Remember kids, Tankies wants to undermine democracy - same as facists.
Just like fascists, tankies could theoretically hang out here without getting the boot. It’s just that genocide denying authoritarians cannot be tolerated in a tolerant, democratic society. The reason tankies and fascists get the boot is because they can’t resist trying to bully and intimidate those that find their views abhorrent. They simply can’t resist being terrible.
They’re cultists with views that can’t stand up to scrutiny, so they need use other tactics to spread their shit and gain power. They use the real downsides and weaknesses of democracy to argue we need an even worse system. Then they argue you actually hold the worst views of their enemies, even though they usually support exactly the same things that make those enemies bad. Tankies claim you’re a free-market liberal for opposing them, when the countries they support are state capitalists. Fascists claim you’re against freedom of speech, while they are always trying to ban ideas they hate. Some of them are misguided and believe their own lies, but others are just awful people.
Tankies traditionally are associated with communists, but today’s tankies (even those that call themselves communists) are really after authoritarianism than communism, and given the history of the name (that they supported using tracks on civilians). I don’t think they’re is much difference between current communists and current fascists, both groups seem to support authoritarianism and feels like term “tankies” fits both of them well.
I learned about a week ago why they are the way they are. See the soviet union was the closest in their mind the world has ever come to communism, so even though it’s fallen into fascist oligarchy, they still hold hope that the anticommunist putin is going to rise up and reestablish global communism once more. The only problem with that is that… well Russia doesn’t want communism. This is their playbook Yeah, that doesn’t look socialist, that looks like “we tried communism it didn’t work so lets do fascism this time” so they end up throwing their support towards red flavored fascism since it’s the best chance (in their minds) at getting global communism. When the alternative is an american nazi world order, or tiny countries with no power, you don’t really have much choice.
But here’s something I want every single one of you to realize having read all of that: Even the most fascist redfash still would have killed the nazis. The same cannot be said for the average (in-power) liberal today. Anticommunism is always pro-fascism. Never let your critiques of the left turn into support for the right.
EDIT: Case in point, the person i’m responding to is never going to see this post because they’re on a nazi bar instance that banned me.
Even the most fascist redfash still would have killed the nazis.
They’d kill who they define as nazis. I find that tankies’ (especially Hexbear) definition of nazism doesn’t entirely correspond to mine or that of most other people. So this is not something to be super optimistic about.
It is a bare minimum that the current world order can’t even pass. They can’t even go a week without funding a mass ethnic genocide.
I really have no idea what people are trying to say or getting at in a lot of these comments, it feels like one of those art experiments where words don’t have meaning but are used to express emotion
Lemmy world are nazis?
The users are a mixed bag but the mods/admins absolutely are in the business of running a nazi bar. They’re doing the classic strategy of passively protecting fascists while actively suppressing those calling out the fascists. They also ban people who are open communists.
Lol redfash killing nazis isn’t worth praise. Redfash kill each other the first chance they get. They are so paranoid when they come to power they purge anyone and everyone they can.
so even though it’s fallen into fascist oligarchy,
You know any left wing project after being overthrown by the US would also end up a fascist oligarchy right? As was the case with the illegal and undemocratic dissolution of the Soviet Union brought about by the US.
Even the most fascist redfash
A mainstream Jewish holocaust scholar on equating fascism and communism and why it is bad
I hate it when threads like this make me have to repeatedly post the mainstream Jewish holocaust historian “stop conflating fascism and communism” article
Are you aware how obnoxious it is to spam a 5,000 word article while refusing to provide any summation or distillation of its thesis?
Paste it into ChatGPT if you’re having reading challenges
I’d like to respond, but I’m going to need you to read 5,000 words on my personal philosophy towards online commenting before I do.
Wait but I’m a communist. As in communes first, no state, no hierarchy, collective ownership, and all that jazz. I’m not super well read on the theory. Its really easy to see the difference, we’re not splitting hairs here.
🤔 There should be a fediverse-wide rule against genocidal rhetoric. Who cares what side it’s from?
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.
Hey everyone, just a reminder:
- Yes Nazis are also bad, we don’t have Nazis pop up anywhere near as often as Tankies
- We remove and ban Nazis too
- We’re aware of Lemmy’s main code writers being ML’s, and it’s not great.
- Please report any bigot bullshit, or fascist/tankie dogwhistles.
These threads are odd to me, considering how many people call all communists tankies. The word seems to be used by anarchists, conservatives, communists, anti-communists, and more, and every person has a slightly different definition.
Half the people here could consider the other half to be the tankies everyone is mad at.
To be clear this isn’t me saying “be nice to the tankies” this is me saying “the overuse of this word is confusing the shit out of me.”
It became confusing when liberals learnt of the word - now they hurl the word at anyone who dares to remind them that being pro-capitalist is still a right-wing thing to be.
Capital co-opting and perversing anticapitalist rhetoric to its own benefit, in my Lemmy? It’s more likely than you think.
