Remember kids, Tankies wants to undermine democracy - same as facists.
Just like fascists, tankies could theoretically hang out here without getting the boot. It’s just that genocide denying authoritarians cannot be tolerated in a tolerant, democratic society. The reason tankies and fascists get the boot is because they can’t resist trying to bully and intimidate those that find their views abhorrent. They simply can’t resist being terrible.
They’re cultists with views that can’t stand up to scrutiny, so they need use other tactics to spread their shit and gain power. They use the real downsides and weaknesses of democracy to argue we need an even worse system. Then they argue you actually hold the worst views of their enemies, even though they usually support exactly the same things that make those enemies bad. Tankies claim you’re a free-market liberal for opposing them, when the countries they support are state capitalists. Fascists claim you’re against freedom of speech, while they are always trying to ban ideas they hate. Some of them are misguided and believe their own lies, but others are just awful people.
Tankies traditionally are associated with communists, but today’s tankies (even those that call themselves communists) are really after authoritarianism than communism, and given the history of the name (that they supported using tracks on civilians). I don’t think they’re is much difference between current communists and current fascists, both groups seem to support authoritarianism and feels like term “tankies” fits both of them well.
I learned about a week ago why they are the way they are. See the soviet union was the closest in their mind the world has ever come to communism, so even though it’s fallen into fascist oligarchy, they still hold hope that the anticommunist putin is going to rise up and reestablish global communism once more. The only problem with that is that… well Russia doesn’t want communism. This is their playbook Yeah, that doesn’t look socialist, that looks like “we tried communism it didn’t work so lets do fascism this time” so they end up throwing their support towards red flavored fascism since it’s the best chance (in their minds) at getting global communism. When the alternative is an american nazi world order, or tiny countries with no power, you don’t really have much choice.
But here’s something I want every single one of you to realize having read all of that: Even the most fascist redfash still would have killed the nazis. The same cannot be said for the average (in-power) liberal today. Anticommunism is always pro-fascism. Never let your critiques of the left turn into support for the right.
EDIT: Case in point, the person i’m responding to is never going to see this post because they’re on a nazi bar instance that banned me.
Even the most fascist redfash still would have killed the nazis.
They’d kill who they define as nazis. I find that tankies’ (especially Hexbear) definition of nazism doesn’t entirely correspond to mine or that of most other people. So this is not something to be super optimistic about.
It is a bare minimum that the current world order can’t even pass. They can’t even go a week without funding a mass ethnic genocide.
I really have no idea what people are trying to say or getting at in a lot of these comments, it feels like one of those art experiments where words don’t have meaning but are used to express emotion
Lol redfash killing nazis isn’t worth praise. Redfash kill each other the first chance they get. They are so paranoid when they come to power they purge anyone and everyone they can.
Lemmy world are nazis?
The users are a mixed bag but the mods/admins absolutely are in the business of running a nazi bar. They’re doing the classic strategy of passively protecting fascists while actively suppressing those calling out the fascists. They also ban people who are open communists.
Meanwhile, .ml keeps banning my accounts for just commenting on c/worldnews these days.
I’m not a troll. You can go look at my contributions. I made some hexbears look like idiots and now they’ve got me on a leash.
so even though it’s fallen into fascist oligarchy,
You know any left wing project after being overthrown by the US would also end up a fascist oligarchy right? As was the case with the illegal and undemocratic dissolution of the Soviet Union brought about by the US.
Even the most fascist redfash
A mainstream Jewish holocaust scholar on equating fascism and communism and why it is bad
Slaps Table Thank You!
Yes, when it comes to the axis from authoritarian to anarchist. Things all tend to narrow in to a single point at either end. In regards to authoritarians, it’s all about the hierarchy and holding power for themselves. They don’t give a shit what form of government sits under that. When it comes to anarchists and libertarians, no government other than a largely flat form of socialism is acceptable. Simply because they are focused on freedoms both individual and social. And large monolithic hierarchies tend to get in the way of that.
