertrand Barère
If you want to use that definition of left right from the French Revolution, fine, are they not “left” when they literally sat on the left side of the National Assembly?
Interesting point you bring up. You are absolutely correct about the consequences of the revolution and the involvement of hierarchical thinking of the Parisians towards the other ethnic groups around them. The Parisians who went and carried out the genocides may have believed that their actions conformed to "Liberty, fraternity, and equality" of the French people, but I'm not sure it was the logical conclusion to the ideology of the revolution, or the left. Looking back from my modern perspective completely out of context I would say these actions went against the professed ideology of the revolution before reality came in and complicated everything.
What I'm saying is that the left is the idea of progressivism and social equality, while the right is the idea of hierarchy and tradition. Actors who intend for progressivism and social equality can, due to the various pressures of the real world, can end up taking right wing measures as above. If someone supports the idea of tradition and hierarchy in the first place, I would not consider them left wing regardless of how they label themselves.
I can respect that.
Not really. If someone says "I am a woodworker" but you never see anything they make from wood, they have no woodworking tools, they don't know about woodworking techniques, they don't attend a woodworking club or job or class they're just... not a woodworker.
People who claim to be leftists without doing the required actions aren't leftists. Liking the aesthetics isn't enough.
So was the USSR not a leftist government?
I feel like we’re going into the semantics of who is a “true” leftist.
Sorry I missed this.
I feel like this is potentially a bait post but if I steel man you for the sake of civility and learning:
I am not the most knowledgeable about the USSR, my grandparents came from occupied poland and thus had certain opinions, that's a large part of my exposure and likely biases me. That said, the revolutionary movement and corresponding government seems to have gone through many phases, and have expressed various degrees of leftism at various times. Was assassinating lots of people, forcibly occupying people, collaborating with nazi germany, and engaging in genocide very leftist? I would say definitionally no. Even for the time there was considerable pushback from other leftist personalities and organisations.
On the other hand for many, many people there was massive increases in freedom, prosperity, and rights compared to tzarist russia. Including my grandmother, who was allowed to hold a technical office job! wow! (until she moved to Australia and was forced to work in a factory and be treated like an idiot. Not wow).
This seems like one of those situations where trying to fit something into a simplistic box will inevitably break down. I feel comfortable saying the USSR accomplished both wonderful and terrible things, that overall it was probably better than tsarist russia but it fell short of the ideals that founded it.
If I met someone who say volunteered to feed the homeless, agitated for unionism at work, volunteered to educate disadvantaged people, but also thought I should be executed as a social deviant (I'm mega queer) I would probably call them leftist even while I thought they were massively misguided and extremely dangerous. I'll note I've never actually met anyone like that though.
It was not.
Let us know when the ussr is doing anything modern. You just keep moving the goalposts.
Yeah, they're banned from lemmygrad. Rule 5:
Denying the Uyghur genocide is an act of bigotry, no different from denying the Holocaust of German Jews, yet such content is openly tolerated there.
You can't be a fascist and not be bigoted. You can be a marxist-leninist and not as a rule hate minorities. I encourage you to go to lemmygrad yourself, see if you find any hatred of minorities being tolerated there. You just won't.
I can coexist in a space with them, they're not going to start calling for the genocide of minority groups. They may dispute the way historical events transpired, but there's a fundamental difference between "these events didnt happen the way you're describing" and a fascist saying "let's mass murder all the minorities because they're biologically impure". I can coexist in a space with one, with the other my murder (or the murder of any other marginalized group) is as a rule being outright advocated for.
No matter how hard you try tankies even at their worst are not fascists. To try and equate the two is beyond ridiculous. You can point out that some historical regimes have done a lot of horrible things, fair enough. But ideologically marxist-leninists are not comparable on any level to fascists.
I can not, and will never under any circumstances tolerate the presence of fascism to any degree.
OP mentioned Holodomor, so I'll just point out that ML's generally don't deny that there was a famine, or even that it was exacerbated by bad policy. The specific point of contention is whether it was intentional.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor_genocide_question
Even historians debate this, so I don't think it's reasonable to characterize it as "genocide denial".
Can't agree more. It's amazing just how many posts I've seen since joining Lemmy equating the left and right, as if "workers should own the means of production" is just as bad as the literal genocide advocated by the hard right.
