holy shit they kicked the tankies out of 196

Based mod team

Yeah, that's not the tankies here; these are "North Korea is a great country, actually" tankies.

When a liberal says "tankie" they mean anything remotely communist-looking. When a leftist says "tankie", they mean authoritarians who like red flags and self-proclaimed communists who nonetheless support hierarchies and have no plan or intention to bring them down. I think the vast majority of people here knows this already.

Is the USA a “functioning” state with all the oppression, racism, greed, invading other countries out of monetarian interest and environment destruction?

I hope you realize that this is an incredibly privileged take. The US is rife with issues, but the hardships experienced by the average western citizen doesn't even compare to the suffering that you would find in, say, Pol Pot's Cambodia, or (to a less extreme extent) Maduro's Venezuela. To compare what a US citizen deals with on a daily basis due to capitalism to what a citizen of any of those countries had to go through is very reductive and may be perceived as disrespectful to many who had to live those experiences.

they yearn for the glorious people's boot

Meanwhile anarchist organizing doesn't have cops, it has Agents of Community Defense who definitely aren't cops!

I have nothing against anarchists, but you need to see past slogans to be anything but a useful idiot to neoliberals.

No one is suggesting that the states the authoritarian communists replaced were good or functional, just that they failed to actually uplift and make people's lives better. There's nothing to admire about one oppressive state being replaced by another.

Tankies on their way to explain why teaming up with the Nazis to conquer Poland is actually based and totally in line with Marxist philosophy.

196 is a shitpost sub where you must post something when you vist

a tankie is a authoritarian that believes they're a communist. they support the imperialist invasion of Ukraine, and they deny the tianaman square massacre, where the CCP ran tanks over college students protesting the authoritarian government. they deny a bunch of other atrocities as well, these are the only two i can think of right now.

a lot of tankies are going to be posting an essay by Engles that defends authoritarianism, asserting that authoritarianism is compatible with communism. which, while sure, isn't ideal because one person having power always ends in genocide. well, it doesn't end in genocide, genocide just... happens under authoritarianism.

Tankies are far left Marxists/Communists that are so anti- USA/West that they gladly defend almost anything that opposes the USA. Even authoritarian states like Russia and China. To be clear not every Communist is a Tankie through. And if you critizises on of this countries for horrible stuff, the Tankies will see you automatically as a USA chill. Because, from my online interactions with them, they see the world in black and white.

Tankie was first used for that kind of communist supporter who kept singing Russia's praises/defending Russia even when Russia was sent 5000 tanks to crush a popular uprising in Czechoslovakia (the "Prague Spring") on August 20, 1968. Some people just couldn't accept that a communist country could do something bad, so defended the action.

Nowadays, it's used to refer to those that are strongly supportive of Russia, completely ignoring the awful things they do. Often these days there's a lot of anti American bent to it. Like, anything anti America and American "imperialism" must be good - even blatant and awful Russian Imperialism.

These days they calmly explain how Ukraine just needs to come to the table and discuss peace (ignoring that Ukraine wouldn't exist if they did so) and blame America for the war in Ukraine for... well... they're America. The people who want war, or are causing the war, are those giving Ukraine weapons - not the country that is literally invading it.

One factor is that the main devs of lemmy are marxist-lennists, so they are more lax in regards to tankie content. Another factor is that people fled to lemmygrad once genzedong was banned from reddit.