And when I use the term libertarian I of course mean actual libertarians. Not temporarily embarrassed Republicans, or teenage capitalists. The easiest test to find out whether someone might accidentally be a libertarian or not. Is to find out if they belong to the Libertarian party, or ever plan to vote for their candidates. No one who would ever do that could ever be a libertarian lol
those “libertarians” are just anarcho-capitalists who think the issue isn’t the system itself but they couldn’t get access to the pie soon enough and get a bigger piece than everyone else so they think we should do a reset do this time they can come out on top
it’s enough to look at how Crypto works with it’s deflationary system where first buyers are much stronger than late comers or the MOAS /ape crowd
Absolutely. Though even calling them in Arco capitalist is still to generous and a blight to the term anarchist. (I’ve met a few anarchists that were too idealistic and unreasonable for their own good. But they are generally pretty chill, reasonable people otherwise.) They are no true libertarians. Actual libertarians push not just for freedom from things like government. But also the freedom for everyone in society to be able to do the things they desire. One without the other is not a libertarian.
I hate it when threads like this make me have to repeatedly post the mainstream Jewish holocaust historian “stop conflating fascism and communism” article
Are you aware how obnoxious it is to spam a 5,000 word article while refusing to provide any summation or distillation of its thesis?
Wait but I’m a communist. As in communes first, no state, no hierarchy, collective ownership, and all that jazz. I’m not super well read on the theory. Its really easy to see the difference, we’re not splitting hairs here.
That is why I use anarchist instead. It means all of that while also making it clear that authoritarianism is not ok.
🤔 There should be a fediverse-wide rule against genocidal rhetoric. Who cares what side it’s from?
Hexbear disliked that
I think we should consider the feelings of Hexbear users when posting or commenting.
If you think they’ll dislike it, it’s probably a good post.
Hexbear REALLY dislikes my compilation of their queerphobia at [email protected]
It’s a bit ironic to make that claim given that user was banned for transphobia.
DroneRights (me) was banned for saying gender neutral pronouns exist. Because Hexbear thinks gender neutral pronouns are transphobic.
no you’re making shit up, look at the goddamn modlog
Removed Comment “They” is a non gendering pronoun. If you use they/them, you’ll never misgender anyone, but you’ll also never gender anyone correctly either. Some people are okay with not being gendered and some people aren’t. You should respect their wishes once you’ve heard them, but I don’t believe you have any obligation to check them in advance.
by DroneRights [it/its] reason: enbyphobiaThis is pretty unambiguously a log of me saying gender neutral pronouns exist and the admins taking issue with that.
Good
I think most of you need to worry way less about sounding sufficiently the “right kind” of leftist and focus more on promoting leftism through action. More than half the “tankie” discourse is, at best, a needless distraction from actual progress. Lose your buzzwords and stop the ideological purity pissing contest and actually put in the work in your communities instead, goddamn.
Nah, it’s critically important that we make it clear that we do not accept autocracy and campism simply because it stands against an army of strawmen. Authoritarian leftists are not well. They are the ones standing in opposition to progress which doesn’t fit into the correct rhetorical box, which is why they are marginalized to the point where they can hardly even be said to stand for socialism, because they are too busy standing in reactionary defiance to “the west.”
It has so blinded them to anything resembling reality that they’ve effectively exiled themselves from academic consideration. They trade in conspiracies and revel in violence while showing little interest in statecraft or politics. It’s the incredible intersection of privilege and ignorance, and it needs to be condemned as fiercely as any fascist or robber Barron or it will continue to suck the oxygen out of every leftist space on the internet.
It’s actually quite ironic that you’d talk about ideological purity, when you don’t have to look far on Lemmy to find “leftists” calling social democrats rebranded fascists. Wake up and stop getting your politics from teenagers.
These threads are odd to me, considering how many people call all communists tankies. The word seems to be used by anarchists, conservatives, communists, anti-communists, and more, and every person has a slightly different definition.
Half the people here could consider the other half to be the tankies everyone is mad at.
To be clear this isn’t me saying “be nice to the tankies” this is me saying “the overuse of this word is confusing the shit out of me.”
It became confusing when liberals learnt of the word - now they hurl the word at anyone who dares to remind them that being pro-capitalist is still a right-wing thing to be.
Capital co-opting and perversing anticapitalist rhetoric to its own benefit, in my Lemmy? It’s more likely than you think.
