considering there’s a few answers already out I’m assuming you didn’t want to scroll through all the comments.
short answer: a leftist that supports authoritarian regimes because they align with leftist beilifs.
longer answer: it comes from the soviet supression of the hungarian revolution. (it was bloody), where the british supporters of the soviets that supported the soviets were named tankies.
a modern tankie might deny the Uyghur genocide in china atm.
Bro what, if we can stop leftist infighting for one fucking minute that would be great. We all have 90% of the same goals so how about we work on that and not build artificial walls to those to the left of us. Also being pro western „democracy“ is cringe.
All tankies seem to want is a strongman dictator and to hate the US. I don’t care about the US but I’m definitely opposed to having a strongman dictator. Like if there was a group that wanted 90% of what I did but also wants to form an ethnostate, I would not work with that group.
The point is, you’re not going to hear a thoughtful explanation of what those people actually think or why on an instance where any such explanation gets you immediately banned and your comments removed.
every nation is NATO or controlled by NATO, the only true way forward is for the not yet corrupted populations to follow their local Russia/China backed dictator to utopia
These people are mostly helping the people they rail against as much as they do the opposite lol. Overall just sowing division where there needs to be none.
Artificial walls? You’re literally implying that if you’re pro democracy you aren’t leftist. You yourself are putting up a wall.
When we ask tankies, in lieu of a communist state, to vote as left as possible, they start foaming at the mouth how cringe lefties voting are… I mean that’s a pretty fucking high wall… How else are we, the general non-revolutionary left, ever going to fucking ‘work together’.
People are incapable of fathoming that resistance AT EVERY LEVEL is necessary for a successful revolution. Voting is just as important is throwing Molotov cocktails is just as important as producing leftist propaganda is just as important as non-violent protests are just as important as protest involving private property destruction is just as important as militant opposition under oppressive regimes. Resistance at all levels is necessary because when you throw a Molotov cocktail without any of the other stuff going on, you’re just allowing the media to propagandize another story about violent and insane leftists acting rashly in an out of touch manner with society. The violent and insane leftists theory is harder to propagandize when its clear that the rest of society agrees with the person throwing the Molotov cocktail. Stop worrying about what other leftists are doing, and join the resistance at whatever level your comfortable with. If you’re coming on the internet to argue about what leftists policies are the best or most effective, you are missing the point and damaging the cause. This is doubly so if you’ve only ever read theory and have never joined an in person organization. If you’d like to argue less and do more, get off of the internet and go volunteer with a leftist organization. We don’t have time to argue and in fight while capitalism is working like a popular, well oiled oppression machine.
tankies are all cosplayers, can’t get over the wet dream of enacting more ur-fascist dictatorships via pretending that the French had it right when they introduced liberalism to Europe, while coincidentally forgetting that, every revolution so far as always ended with some form of ur-fascist, and reformation brought us closest to an actual socialist/communist society.
Bro what, if we can stop leftist infighting for one fucking minute that would be great. We all have 90% of the same goals so how about we work on that and not build artificial walls to those to the left of us. Also being pro western „democracy“ is cringe.
Do you seriously think that for example the USAs democracy represents the will of the people? Democratic representation does not mean capitalistic multi party system that’s not how you measure democracy.
I’m not the person you replied to, but you do see the reasoning, right? The original comment was a criticism of representative democracy, likely in favor of Democratic Centralism. Democracy is far more complex than just “mob rule,” you have to take into account local populations.
Participatory economics is a good example of how decentralized democracy can work.
The issue with democracy is that it inherently doesn’t protect minority rights.
That was the initial intention of the US political system. Clearly, it hasn’t worked out too well because of things like gerrymandering, but that doesn’t mean you just go back to the system that clearly has errors.
being a Stalinist/Maoist enjoyer is part of the whole tankie thing, Tankies are fans of vanguard party fascism, they are called tankies because they support the side using tanks to shoot down protesters.
The left is being taken over by closet right wingers masquerading as progressives. They are pro censorship, pro military, pro oligarchy, pro authoritarianism. They listen to corporate media and drink the corporate kool-aid.
Just the people who promote for Russia and the ccp. The reason people aren’t using “commie” is because neither of those nations are actually communist and they don’t actually dislike core communism/Marxism ideas.
That’s why calling them communists or even Marxist-Leninists would be a bad idea. However, “Tankie,” describes exactly what’s wrong with them: They’re authoritarian bootlickers that have no place amongst people who want any form of liberation, or care about social issues in any way. If somebody fits the definition of a Tankie, they have failed in their quest to make a better world, instead embracing might makes right and dogmatic faith in elites to rule in the best interests of the workers.
