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.
Yes, when it comes to the axis from authoritarian to anarchist. Things all tend to narrow in to a single point at either end. In regards to authoritarians, it’s all about the hierarchy and holding power for themselves. They don’t give a shit what form of government sits under that. When it comes to anarchists and libertarians, no government other than a largely flat form of socialism is acceptable. Simply because they are focused on freedoms both individual and social. And large monolithic hierarchies tend to get in the way of that.
And when I use the term libertarian I of course mean actual libertarians. Not temporarily embarrassed Republicans, or teenage capitalists. The easiest test to find out whether someone might accidentally be a libertarian or not. Is to find out if they belong to the Libertarian party, or ever plan to vote for their candidates. No one who would ever do that could ever be a libertarian lol
those “libertarians” are just anarcho-capitalists who think the issue isn’t the system itself but they couldn’t get access to the pie soon enough and get a bigger piece than everyone else so they think we should do a reset do this time they can come out on top
it’s enough to look at how Crypto works with it’s deflationary system where first buyers are much stronger than late comers or the MOAS /ape crowd
Absolutely. Though even calling them in Arco capitalist is still to generous and a blight to the term anarchist. (I’ve met a few anarchists that were too idealistic and unreasonable for their own good. But they are generally pretty chill, reasonable people otherwise.) They are no true libertarians. Actual libertarians push not just for freedom from things like government. But also the freedom for everyone in society to be able to do the things they desire. One without the other is not a libertarian.
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.
That is why I use anarchist instead. It means all of that while also making it clear that authoritarianism is not ok.
🤔 There should be a fediverse-wide rule against genocidal rhetoric. Who cares what side it’s from?
Hexbear disliked that
Good
I think we should consider the feelings of Hexbear users when posting or commenting.
If you think they’ll dislike it, it’s probably a good post.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
…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.
The guy needs a speech bubble that says “Stalin did nothing wr-”
Based AF
Fuck tankies
In practice, (representative) democracy is a sham, anyways
The actually imporant thing they undermine, as does capitalism, is autonomy.
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.
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.
196 is one of the greatest
subscommunitiesya’ll should be proud. Thank you for adding a little queer fun to my normal CIS life
Since when are screwdrivers tankie symbols?
The original says keep nazis out of punk. Skrewdriver is a neonazi band
I swear almost every American election cycle, some weird word will start popping up everywhere. like how all the trump supporters started saying cuck out of nowhere in 2015-2016
Tankie has been a thing for over half a century. The Soviets used tanks(from other countries) to invade and crush antisoviet revolutions/protests in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
This was considered shocking for some communists and other leftists while some communists supported those actions. Those who supported this “intervention” were called tankies, in order to differentiate them from the non tank invasion supporting communists.
In Greece(my country), which was in the “West”, this event caused the split of the greek communist party(KKE) into 2 separate parties, KKE(Moscow controlled tankies) and KKE “interior”(weak ass soy communists who cant stomach the use of tanks in order to create a better tomorrow).
KKE “interior” kinda eventually became SYRIZA which surprisingly won the elections in 2015(breaking the 2 party status quo). Then the EU decided that the greek people decided poorly and punished them. So when the greek people decided correctly(elected a right wing government), the EU rewarded them. Carrots and sticks make the world go around. Thats how you make a majority leftist country, into a right wing one.
PS Greek debt is as high as it has ever been but Greece issued negative interest bonds. Tell me again how is the economy supposed to work? Noone talks about the greek debt anymore, it’s a non issue, Greece has been accepted into the EU’s infinite money glitch scheme.