I’m an anarchist, we don’t call anybody tankies. Tankies is a term coming from the UK i think the 80s some eastern european nation was taken over by the USSR and some Brittish came out in support of it. So they were called tankies.
These political fighting words need to be layed to rest. Communists hate me as much as anybody else but I’d rather engage on the idea level instead of ad hominem attacks and name calling.
I suspect this whole tankie thing might be a coordinated propaganda campaign geared at discrediting communists and at the same time creating tension between them and other leftits. I suspect this as this whole infighting over small differences doesn’t lead to a victory for the left but effectively disables and neutralizes it.
I’m an anarchist, we don’t call anybody tankies.
Speak for yourself… anarchists are very prone to using that term to describe the technocratic left. I know, I’m one of them.
Maybe it’s just the circles I run in, but I understand “tankie” to mean leftists who think Soviet/Maoist/vanguard-party styles of Communist revolution/rule were good, actually, to the point of denying any bad things they did/do as “Western propaganda”.
Given the red scare in the US, our ability as a whole to use any sort of leftist political labels accurately across the population is basically non-existent, so I do understand the frustration by both tankies and non-tankie leftists about how the term gets used lately, especially in produce circles on social media.
But again maybe that’s just me. I don’t know if I would consider myself a communist, but I do consider myself as a yet undetermined variety of socialist, if that helps at all.
…because none of those groups are Tankies and they are all unified against Tankies.
Tankies aren’t socialists or communists (not that those two things are the same either). They are the purist ideologues of communism, where compromise is defeat. Rampant in telling you why you’re wrong, and why only the purest form of communism will bring nirvana. All without understanding the consequences of what they propose.
Even the Communists don’t want them on their side.
I think you kinda missed my point. Sure, socialists and communists don’t like tankies, but conservatives think the socialists and communists who don’t like tankies are tankies. They aren’t “unified against tankies”, they don’t agree who, what, and where “tankies” are.
Then there’s folks like me who have no idea what the term means, you’re not alone in your confusion.
Edit: thanks for all the replies folks! TIL
Hey everyone, just a reminder:
- Yes Nazis are also bad, we don’t have Nazis pop up anywhere near as often as Tankies
- We remove and ban Nazis too
- We’re aware of Lemmy’s main code writers being ML’s, and it’s not great.
- Please report any bigot bullshit, or fascist/tankie dogwhistles.
We’re aware of Lemmy’s main code writers being ML’s, and it’s not great.
I don’t know why thats so bad? Why are MLs any different from other commies? Why are they being compared to fascists? whats going on?
The guy needs a speech bubble that says “Stalin did nothing wr-”
I mean when people give Stalin shit yet don’t bat an eye at what Lenin did, I can safely assume they’re going off cold war propaganda.
Lenin had some legitimately good takes, e.g. that Stalin should, under no circumstance, ever be allowed to come to power. His analysis was also usually spot-on, but his solutions to things either hare-brained or naive, leading to, well, history. Or, put differently, on a scale from tragic hero to villain he’s at least in the middle while Stalin is a straight-up villain.
Lenin ordered the Red Terror. The main difference between him and Stalin when it comes to willingness to use state violence was the size of the state. His solution to political decent was mass executions. While it was announced as a class war on the bourgeoisie, it began with a massacreof sociallists. In addition to kulaks and white army afficers, it targeted the former bolshenik allies Left Socialists, anarchists, and striking workers. The Red Terror featured the creation of the gulags and concentration camps, hostage taking, and torture.
The “tankie” thing is such a Reddit holdover, both the word and the people it describes. Nobody outside of those hyper-online teenage ideology spaces like Twitter or Reddit cares about those made-up political categories that are only based on aesthetics.
Always remember that both the pro-Hamas pro-Assad “socialist” shitposter and the pro-Israeli pagan plural trans anarchist are some American high schoolers who are too anxious to go out to a store, let alone participate in a mass movement or join an organization. Nobody in the real world cares about those basement dwellers.