They have a level of certainty in the decisions of a state that no one should have. They’re cult like in their faith that their strategy will work, that ignoring and downplaying the sins of these countries is worth it. Sacrificing reality is worth it if you believe only the party can deliver communism.
I think most of you need to worry way less about sounding sufficiently the “right kind” of leftist and focus more on promoting leftism through action. More than half the “tankie” discourse is, at best, a needless distraction from actual progress. Lose your buzzwords and stop the ideological purity pissing contest and actually put in the work in your communities instead, goddamn.
No fuck that bullshit. The largest leftist majority is aligned with non-revolutionary socialist democracy… Tankies are actively undermining the largest leftist group by refusing to partake in democracy. And now WE need to stop complaining and work together and not be so pure. Fuck off with this absolute disgrace of a discourse. The group that controls the purity of its members by refusal to partake in progress through democratic means are tankies. They want it all to go down in flames. Their idea of progress is revolutionary uprising.
Nah, it’s critically important that we make it clear that we do not accept autocracy and campism simply because it stands against an army of strawmen. Authoritarian leftists are not well. They are the ones standing in opposition to progress which doesn’t fit into the correct rhetorical box, which is why they are marginalized to the point where they can hardly even be said to stand for socialism, because they are too busy standing in reactionary defiance to “the west.”
It has so blinded them to anything resembling reality that they’ve effectively exiled themselves from academic consideration. They trade in conspiracies and revel in violence while showing little interest in statecraft or politics. It’s the incredible intersection of privilege and ignorance, and it needs to be condemned as fiercely as any fascist or robber Barron or it will continue to suck the oxygen out of every leftist space on the internet.
It’s actually quite ironic that you’d talk about ideological purity, when you don’t have to look far on Lemmy to find “leftists” calling social democrats rebranded fascists. Wake up and stop getting your politics from teenagers.
It’s actually quite ironic that you’d talk about ideological purity, when you don’t have to look far on Lemmy to find “leftists” calling social democrats rebranded fascists. Wake up and stop getting your politics from teenagers.
I have no idea why you mentioned this. What does this have to do with me?
But to your greater point: Are there going to be ideological differences that matter? Of course. I’m not saying not to debate or defend positions for the sake of refining and strengthening ideology, I’m saying don’t do it for the sake of stroking yourself off to how ideologically pure you are, especially when you go about doing so in a way that doesn’t actually help refine and strengthen the ideology but rather muddies it all up with a bunch of reductive and useless buzzwords and short-hands.
We should be saving our ire for the unsaveable so far past the ideological divide as to where no commonality can be found; if we actually give a shit about making any progress we should be approaching anyone winnable with nuance and confidence, and not reductivism and hand-waving.
If you truly aren’t a tankie and believe that the path forward can be achieved as a peaceful people’s revolution, then you have to remember that winning people over is an enormous component to that strategy
Or ban them, whatever. Just stop fucking stroking yourself off to how fucking elite commie leftist you are for it
I have no idea why you mentioned this. What does this have to do with me?
Tankie doesn’t understand the argument he made.
Also, Tankies are fascists that wear the skin of the lefties they murdered. They advocate for an all powerful vanguard party that dictates basically everything, it makes more sense to try and win over conservatives than a Tankie.
Or liberal BS like we shouldn’t make this post because of LeFtiSt UniTy when tankies are the ones who have crap, authoritarian, and genocidal views. All the concern trolling really shows why this post was made.
Uh but isn’t a revolution an undermining of democracy? I don’t know who these tankies are, but it seems like yall commies just making some big deal about your little beef with other commies. Its kinda silly.
ya, this might shock you, but not all “commies” are looking for a revolution, and to make matters worse, most of these other “commies” were in power in the era that created the great American golden-age, and then when someone let liberals in again they ruined everything so that their aristocracy can have their dragon hordes back, ironically when southern pride really started up again…
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
[…]
In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.
something like 70% of Americans want universal healthcare and yet it remains politically impossible.
Leftist who want to fix this are by far the largest group of leftist. And there have been multiple successful leftist political victories. You can not get these victories without a considerable amount of leftist and left leaning voting. And it’s your discourse that just wants to pretend that nothing can be done, it’s too late, Democracy isn’t real… That is undermining leftist progress in our current society. And this is the problem, tankies aren’t interested in protecting, fixings or saving current society. They want everybody to suffer the breakdown of society in order to hopefully get a revolutionary uprising that magically turns everything into a communist utopia. It’s poison and you’re injecting it.
And there have been multiple successful leftist political victories. You can not get these victories without a considerable amount of leftist and left leaning voting.
The entire conclusion of the study I linked is that this is not happening.
