Thank you. I tried interacting with one today and they just kept telling me I’m not introspective enough. Like just outright shaming me as if I don’t understand my own thoughts and choices. Conatantly attacking my character rather than my arguments.
OP points out it’s not just their beliefs that are problematic but this like, systematic behavior of disrupting our beliefs.
Would you call Malcom X a “tankie”? Were the Black Panthers reactionaries? Was Albert Einstein a fascist? Were the tens of millions of communists who died in the 20th century fighting for human liberation equivalent to Nazi’s?
This is an honest question. I would be fascinated to understand the thought process of anyone who answers yes, which presumably should be anyone who uses the term ‘tankie’.
The people in the US that were anti intervention in WW2 until Soviet Union got invaded, but then changed their stance were tankies (doubly so to the Union leaders that were fine with genocide in Poland but stopped striking the moment Stalin’s criminal treaty backfired). The people that supported Soviet oppression in the Warsaw pact were tankies (that’s what the terms comes from). The people supporting an Fascist land grab and genocide attempt, done under the same pretexts as Hitler had for Poland, right now, are tankies and truly worthy of their 1939 ideological ancestors.
Oh, fuck that noise. Tankies are anyone that figure the Soviets were good for the Eastern Bloc countries, and that China can do no wrong as it oppresses a fifth of the world’s population like they’re expendable slaves. Usually they’re out here telling us how Ukraine should just roll over to Putin and that there’s nothing to see in Xinjiang.
I’m not going to stop using “tankie” to describe these fucks.
As an anarchist I tried being peaceful with tankies in leftist spaces, but the moment I criticized shit like Putin invading Ukraine they immediately turned on me. These people don’t give a shit about leftism they care about state capitalism. After reading Lenin I now know why they hate other leftist so much, it’s because he hated them too
Lenin did not hate other leftists. Kropotkin, for example, was one of his favourite writers. His own brother was an anarchist. He did consider non-Marxist ideologies to be incapable of effecting real change or defeating capitalism. It was ‘other leftists” who, in the early days of the revolution, aligned themselves with reactionary forces, attempted to overthrow the revolution, and tried to assassinate Lenin himself.
I’ve read revolution and state and he literally calls anarchists opportunist, he also destroyed actual anarcho communist communes during the Bolshevik revolution because he saw them as anti-revolutionary, if he liked Kropotkin he didn’t like anarchists
If you simp for dictators you cannot be leftist. All authoritarian is right wing. Tankies are virtually no different than MAGA Republicans. Both have the same goals regardless of the minor differences. And I have never seen a tankie talk shit about conservatives.
"Make America Great Again" Communism doesn't make sense, however if you follow their stupid logic that MAGA will render the United States into a religious theocracy and post-apocalyptic wasteland, running a small local commune to survive is possibly the only way to survive if they succeed.
Fuck tankies, fuck MAGA, fuck rural uneducated dipshits who vote that way, fuck capitalism, fuck anarchy, fuck me, fuck cars, and most importantly fuck you for reading this.
Tens of millions of communists have died fighting for the emancipation of the working class. Half the world was communist at one point. The people you call “MAGA communists” are an online micro-ideology of a few hundred infantile Westerners, who most communists are not even aware of, and who all communists who are aware of them reject as explicitly anti-Marxist and crypto-fascist. They have no relevance to communism whatsoever.
This is one of the purposes of the ‘tankie’ slur - to associate Marxists with people who are explicitly opposed to them and so fringe as to be otherwise irrelevant. In this way the ideas of communism can be confused and distorted in the public consciousness.
another example of you demonstrating op to the letter - playing victim. Just like all oppressors who seek to flip the script - white people who claim reverse racism is a thing, men who claim reverse sexism is a thing, transphobes who claim being called cis is a slur.
I have separate distinctions between “Tankie” and communist.
Communism, true communism as explained by Marx. Classless, stateless. NO ELITE CLASS This is the goal. This is good.
Tankies seem to just want Putin or Xi to rule the world. Or are capitalists LARPing as what they think commies are in effort to troll. Probably both with some true believers filtering in over time. Sorta like the origins of r/The_Donald and flat earth theory.
Anyone who simps for authoritarian state violence inflicted militarily upon civilians is a tankie and anyone who DOESN’T simp like that ISN’T a tankie, full stop, regardless of their espoused economic model. If you’re not simping for a power-mad mass murderer, you’re not a tankie either.
Thank you for changing your views, I know how hard that can be.
I wasn’t a tankie in my past, I was homophobe among other things.
My views have changed since then and it hurts to think back on those who were hurt by my views. But I try to do better. And that’s really all we can do.
We’re human, we make mistakes. Our mistakes aren’t what define us. It’s our response to mistakes (be it our own or others) that define us.
Plus once I got to the root of where that homophobia came from (self hatred, being a victim of abuse, etc) I was able to move past it.
I’ll never forget what it felt like to look at myself in the mirror and say aloud, “I’m bisexual.”
And over the years confronting those I knew who still held onto those shitty views, and they either changed or I moved on.
Oh, I’ve never been a tankie. I was saying that I was one of the people that wanted to stay federated with Hexbear and try to make it work. I want to believe in leftist and queer unity, so I tried to turn a blind eye to their takes on Putin, thinking it was only a few bad apples.
But thinking back on it, the days we’ve been federated I was a lot angrier and jumpier than usual, and it’s because of the bad energy they bring. Defederating was for the best.
Maybe it’s just a jerboa bug but many of the replies to this comment look like they’re replies to someone else and it doesn’t look like this comment was edited… Am I going crazy or is it a bug or what?
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