That said, given that lemmy.ml (and maybe latte.isnot.coffee?) is run by pro-CCP tankies, I think it's worth taking a second to say that defending the genocide of the Uighurs is majorly fucked and the vast majority of hard leftists here on Lemmy vehimently oppose that.
But one can't be hard-right and not be for genocide, basically. Not so on the left.
Yeah, the concept behind the fediverse nests pretty well with leftist ideals, so it’s no surprise that leftism has thrived here. An open-source site that anyone can host, with no centralized power structure, and that openly promotes opening and administrating your own server? The idea behind it is inherently anti-fascist, because fascism relies on consolidating power so only an elite landed gentry are allowed to make decisions.
My philosophy has been that If you hate people you're never met, I hate you. Otherwise, let's have a drink and talk out whatever the differences are.
The people who made abortion illegal in most of the United States have harmed millions of innocent people without meeting them.
I'm gonna be annoying and I know it, but I really hate that people equate the far left and the far right. What does the far left want? Destroy capitalism. What does the far right want? Kill all queer people and then some. For some people, the opposite of Nazism is Communism when these barely have anything to do with each other.
The far left can be annoying, sure. But in the end, the vast majority of them are not actively trying to justify mass murder. That's a key difference. Also, one has dramatically more influence then the other. So the question should be:
Should the far right be an allowed part of Lemmy's fediverse?
Which is a misunderstanding of the fediverse I think. We can't forbid them to be anywhere on an open source and defedrated platform. We can however, ask if they should be tolerated? And that's up to the various servers to decide.
Beehaw already has a stance on it, though: No. Hence the recent defederation. And I agree. Fuck Nazis.
This is my stance on it too. People like to treat today's political environment as two sides of a coin diametrically opposed, but that's not how political ideology works, it's more nuance than that, like a sphere. I get why American's do it with a two-party system, but that doesn't mean you're all in on one or another, people are more nuance than that too. People who run with this mentality that there are only two sides to politics often fall into the mistake of equating to two as equal sides as you said. It makes it hard to acknowledge the difference of the extremes and their intentions.
Though I think the biggest reason people are less tolerant the alt right is because there are more reasons outside of politics to be against the alt right. Outside of politics, alt lefties usually get into arguments with economist and capitalist because extreme leftist have intensions to change the economic landscape. Whether for better or worse is precisely what they're arguing about. There's also the more fringe alt left (tankies I believe) who will get in a tussle with historians and survivors alike, but their conversations chill out once they realize no one's condoning anything (usually, idk all you tankies).
Meanwhile the alt right targets specific freedoms enshrined by the US constitution and the Human Bill of Rights. The alt right wants a say in who you marry, whether or not you should adopt, religious rule you should abide by, who should/shouldn't get to vote, whether the vote should be decided by the people or legislator (you now Democracy and all), your identity, your medical decisions, your family planning, your education, and the very books you read. There's a desire to snub out individuality if it doesn't abide by the alt rights idea of "normal." All of these stances directly invade individual rights of many people and their ability to pursue their respective happiness. While there's political reasons to speak out against these stances, there's also moral obligation and the simple instinct of survival pushing back on these perspectives. This creates a large group of people who not only disagree, but whose existence is literally threaten, there's no room for tolerance when lives and freedom are on the line. The reason alt right has a tough time is because most Americans still hold age-old American values of liberty, life, and the pursuit of happiness.
I keep seeing these posts about whether something should be "allowed", and keep asking myself how people could so fundamentally misunderstand the fediverse when I've only been here a month and can see this is a silly question.
How are you going to stop an open source, federated community from having instances where far right or far left stuff happens? You can't. All you can do is decide who you federate with on the instance you own. So join an instance who is careful about its membership and defererates instances that have far right or left activity. That's all you can do.
There is no "king of the fediverse" making decrees about what is/is not allowed.
You cannot stop someone from downloading a software to open their own instance. What you can do is to block bad actors/cut federation with them. Which is what most instances do with both alt-right/nazi and tankie instances.
I don't understand what argument you're making. I was about to say you're welcome to make your own instance and federate or defederate with whoever you want, but then I noticed you're on beehaw. They already have defederated with lemmygrad. So what's the problem?