There’s nothing wrong with voting, I vote every two years, but it’s dangerous to convince yourself that voting is enough. You need to also organize. You need to strike. You need to unionize your workplaces. If you really want to push the government into conceding real improvements in our lives, you need to apply direct pressure on a large scale. And when the crackdown comes, you need to collectively organize to help each other. Bail people out of jail. Help people pay rent when they’re fired for trying to unionize. Doing this on a large scale is how you get actual fucking change, and it will never happen if people lie to themselves that voting alone is sufficient.
Dovid Katz (Yiddish: הירשע־דוד כ״ץ, also הירשע־דוד קאַץ, Hirshe-Dovid Kats, [ˌhirʃɛ-ˈdɔvid ˈkɑt͡s], born 9 May 1956) is an American-born Vilnius-based scholar, author, and educator specializing in Yiddish language and literature, Lithuanian-Jewish culture, and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.
When, in May 2008, Lithuanian prosecutors launched investigations of two more elderly Holocaust survivors, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky and Dr. Rachel Margolis, Katz embarked on a new activist phase of his life. He became a staunch advocate for the accused Holocaust survivors who were under investigation, and played a role in mobilizing the Western diplomatic community in Vilnius to support them.
I feel comfortable linking Wikipedia on this because it is pretty well sourced, but I would encourage people to read the sources.
This guy isn’t a “tankie”, he isn’t even a communist. He’s a mainstream jewish Holocaust scholar and activist and it is concerning that his article was removed because you dont like what he has to say.
Gotcha. As someone who is pretty aligned with Allende and the Castros(Mariela Castro in particular has made tremendous progress in leading government support of the cultural revolution around queer rights in Cuba) I disagree with the communities stance on marxist leninists(even though I have my own critiques of them), but I hope we can have the common ground of MLs not being as bad as literal nazis, because people like Dovid Katz point out that that equivocation has been used to prosecute holocaust survivors as soviet collaborators and has been used to trivialize the holocaust.
Yeah I think anyone who uncritically supports stalin is either trying to be edgey or is just uninformed. There is a reason why still existing marxist-leninist parties have the line they do, the cpc for example saying he was 70/30 good/bad
I know you didn’t ask for this rant, but that’s ok, it’s not meant to be directed at you. This is an open -carry ranting state, and this is rant is legal even though it’s unregistered because it’s from the Internet.
It is shitty to rule - setting aside corruption and greed, and imagining a world where leaders were just and smart and altruistic, etc - even then - ruling will lead to mistakes and failures and horrific results. That’s… unfortunately kind of natural.
But holding that leadership accountable - that’s normal too. That’s how you remind them what a fuck up is, and what horrific means. Our protests against their failures in leadership are there to right the ship. Our voices are a vital part of the plan.
(And, yeah, obviously things are weighted a little (a lot) unfairly due to greed and corruption - but that’s not the point. The point is: when something is wrong, it’s wrong. When leaders do wrong, you yell at them. That’s how you tell them what wrong is.)
To say that we (the USA) can’t be criticized because “omg leadership is hard” is making excuses - and if you stop telling them what wrong is, they’re going to start to forget.
Liberals and social democrats think we can vote our way out of the evils of capitalism, but we’ll never have the wealthy class’s “permission” to end any of this. The status quo is fueled by violence, blood and oil - but “moderates” treat this as acceptable violence, unlike “Communism” which engages in that “Evil, authoritarian” sort of violence.
Violence caused by our inaction towards capitalist exploitation is no better than violent pro-activeness. In the words Canadian rock legend Geddy Lee: “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”
Kind of is at this current moment given the other superpowers, but it’s wrong to even think that the world should have leader like the US. No country has anywhere close to a majority of the people, so an actually multi-polar world, or even a world with no clear poles would be ideal. Taking a turn implies that we need someone else in the US’s role, but the reality is that the role shouldn’t exist.
I’ve seen “Tankie” pulled out on Lemmy and Reddit over things like:
Suggesting a revolution is required to stop global capitalism, and that we cannot vote our way out of Capitalism
Countering common narratives that paint US Geopolitical Adversaries and Existing Socialist/Communist regimes as comically evil villains.
Criticizing the western perspective on the Russia/Ukraine conflict, and by extension criticism of Ukraine, or praise for Russia
Suggesting that violence against Nazis is ok
I mostly get the impression that people don’t like violence, and dislike the idea that capitalism may need to be opposed through violence. Though I’ve also seen it thrown out at suggestions that capitalism should even be defeated at all. It feels like a poison tbh, we really should just be uniting against capitalism.
I’ve seen tankies making strawmen out of things like:
People who don’t think ML strategies are a good idea for global revolution.
Recognizing that the US, Russia, and China are all fallible. Not equally bad, but comparably flawed.