If the people you want to criticize have terrible political standings, and they just LARP as socialists while supporting inane reactionary actors like Russia, the Hamas, China or the DPRK, then make an actual argument against them and fight them on their standpoints in the actual class warfare out there, instead of making a dumb-ass childish meme. Go join a party, go agitate, go organize your workplace, go read something. Analyze the class politics they espouse, criticize them on that point, not on some moral failing.
Both “tankies” and “anti-tankies” only exist on Reddit. Nobody cares in real life.
Edit: To clarify, I mean “tankie” as it is used now on the internet for anyone who’s not an anarchist or social democrat, not its original meaning dating back half a century.
Word comes from 80s Britain as far as I’m aware.
Yeah, for people who supported the crackdown on grassroots workers’ power protests in Prague. But that’s not what the word turned into via the internet.
In practice, (representative) democracy is a sham, anyways
The actually imporant thing they undermine, as does capitalism, is autonomy.
Based AF
Fuck tankies
Bro what, if we can stop leftist infighting for one fucking minute that would be great. We all have 90% of the same goals so how about we work on that and not build artificial walls to those to the left of us. Also being pro western „democracy“ is cringe.
These people are mostly helping the people they rail against as much as they do the opposite lol. Overall just sowing division where there needs to be none.
ya, i’ll proudly stand divided from the people pushing for a dictatorship
I’m just nonplussed that a stupid nazi-edit meme like this could get more attention than anything else happening right now.
Idk, tankies are pro-genocide. That doesn’t mesh very well with most people’s sensibilities.
Who supports genocide? What genocide? Who do you define as tankie? This is not one homogeneous group lol
The Uyghur genocide for example
You’re not to the left of us.
What are you trying to say? Legit question, not sarcasm, just confusion.
They said “how about we work on that and not build artificial walls to those to the left of us.”
MLs and other similar ideologies are not to the left of anarchists.
MLs? I tried googling it, but the closest approximation is Marxist-Leninists?
yes, that is correct, and ironically fascist (who would have seen that coming, a single party dictatorship with economic control ending as fascist)
196 is one of the greatest
subscommunitiesya’ll should be proud. Thank you for adding a little queer fun to my normal CIS life
Define tankie. I’ve seen that work be used in so many different contexts that it seems to have lost all meaning. This are word has been used to describe so many different things by people that don’t know what it means that now it has lost all meaning.
Similar case for the word "Authoritarian"
Same story goes for the word “authoritarian”. I’ve seen that word being defined as “When government uses it’s authority to stop you from doing something”, but by that logic any society with laws and law enforcement is authoritarian. This are word has been used to describe so many different things by people that don’t know what it means that now it has lost all meaning.
I’m not against the hostility being shown towards tankies here… but it should be remembered that there are a lot of well-meaning and well-intentioned people who get caught up in the technocratic ideology tankies buy into. Let’s face it… if you google anything about leftism you are more likely to end up reading about Marx and Engels than Bakunin or Goldman - and right-wing propaganda is as perfectly fine with conflating everything “leftist” with the technocratic (ie authoritarian) left as tankies themselves are.
If we are leaving some doors open for fascists and capitalists who turn against their programming, we should remember to do the same for tankies.
As someone who’s read Marx and lenin, and Bakunin and Goldman… not to mention kroptikin(god damn that guy bullshat his way through conquest of bread)
The anarchists always decry practical steps that are needed for the transition, but they have a poverty of ideas when it comes to propose better alternative solutions to the problems faced by actual revolutions. And frankly, reading their literature I understand why. They’re still hung up on ideas and values and not material analysis much more than MLs. They’re still trapped within liberal hegemonic thought though they are against liberal capitalism.
Neither the anarchist revolutions in Ukraine nor Spain seemed to lack “practical steps”… what they did lack, however, was practical steps for turning into a reactionary elite as soon as they seized power - something the Bolsheviks and their ideological spawn seems to have no problems with.
They absolutely did, their inability to coordinate and make compromises during wartime absolutely led to their failures as revolutions.
Oh… being (respectively) stabbed in the back by Bolsheviks and being sabotaged by Stalin had absolutely nothing to do with it, eh?
No, tankie… I don’t think you’ve read any anarchist literature at all.
