Wasn't tankie originally cold war British Communist slang to refer to people who agreed that the Hungarian revolution of 1956-1968 Was funded by the CIA and that rolling the tanks in was as such an appropriate response

(No I don't have this memorized so I had to double check but that was the original meaning)

I wish I would have had someone like you as a history teacher in school. Back then we got a very brief and basic "here are the definitions of socialism/communism. These may sound good, but that's just because you're young, they're actually bad. We're not discussing why, or going into specifics." I'm not sure the discussion even goes that far today in US schools, as most teachers like having a job.

Of course my gut reaction to this as a teen was to launch into my own "semi-tankie" anti-west, anti-imperialist phase. After a few swings back into liberalism, I eventually found a comfortable (if idealistic) ideological home somewhere between socialist democracy and social anarchism, but it was a long, bumpy, and confusing road there.

It seems quite a few on this site never made it past that angsty adolescent phase. They'll tell you "tankies" is an insult, or a slur even, but I'm not exactly worried about hurting someone's feelings with that when they openly call for authoritarianism and even support ethnic cleansing and genocides, as long as they're done by countries or groups that have their approval.

Liberalism arose from "enlightenment thought" and basically said that all humans are equal, therefore state legitimacy comes from the consent of the people, and therefore there should be a set of laws that guarantees everyone's rights and gives everyone a say in how society should be run

*This was only applicable to western European nations. Liberalism was the moral justification for the enslavement of the world under colonial and neocolonial schemes. Since Europe was said to be the cradle of morality and values, the rest of the world were barbarians who were deemed needing stewarding and European intervention.

Some leftists theorized the state should be violently overthrown in order to install themselves as dictators and therefore solve the social question by directly redistributing wealth to the poorest. The most important of these is Lenin

This is very much not true. Leninism is a theoretical development of Marxism applied to preindustrial nations. Marx theorized that the socialist revolution would stem naturally from developed industrial nations, but Bolsheviks saw the revolutionary potential not only of the industrial workers but also of the peasants. Lenin led a democratic vanguard party until his death, but understood that a socialist project in construction will have interference from capitalists both locally and abroad, and needs state repression of said interference in order to be able to carry out the goal of redistribution of power to the people because capitalists won't just give it away.

Stalin, who cemented his dictatorship and took over a number of countries through military force

I think you misspelled "eliminated fascism from Europe and saved tens of millions of lives from Nazi extermination". It wasn't done personally by Stalin, but by the socialist project of the USSR as a whole.

You did a great job disregarding the colonial history of the west and the implications it had for billions of people in the global south.

didn't downvotes you, but broadly speaking the way liberal gets used by Marxists/anarchists, it's referring to the people who still think we should have/reform capitalism. social Democrats are the left wing of that.

'leftist' is bit of a squishy term because it doesn't actually distinguish people's position on the political economy

Liberal is an actual ideology. A hallmark of liberal thought is that business can do things better than government. Leftist thought starts at capitalism is bad, and is much deeper than you think. Democrats of all types are liberal. The kicker is so are the Republicans. It's one reason that Republicans are able to push the Democrats to do anything they want. They don't fundamentally disagree on things.

Pretty decent description.

I was a liberal up until this year and I've been radicalized pretty hard but that also means I fucking despise the people who are hardcore haters of liberals. They're on the right side, just need more pushing.

For being so anti-US, tankies keep.on repeating the us-centric, capitalist rebranding where neoliberals, democrat party, right wingers who have no support for liberal principles of emancipation, rights and freedoms etc are claimed as libs. It's like they want to surrender what leftists strive for and support right wing newspeak.

The right-of-center factions seem far more definitionally fleshed-out in the public mind. (In the US at least.)

I'm in my 30s, and a news and politics junkie (a very cursed special interest to have in 2025) and I'm still trying to figure out where the dividing lines are on the left. It also seems like right-wingers either get slowly pulled right with the Overton window, or just stay where they're at for life. Whereas us lefties can have a tendency to hop around, trying on different ideologies like they're Linux Distros.

There's nothing innately wrong with that (unless you get sucked into problematic beliefs/behavior). We just tend to be perennially unsure about "correct" beliefs, which may contribute some to the division and the somewhat blurry lines between factions on "the left".

It's not hard to understand.

Dessalines and Nutomic, the two lead lemmy devs, think that Tianenmen Square didn't happen. They think the genocide currently going on in China of that particular group of muslims (Uighyur or something like that, I can't spell it right) is actually a social program for their own good. They think that Ukraine is legitimately filled with Nazis in their government and military and that Russia is rescuing the poor populace from their oppressors.

Effectively, China and Russia can do no wrong. Dessalines in particular regularly bans people from lemmy.ml who say otherwise.

The term "tankie" is in reference to the tanks China drove over people during the Tianenmen square massacre.

Edit for the sake of jackasses: Better explanation of the term "tankie" from another commenter here. And it's spelled Uyghur.

Happy now?

When the Hungarian workers revolted against the Soviet Union with demands like a minimum wage and the right to strike, Stalin sent in the army with tanks to put down the revolution. Many Stalin supporters said this was justified.

A tankie is one of those supporters who will make excuses for the use of tanks to suppress rebellion.

The literal definition is someone who unquestionably supports anyone who waves a red flag. In practice, it means anyone who ever acknowledges a good thing done by a socialist state, or even refutes misinformation about them. If you say, "Cuba had a successful literacy program," there are people who will call you a tankie, even though it's just objectively true.

Crazy to see this accurate comment downvoted even though it explains it perfectly. That’s the difference. Liberals are race reductionist right wing capitalists who are occasionally sympathetic to limited social democracy.