Believing Zelenskyy is like Churchill in both the flattering and unflattering ways, while no amount of Azov Nazis justify Russia’s brutal invasion.
Ignorant liberals representing all left leaning opposition.
I get the impression that you want to paint serious objections and disagreements by genuine leftists as either factionalism that must be silenced, or a plot by capitalists to stop redistribution. Tankies are real, terrible, and willing to defend or perpetuate almost any crime against humanity if they have faith it will contribute to the greater good.
It can be misused, but it properly means supporting authoritarian ‘communism’. I usually see it on hexbear, where they often say Russia China and North Korea are vastly better than western countries.
the infighting is hilarious. it’s no wonder the internet leads to poor mental health. keep flaming one another, it’ll definitely lead to a brighter future.
I’m gonna keep this up because it’s fun to chuckle at.
BTW if you report posts we’re much more quickly to find them. I looked at the reports and I’ve been removing most of them. I’ve also informed the other mods.
Please tell me what modern communists are doing in North Korea other than jailing people, and how we position the well by being openly trans inclusive and ban transphobes.
Edit: Lmao you also defened hexbear when they attacked our users. imgur.com/98u8Njc
News flash, they won’t like trans people because they view queer folk like you and me as enemies of the people.
Reading this and looking at the moderated comments, I’m largely on side with your criticisms, but hexbear is not the most welcoming instance to trans people by a long shot. I’m a disabled trans woman who works with the public and uses it as an opportunity to seed social change. I act as an outside agitator for some local workers struggling with their management. I’ve done canvassing for Planned Parenthood. I’ve lived on the street and been part of intentional self-supporting homeless communities. I absolutely reject corporate oversight and I’ve made sacrifices in my own life to reject capitalistic imperatives. I put my money (or lack thereof) where my mouth is and am leftist as fuck.
And yet the moment i disagree with one of them on anything it’s the ‘lib’ dogpile from a bunch of armchair doom scrollers from the comfort of their heated-seat toilets. I don’t feel the vibe that i do from people in the real world I’ve talked to who’ve been through struggle and know first hand what’s wrong with capitalism and American pseudodemocracy. I feel the vibe i feel from ignorant ass private school teenagers who think they know everything.
Personally, I find Beehaw and Solarpunk a lot more welcoming. Same to .film before it poofed.
Hexbear is to my experience the least welcoming instance to anyone who isn’t cosplaying a leftist channer poe troll.
I think it’s a fair criticism that they can get a bit debatelord-y but the majority of users I’ve interacted with tend to be much like yourself. I personally do not like beehaw as they seem to want to create a hugbox which isn’t my vibe but I do understand why someone would want that.
However I disagree that they’re the least welcoming as I’ve yet to see any other instance so openly embrace their queer and trans users while also taking action against phobes and chuds with extreme prejudice. Most other instances I’ve interacted with tend to harbor and at worst defend these people which leads to them hiding just below the surface.
I mean personally they immediately dogpiled me, which has never happened with another instance’s users. But I also immediately blocked all the right wing instances on any accounts that didn’t start defederated from them, so I’m sure that has substantial impact.
I definitely think they’re nowhere near at leftist as they think they are, though, just by virtue of their tendency to stuff memes in their ears and loudly shout libliblib. It reminds me of the racist nimbyism of ostensibly progressive people who aren’t ever able to examine their own ideas and behaviors critically.
To me leftism requires some degree of intellectual honesty and humility or it’s just the kind of self-serving performative lib bullshit they accuse everyone else of as a literal hobby.
As far as Beehaw goes, I usually use at least one or two other instances to have a bit of a wider reach, but it certainly does make a comfy sort of home base.
Edit: I find the blahaj staff’s treatment of a user politely disagreeing with them pretty disappointing. Not winning anybody over in this thread.
I’m sad to hear you had those experiences with them but I thank you for sharing your experience all the same. I do think they have a good level of self-crit but I’m not going to deny your history with them and I’ll definitely be on the look out for it.
Really the important thing is that you’re comfortable and for me hexbear fits my comfort zone and I’m glad you’ve found your own space.
Edit: I find the blahaj staff’s treatment of a user politely disagreeing with them pretty disappointing. Not winning anybody over in this thread.
Can you clarify please? Neither myself nor Kaity have been active in this thread
If you’re referring to the 196 mods, none of them are Blahaj staff. Feel free to DM me with more details if it’s something an admin needs to look in to.
Also why do i have to report openly bigoted/ableist speech when you’ve interacted with the comment? Do you not bother if nobody cares enough to report the shit?
Hey don’t use that word, its ablest in itself. I’m not saying that as a “gotcha!”, I looked into using that word, and its like “br**ndead” and “l*me” as an insult.
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