No, tankie… I don’t think you’ve read any anarchist literature at all.
so now we are gonna start calling names. Cool, very mature.
Well, then… what do you think we should call them? Do remember… it was Marxist-Leninists themselves that came up with that term.
Yes, the Spanish anarchists were unsuccessful because Stalin, and not because they refused to be integrated with the popular front(which even the fucking liberals joined), including militarily until the war was already well lost, which made coordinated actions against the fascists with the popular front impossible
The lessons of the Spanish civil war dont reflect well on the anarchist movement there.
Yes, the Spanish anarchists were unsuccessful because Stalin
Yes. That’s why, tankie. And no… they didn’t lose because they decided not to take orders from your outrageously incompetent and cynical two-faced realpolitking fetish object Stalin.
Okay?
Okay so how much did you actually study the Spanish civil war because this comes off as really ignorant? Like, what books have you read on the subject that have led you to the conclusion that Stalin was controlling all of the Spanish Republicans except for the anarchists? You seem to deify Stalin much more than me, who generally considers him a very flawed leader who was a better revolutionary, but doesn’t consider him some octopus with his tentacles in literally everything.
The stupid part is that the third-way labor parties and social democrats are doing a much better job at socialism than any Leninist or Maoist tradition. But every leftist space on the internet seems to hate these “fake socialists” as much as anything else. That’s really all the evidence I need that these people are more interested in revolution fetish fan service than anything resembling actual statecraft.
The stupid part is that the third-way labor parties and social democrats are doing a much better job at socialism
Well… no, not really. It’s not that leftists hate social democrats… every anarchist I’ve ever spoken to appreciates the effort of people like Bernie and AOC - it’s just that we understand what they are allowed to do and what they aren’t. The political establishment will allow them to protect capitalism from itself by restraining it’s most obscene aspects it to a certain extent (and even such meagre self-protective measures are a bridge to far for the right-wing hivemind)… but that is all they could ever achieve.
Remember - no matter what the media hysterically screeches - the term socialism has a very hard and uncompromising meaning… a condition wherein the workers control the means of production. If it doesn’t measure up to that or only pretends to measure up to that, we can’t call it socialism with a straight face.
I swear almost every American election cycle, some weird word will start popping up everywhere. like how all the trump supporters started saying cuck out of nowhere in 2015-2016
Tankie has been a thing for over half a century. The Soviets used tanks(from other countries) to invade and crush antisoviet revolutions/protests in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
This was considered shocking for some communists and other leftists while some communists supported those actions. Those who supported this “intervention” were called tankies, in order to differentiate them from the non tank invasion supporting communists.
In Greece(my country), which was in the “West”, this event caused the split of the greek communist party(KKE) into 2 separate parties, KKE(Moscow controlled tankies) and KKE “interior”(weak ass soy communists who cant stomach the use of tanks in order to create a better tomorrow).
KKE “interior” kinda eventually became SYRIZA which surprisingly won the elections in 2015(breaking the 2 party status quo). Then the EU decided that the greek people decided poorly and punished them. So when the greek people decided correctly(elected a right wing government), the EU rewarded them. Carrots and sticks make the world go around. Thats how you make a majority leftist country, into a right wing one.
PS Greek debt is as high as it has ever been but Greece issued negative interest bonds. Tell me again how is the economy supposed to work? Noone talks about the greek debt anymore, it’s a non issue, Greece has been accepted into the EU’s infinite money glitch scheme.
Tankie has been a thing for over half a century.
Disingenuous in regards to their point.
“Cuckold” had been in use for a long time before it’s cultural adoption in 2015 too. They weren’t disputing the appropriate use the term, they were clearly commenting on the shift from appropriately-applied usage to the saturation within the cultural lexicon as a buzzword. Why is this thread full of disingenuous asides and non-sequiturs?
Well i and other people that i know were using the term for at least 10 years. I even had a friend break up partly because the other person was a tankie. Maybe the term was less common in other countries.
Also tankie definition hasnt changed nor has been appropriated as a general slur. It has always meant communist who supports authoritarian policies.
Since when are screwdrivers tankie symbols?
The original says keep nazis out of punk. Skrewdriver is a neonazi band