Maybe it’s just the circles I run in, but I understand “tankie” to mean leftists who think Soviet/Maoist/vanguard-party styles of Communist revolution/rule were good, actually, to the point of denying any bad things they did/do as “Western propaganda”.
Given the red scare in the US, our ability as a whole to use any sort of leftist political labels accurately across the population is basically non-existent, so I do understand the frustration by both tankies and non-tankie leftists about how the term gets used lately, especially in produce circles on social media.
But again maybe that’s just me. I don’t know if I would consider myself a communist, but I do consider myself as a yet undetermined variety of socialist, if that helps at all.
I’m an anarchist, we don’t call anybody tankies. Tankies is a term coming from the UK i think the 80s some eastern european nation was taken over by the USSR and some Brittish came out in support of it. So they were called tankies.
These political fighting words need to be layed to rest. Communists hate me as much as anybody else but I’d rather engage on the idea level instead of ad hominem attacks and name calling.
I suspect this whole tankie thing might be a coordinated propaganda campaign geared at discrediting communists and at the same time creating tension between them and other leftits. I suspect this as this whole infighting over small differences doesn’t lead to a victory for the left but effectively disables and neutralizes it.
I’m an anarchist, we don’t call anybody tankies.
Speak for yourself… anarchists are very prone to using that term to describe the technocratic left. I know, I’m one of them.
…because none of those groups are Tankies and they are all unified against Tankies.
Tankies aren’t socialists or communists (not that those two things are the same either). They are the purist ideologues of communism, where compromise is defeat. Rampant in telling you why you’re wrong, and why only the purest form of communism will bring nirvana. All without understanding the consequences of what they propose.
Even the Communists don’t want them on their side.
I think you kinda missed my point. Sure, socialists and communists don’t like tankies, but conservatives think the socialists and communists who don’t like tankies are tankies. They aren’t “unified against tankies”, they don’t agree who, what, and where “tankies” are.
Define tankie. I’ve seen that work be used in so many different contexts that it seems to have lost all meaning. This are word has been used to describe so many different things by people that don’t know what it means that now it has lost all meaning.
Similar case for the word "Authoritarian"
Same story goes for the word “authoritarian”. I’ve seen that word being defined as “When government uses it’s authority to stop you from doing something”, but by that logic any society with laws and law enforcement is authoritarian. This are word has been used to describe so many different things by people that don’t know what it means that now it has lost all meaning.
The guy needs a speech bubble that says “Stalin did nothing wr-”
I mean when people give Stalin shit yet don’t bat an eye at what Lenin did, I can safely assume they’re going off cold war propaganda.
Hexbear disliked that
Good
I’m not against the hostility being shown towards tankies here… but it should be remembered that there are a lot of well-meaning and well-intentioned people who get caught up in the technocratic ideology tankies buy into. Let’s face it… if you google anything about leftism you are more likely to end up reading about Marx and Engels than Bakunin or Goldman - and right-wing propaganda is as perfectly fine with conflating everything “leftist” with the technocratic (ie authoritarian) left as tankies themselves are.
If we are leaving some doors open for fascists and capitalists who turn against their programming, we should remember to do the same for tankies.
As someone who’s read Marx and lenin, and Bakunin and Goldman… not to mention kroptikin(god damn that guy bullshat his way through conquest of bread)
The anarchists always decry practical steps that are needed for the transition, but they have a poverty of ideas when it comes to propose better alternative solutions to the problems faced by actual revolutions. And frankly, reading their literature I understand why. They’re still hung up on ideas and values and not material analysis much more than MLs. They’re still trapped within liberal hegemonic thought though they are against liberal capitalism.
Neither the anarchist revolutions in Ukraine nor Spain seemed to lack “practical steps”… what they did lack, however, was practical steps for turning into a reactionary elite as soon as they seized power - something the Bolsheviks and their ideological spawn seems to have no problems with.
They absolutely did, their inability to coordinate and make compromises during wartime absolutely led to their failures as revolutions.
The stupid part is that the third-way labor parties and social democrats are doing a much better job at socialism than any Leninist or Maoist tradition. But every leftist space on the internet seems to hate these “fake socialists” as much as anything else. That’s really all the evidence I need that these people are more interested in revolution fetish fan service than anything resembling actual statecraft.
The stupid part is that the third-way labor parties and social democrats are doing a much better job at socialism
Well… no, not really. It’s not that leftists hate social democrats… every anarchist I’ve ever spoken to appreciates the effort of people like Bernie and AOC - it’s just that we understand what they are allowed to do and what they aren’t. The political establishment will allow them to protect capitalism from itself by restraining it’s most obscene aspects it to a certain extent (and even such meagre self-protective measures are a bridge to far for the right-wing hivemind)… but that is all they could ever achieve.
Remember - no matter what the media hysterically screeches - the term socialism has a very hard and uncompromising meaning… a condition wherein the workers control the means of production. If it doesn’t measure up to that or only pretends to measure up to that, we can’t call it socialism with a straight face.