Sounds like you struggle with nuance.
Tankies are a very specific subset of “the left”.
They support stalinist policies specifically.
Thats very narrow in comparison to a vague “the left”
ed. downvote me, idgaf. But maybe reply, discuss your position
nuance
But maybe reply, discuss your position
I’m going to take this point in good faith, even though I disagree with it. The people that scream “tankie” often use the word in exactly the same meaningless way that the people who scream “woke” do, then they claim it has a specific meaning but clearly apply it very very broadly to basically anyone who is a marxist and waves a red flag.
But, since you suggest you’re willing to get into nuance. I’m going to throw reel off a few groups, people and countries. Would you mind telling me which ones you consider tankie and evil, vs which ones you consider good?
The Black Panthers
Fred Hampton
Huey Newton
Albert Einstein
Nelson Mandela
Che Guevara
Fidel Castro
Thomas Sankara
Chavez
Cuba
Venezuela
Bolivia
Vietnam
Laos
Nepal
Nicaragua
Angola
Kerala district of India (governed by the Communist Party of India)
It’s ok to not know one way or another too btw, I’m just interested in a “tankie” “not tankie” “never heard of them” response on each of them.
People aren’t shouting “tankie” at you. You people are self identifying as tankies.
The shouting came before the self identifying.
Saying tankie is tongue-in-cheek, or simply to upset the people that scream it constantly. I’m a marxist-leninist, formerly an anarchist. I would still be an anarchist if climate change weren’t putting a time limit on the need to get something done too. I decided that I could not sit by knowing hundreds of millions of people were going to die in 30 years (closer now tbh but it was a few years ago that I moved to a leninist toolkit now) while also knowing that anarchism was not equipped to generate the needed revolutions required to save any of those lives. Marxism-leninism and dem-cent parties on the other hand have a proven track record of creating revolution within that kind of timeframe.
I will probably return to anarchism when such timelimits are not in effect. It’s just not morally justifiable for me to sit around using a toolkit that’s not equipped for the time limit when we know what we know.
Just a thought, maybe it came with the fawning over of Putin and the CCP?
God this is so boring mate. It didn’t. Nobody likes Russia. Russia is a capitalist shit hole. The only takes that the left has which is used to claim we support Russia is that the war was caused by nato and that pouring weapons into does nothing to save any lives, on the contrary it just enriches the billionaires to the military industrial complex and vastly increases the number of deaths on both sides.
China on the other hand we have some nuanced takes on but because you all know absolutely nothing about it and behave like they’re animals incapable of independent thought and self-governance discussing anything with you ends up a case of bashing our heads against a wall because you don’t have real conversations about it. You don’t listen and don’t learn anything. You don’t even say the name of the party correctly (it’s cpc not ccp). If I told you 95% of Chinese citizens are happy with and support their government you’d claim I’m wrong and when I provide evidence for that you’d claim it’s only because of propaganda/information control and when I provide evidence that it’s not because of that you’d find some new deflection or topic to divert to. So what’s the point?
On the offchance you actually want that nuanced discussion we can have it but you need to start behaving more academic and stop talking like a terminally online reddit teenager. Come on.
Are you saying they are the same, or that people think that they are the same? I’ve seen the meme used both ways
I believe the point is that they’re equally vague knee jerk reactions to seeing trigger phrases and relevant social signifiers, as opposed to legitimate and useful political categories
What would you call people in favor of even authoritarian communism? (Such as in the USSR and China?)
Communist, Socialist, on the right side of history, feel free to take you pick from the 3
downvoting it doesn’t make it any less true :)
WFT is wrong with you?
I read books 😱😱
i’ve read marx. at precisely no point does he say anything justifying the various atrocities state capitalist countries have committed. i think he’s wrong about some stuff, but even if you accept that his word is gospel, tankies are still just people who took leftist principles as an excuse for the imposing the kind of brutal authoritarianism that leftists are supposed to be against.
If you’ve read Marx, then you’ve surely read Engels as well?
On Authority - Marxists Internet Archive https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
you expect liberals or anarchists to have read the ENTIRE PAMPHLET, if they did that how would they be able to blindly call us athoritarian, with no real understanding of the word.
Michael Parenti, from Blackshirts and Reds:
During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
I’m an anarchist who gets called a tankie on Reddit for using the word “imperialism” and I approve this meme
