this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
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[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 day ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

I’m as socialist as they come and I will forever say fuck tankies.

You just failed their bullshit purity test. In their mind, this means you're just a "dirty lib"

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Let me explain the metaphor I used since, surprisingly, you seem to have missed it by a mile:

  • Most of the people the libs nowadays call "tankies" are as communist or even just socialist as most of the people the Macartists called "commie" back in the time of the Red Scare (meaning, most are neither: those terms were and are used by libs/Macartists mostly for people who are just left-of-center)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Who are you talking about? Libs mostly don't even know what tankies are, they aren't generally going around using the term as an epithet. I think there's more LaRouchites than tankies in the US, it's an obscure and politically irrelevant tiny little slice of the population that 99% of people have no idea about. The only reason anyone talks about them on Lemmy is because there's a disproportionate amount here and a number of them like to make a nuisance of themselves. The people who dislike tankies are almost exclusively actual communists and Marxists and socialists and anarchists, and generally people of the left who are in any way knowledgeable about history or politics. No else even gives a shit about them.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago

The people who dislike tankies are almost exclusively actual communists and Marxists and socialists and anarchists, and generally people of the left who are in any way knowledgeable about history or politics. No else even gives a shit about them.

Exactly. I'd say that its likely most everyone else has never even heard the term.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

Libs mostly don’t even know what tankies are

The ones here do. I'm not writting for people not here.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

And they're "libs" because you say so, because they don't pass your purity test.

Fallacious as fuck.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago

Are you surprised then? There's a disproportionate number of tankies on Lemmy relative to anywhere else and they have a habit of poor yet aggressive argumentation. For libs who are ignorant of political ideologies and encounter tankies for the first time here they usually have no idea that tankies aren't actually communists or socialists or leftists. They don't know what leftists really are and so tankies become the stereotype for them. If you keep encountering assholes who tell you they are leftists you're going to think that all leftists are assholes. I think that's gone on enough here now that the reputation of tankies gets turned into a broad brush and perhaps gets applied inaccurately to actual leftists. You can blame libs for being ignorant but its understandable given the context here.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 23 hours ago

they aren’t generally going around using the term as an epithet.

Liberals are the only ones doing that.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Except most of the authoritarian tankies self-label as communists. So your analogy was not terribly apt.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 18 hours ago

And during the Macartist times authoritarian lefties called themselves "communist".

The point being that back them with "communist" and "commie" as now with "tankies", other people who are not authoritarian lefties are also being labelled by their politicial adversaries with their nickname for authoritarian lefties.

I'm shocked I've had to explain the same thing thrice now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Fascists who like to cosplay as communists are still fascists.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

That's why it should mean, but is frequently applied to anyone unapologetically anti-capitalist.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

"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".