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this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
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Anyone that uses the term "Tankie" unironically to refer to people to the left of them and the Democratic party are not a part of the left.
It's always helpful to identify the liberals that are getting "scratched" though.
Yeah no, this isn't a "everyone who disagrees with me is a Nazi" situation. I know what you're trying to do here.
What if I use the term 'tankie' unironically to refer to people to the right of me?
It's the good old Red Scare but using the word "tankie" instead of "commie" and the people doing it now are just as devoid of ethics and hard right as the Macarthists were.
No, it's not. Tankies are their own thing, they're authoritarian communists. The fact you think they're regular communists has you spreading misinformation sympathetic to their cause.
I'm as socialist as they come and I will forever say fuck tankies.
"I'm as socialist as they come, that's why I reject all previous forms of socialism: because I believe myself to be more intelligent, literate in politics and economics, compassionate, and superior to those pesky socialists that dedicated their entire lives to socialism in the previous century".
Fuck off, tankie.
By insulting me you're literally as violent and aggressive as the right, I won't stand by your despotic attitudes and authoritarian tendencies!!!!!!
Tankie is when they correlate the industrial growth of USSR as success when every other nation transitioning into a bourgeoise republic had similar growth
Tankie is when they pick and choose traits of Stalin and refuse the facts of his authoritarianism
Tankie is when they ignore the lack of progress in communism in USSR after Lenin died
Tankie is when they make excuses for the failures of USSR by pining them all in the west
The differences being that the USSR uplifted everyone equally and not just a capitalist few; and that it developed without abusing imperialism and unequal exchange against the global south (and actually contributed the most to emancipatory movements and was key in the decolonisation of the 20th century and as a reference for worker movements in the west to push for further rights).
Tankie is when they reject the big-man understanding of history and instead analyze the material and historical conditions of a particular era.
Tankie is when they point to the doubling of life expectancy in the Soviet Union and the only case of industrialisation of a country in history together with China that happened since the 20th century, excluding subsidised US colonies such as South Korea or Japan.
Tankie is when you understand that an imperfect but emancipatory movement which surmounted extreme odds, is desirable over the continuation of imperialism
Sorry to hear you got scratched
What a clever, pithy response. Not like you could address the actual content of the comment because... Well you know.
There was no content to the comment, just a selection of meaningless assertions.
How, exactly, were any of them meaningless? They're statements describing the views of actual people (and a lot of them are here).
Because they're completely baseless assertions.
How are they baseless? I think of the tankies I've known over the years and these assertions fit them perfectly. They do exactly all of these things, its like they have a script. I spent a good amount of time around tankies in college and they would regularly get into dumb arguments with the communists and anarchists about literally each one of the things listed.
It's a self report on the level of people who use dog whistles so loud they are foghorns. Just a word or two in the right context and you know you can ignore everything else you've read by them in the last 30 seconds.
Tankies aren't to the left of anyone. They're a parody of the left that ultimately believe in right-wing authoritarianism in a slightly different hat. Leftist authoritarian is an oxymoron.
It is an oxymoron because tankies aren't authoritarian. Tankies believe in collectivisation of the means of production, democracy in the government and in the workplace, maximal freedom speech and of arts, and welfare for everyone.
What tankies don't believe in, is in wannabe-good leftism that lets itself be trampled by fascism, e.g. Allende in Chile or the Spanish Second Republic. Tankies believe in actually-existing socialism, which manages to fight imperialism, e.g. defeat of Tsarism in the Russian Empire and the liberation of Europe from Nazism, or the liberation of Cuban slaves from western oligarchs, despite some caveats and shortcomings that are overstated and heavily propagandized by State Department propaganda that libs swallow whole.
Then we need a new word for the pseudoleftists who support authoritarian regimes in Russia and China who are infesting Lemmy.