Here me out. Many of the 'tankies' on lemmy.ml, hexbear, and lemmygrad are not actually tankies. People use that insult far too much.

It's often giving them too much credit.

Here's an excerpt from a relevant article:

Walking along the thoroughfares of the Russian capital these days, it’s easy to feel as though you’ve gone “Back to the Future.” Like Marty McFly in the classic 1985 movie, visitors to Moscow might imagine they’ve traveled back in time to the Soviet past, ... Golden hammer-and-sickle emblems festoon the buildings on Red Square, and out at the old Exhibition of Economic Achievements—a grand, Disneyland-sized theme park extolling the accomplishments of the Soviet Union—the statues of workers and collective farmers are all polished up like new. ... Tatiana Desiatova, a straight-talking Communist with a reputation for bluntness, says there is a much simpler and more cynical explanation for all of it: “The oligarchs have built nothing but their own wealth, so now we see them cleaning up the old monuments, putting out the old Soviet symbols, singing the old songs, and celebrating some of the USSR’s achievements in an attempt to bolster their own flagging legitimacy.” ... The Russian state manipulates those positive sentiments linked to the past in order to raise its own profile at home and abroad, opportunistically cherry-picking from the Soviet record while still taking advantage of every chance to trash Lenin, Marxist ideology, and socialist economics. ... It all seems to prove Tatiana Desiatova right. Putin sits at the head of a clique that calls the shots on everything—from economics to politics to war. Neither the plastering of Moscow with Soviet symbols and red flags nor the renovation of socialist monuments can hide the reality that Russia is a capitalist state ruled by a class of parasitical oligarchs.

Many of the 'leftists' you encounter online fall for the bullshit, as long as it's anti-western. The esthetic is enough for them because they are invariably young, dumb, naive, immature and/or privileged. For them debating politics is a hobby, not a cry for help or a fight for survival. It's fashionable and often a phase. They are nothing more than cosplay communists, who pop a Lenin avatar in their profile, but have no grasp of history or Marxism-Leninism. They're justifiably critical of western capitalism, they watched a streamer, they watched some tiktoks, and have come to the conclusion that any regime that is anti-western is necessarily better. This results in them knowingly and unknowingly parrotting the propaganda of anti-communists, theocrats and outright fascists.

They aren't like the tankies who supported the Soviets for ideological reasons, who were often willing to overlook or in denial about what happened in Hungary or Tiananmen. My grandparents were like that, and I could understand why they had a hard time accepting that the USSR and China were less than perfect, they had pinned all their hopes on them, and were living in a pre-internet age where western media bias went largely uncontested, and western imperial crimes went unpunished.

Cosplay communists may lie (to themselves and others) that they are critical of authoritarian capitalist states that wrap themselves in the hammer and sickle, but still mindlessly regurgitate the narratives of these billionaire oligarch run states like the useful idiots they are. If you're genuinely left-wing, it can be comforting to think of these people as allies or make excuses for them, but it's important to realize that they are not. They aren't actual allies, just contrarian parrots.

To be clear, this comment does not apply to actual communists. Thank you for attending my lecture. There will be no time for questions.