Btw, MLs suck but let's not pretend they're the same or as bad as Nazis. That's a false equivalence.
Yes, but no one is obligated to federate their shit, or host their shit.
This is a complete misunderstanding of what Lemmy and the Fediverse more generally is. It's quite literally impossible, by design to keep anyone out globally. That's the whole point. There's no centralized server where someone can decide "Oh, we're just gonna prevent this person's physical hardware from spinning up a Lemmy server and connecting it to the internet".
If there were, it'd be like Twitter, or Reddit, or all of the other centralized sites where moderation seems cool until you disagree with their choices in what they do or don't moderate. Beehaw can moderate things how they please. You could moderate things however you please by spinning up your own little instance and just using it as an account hosting instance. Once again, by design.
Good to define terms for this. Does extreme left mean people who think that a living wage should be a thing? To fox news it does.
Exploding heads is a good example of a far right instance. A lot of folks have defederated from them. The biggest instance, Lemmy.world, just cut ties and they’re furious.
The premise is that it’s up to the admins of each instance to choose. Inherently in the design, nothing is globally allowed or not. And the less-preferable ideas will appear to fewer people because they will be defederated more often.
Fwiw, lemmygrad is defederated from many instances.
Isn't Truth Social (Trump's thing) technically part of the fediverse, since it runs on Mastodon? I don't know if they're a far-right equivalent of lemmygrad since I haven't spent time on either but it seems like a fair parallel.
Personally I'm not a fan of eager defederation. I'm skeptical of the benefits of deplatforming and I think that casual use of the banhammer, even if the subjects deserve it, is corrosive to our own ability to think clearly.
by design it literally cannot be "allowed" or "disallowed", it just Is and Can Be a part of the Fediverse. you as an individual have absolutely no control over who uses Lemmy or ActivityPub generally, in the same way Mastodon can't stop a community like Gab from using their software as long as they abide by the guidelines. also, there is a "far-right equivalent of Lemmygrad" (exploding-heads) and you're literally asking the body questions on an instance which defederates from lemmygrad (which many instances also do). this is such a perplexing set of questions in general.
Account is 3 days old. Maybe the whole idea of Lemmy and the Fediverse is still perplexing to them? This response feels needlessly passive-aggressive; seems like maybe there's some room to afford grace?
The post is a dog whistle. Far-right communities have existed and still exist, OP is misrepresenting the current status to paint one of the extremes as unfairly perjudiced by the other.
Very extreme assumptions about me. I'm disabled and would be killed by any far-right government, if one were in power. I was just trying to ask a question: at what point does free speech end and dangerous ideas begin? I wasn't trying to say "hey, that's not fair!!! let racist timmy here if we're gonna have Lemmygrad :((", I was simply asking why any form of extremism is tolerated(and why there's some big deal about exploding heads, which I've just recently learned about, and far less talk about Lemmygrad). I personally don't feel either should be allowed on Lemmy, and that any instances pertaining to extremist ideology should be defederated. Also, I apologize for asking this question on Beehaw, of all Lemmy instances, when none of my arguments pertain to here; I feel my post would've been far better had I directly mentioned Lemmy.world/made this post on Lemmy.world. (which is still federated with Lemmygrad, if I am understanding things correctly)
i am pleased to report you've picked a good instance for this since this is more-or-less our policy.
we've collectively spent like 6 hours today just trying to get the site up and functioning because Lemmy is nightmarish to work with, you're gonna have to forgive me a bit if i'm more blunt in fielding questions which have been litigated for as long as we've been here and get re-litigated on the time scale of every few days. this is a very played out discourse in general. i would encourage people to just lurk more to answer stuff like this
Do not tolerate the intolerant!
We should tolerate every ideology and political flavour as long as its supporters are not actively attacking or suppressing other views and especially targeting vulnerable people. The goal should be to create a welcoming place of free speech for all and this requires to eliminate those who do not support this goal or actively work against it - namely fascists (and that includes more than just the old and alt right).
Anti-fascism ist necessary action against those that claim freedom of speech but abuse it for ideological warfare with the ultimate goal of abolition of free speech.
But lemmygrad is already defederated by most instances
The wonder of a federated system. Is you or anyone else can set up an instance that is dedicated to open political debate.
But no one can force you to do so.
The issue is to encourage the current right wing to join, you will need to allow prejudice and hate. Because tha is what the far right has turned into. At that point no one else can or should be forced to allow your instance to be federated to them.
Most instances have no objection to fiscal right wing politics. They just ban the hate. If right wing supporters are unable or unwilling to debate in that environment. I have no desire or ability to force instance owners to accept them.
I'm brand new and figuring out this Fediverse right now and it's more complicated than push a button I'm on. That stops a lot of the tech averse idiots who seem by and large to be conservatives from showing up. It's too complicated for them.
Fuck the far right in all venues and platforms.
Are you actually wondering out loud whether we should allow Holocaust denial here? You might be in the wrong place.
I mean, how scary is the far left? They want to feed too many hungry kids? Make healthcare affordable? Respect basic human rights? It seems disingenuous to compare the left to the right, I mean one side is too nice and the other wants to tear down democracy.
Damned communists wanting everybody to (checks notes) live in reasonable comfort, without fear of destitution and homelessness
The problem isn't political extremism in either of those cases, the problem is authoritarianism.
Authoritarianism is just bad, no matter who does it. As others have stated, there is indeed no king of the fediverse.
Just asking a question, huh? Second one of these threads I've seen in my feed today.
Neocons testing the waters, to see how far their hatespeech will get them.
This reads like such flame-bait/rage-bait, sigh... but I will respond under the assumption you are a confused newbie to Lemmy and give you some slack.
Lemmy and many Fediverse apps are set up so that it is not possible to banish/censor an instance from the entire network, besides methods to take the server offline itself including DMCA/DDoS/lawsuits/government seizure etc., so lemmygrad will continue to "exist" just as much as exploding-heads, Gab, Truthsocial and other far-right sites will.
Keep in mind: Many major instances (including beehaw) are already de-federated from lemmygrad. Constant CCP and СССР propaganda gets tiring quickly.
As much as an instance owner is given a right to unfettered speech, they and other instande owners also have the right to control what speech from others they want on the platform. Being blunt here, right-wing instances being immediately de-federated is an indication that many instance owners don't want the diarrhea of extreme rhetoric pouring in, so the best course of action for those users would be to find their own toilet.
If you explicitly define what far-left and far-right means, you could probably have a straightforward answer. You mention holodomor skepticism and holocaust skepticism as some kind of far-left and far-right examples (unless I am misreading your comment), but I personally am not sure exactly what the holodomor was. I assume it was some genocide-level event perpetuated by the USSR, but I am not at all sure. Maybe my internet experience is in some kind of enclave composed of SF literature discussions, 8-bit computers and King of the Hill clips, but I really don't run across holodomor skepticism at all.
Of course, I know what holocaust skepticism is (the denial that millions of Jews [and a whole bunch of gays and Christians and Roma peoples) were systematically killed by the German regime during WW2, as directed by Hitler), but that's only because the types of people who would embrace (or worse) holocaust skepticism are feeling more emboldened by the current political climate.
Personally, I define far-left and far-right as being 'armed militants' and/or 'large groups of people calling for the eradication of one or more types of people.' 'Types of people', in this case, means 'people who are born with a certain characteristic that is not changeable, such as race or sexuality' Currently, we have armed militants protesting libraries (libraries, of all places!) but I have yet to see an armed militant demanding government-funded healthcare or seizing the means of production. Therefore, you will have to forgive me if I don't buy into the 'both sides' equivalence that your post requires the reader to hold.
When the far-left becomes as bad as the far-right, we can (and should!) talk. Until then, miss me with that shit.
The Holodomor was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine; there is some argument as to whether the intent was to kill off Ukrainians to stifle their independence movement at the time, or if the greater USSR just didn't care about them at all.
Regardless, most of the crops grown in Ukraine at the time were shipped out to other parts of the USSR, leaving little to eat in Ukraine, and causing millions of deaths. Total death count is also iffy, but certainly rivals the Holocaust.
Compare the Irish potato famine, where Britain enforced export of potatoes from Ireland despite widespread Irish famine. Same thing, larger scale.