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 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?
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?
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.
Communists seem to be sad, pathetic people now. I thought ya’ll had something, but you’re all just a bunch of fractured apologists trying to get one over on each other.
Sad, ya’ll actually had something going on at one point, now you’re just irrelevant
I can’t tell if you are just angry and on a weird internet tantrum or a communist who made this account to do a bit
Strong probability the name is a reference to catradora_stalinism, a prominent monarchist user on Hexbear. Not sure if it’s an alt or someone who really hates C_S.
Can’t tell if you’re just outta anything smart to say or just want me to confirm whatever little paranoia you got
I can’t tell why you commented on a day old comment to start an argument with someone who doesn’t really care that much.
I can’t tell why someone who doesn’t care all that much wants to keep replying to me
I mean I don’t really care about the topic you are speaking about
But I am bored
But I am bored
honestly mood
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.
I for one 100% believe in purity tests. For example, anyone who hates trans people isn’t a real leftist, doesn’t belong in the community, and needs to fuck off. Purging the community of reactionaries is the only way to protect our most vulnerable members and create a unity of people who truly believe in equality and justice. There are lots of marginalised peoples who feel disrespected by mainstream left movements and cannot afford to participate in direct action for their own safety. Liberty for one means liberty for all. We need to kick tankies out of the left so we can actually get some shit done
Very well put. Please keep yelling this from every rooftop.
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
Hexbear disliked that
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.
Hexbear REALLY dislikes my compilation of their queerphobia at !dronerights@lemm.ee
I mentioned the time hexbear’s admin called the (trans) admin of blahaj.zone (the trans instance) “transphobic” in another thread once. Some hexbear dipshit then “named and shamed” me as a transphobe.
They’re loud, obnoxious idiots – nothing more.
Hexbear is full of transphobic trans people and Blahaj’s admin is also a transphobic trans person.
the user you are replying to was banned for transphobia, they were dismissing the existence of enbys as their own gender. They’re an insane troll.
Enbies are not our own gender. We are thousands of genders.
It’s a bit ironic to make that claim given that user was banned for transphobia.
DroneRights (me) was banned for saying gender neutral pronouns exist. Because Hexbear thinks gender neutral pronouns are transphobic.
no you’re making shit up, look at the goddamn modlog
Removed Comment “They” is a non gendering pronoun. If you use they/them, you’ll never misgender anyone, but you’ll also never gender anyone correctly either. Some people are okay with not being gendered and some people aren’t. You should respect their wishes once you’ve heard them, but I don’t believe you have any obligation to check them in advance.
by DroneRights [it/its] reason: enbyphobiaThis is pretty unambiguously a log of me saying gender neutral pronouns exist and the admins taking issue with that.
who is hexbear
A website on the fediverse for transphobic stalinists
I’m not sure anyone knows what a tankie is.
Apparently saying any country other than the US should take a turn at world leadership is a tankie opinion.
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.
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.
We’re aware of Lemmy’s main code writers being ML’s, and it’s not great.
I don’t know why thats so bad? Why are MLs any different from other commies? Why are they being compared to fascists? whats going on?
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and the pro-Israeli pagan plural trans anarchist
What if I’m an anti-israel pagan hivemind trans anarchist?
Word comes from 80s Britain as far as I’m aware.
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Have you seen hexbear? They seem to fit the tankie category to a tee
Right down to the transphobia while saying “just trust me bro, abolishing capitalism will end identity discrimination, I’m totally an ally”
Eh this argues that we even have a democracy that is functional enough to undermine in the first place, and I reject that premise.
Better than a single oligarch for sure.
I’m not sure it’s that different. In place of a real personality, you get the country’s persona. With US foreign policy for example it matters little who leads because they are adhering to the persona. While the majority of Americans don’t want war, the US persona does. That results in the same thing (a population ruled by one idea set) just a hologram of person rather than an actual one.
what democracy?
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.
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.
Idk, tankies are pro-genocide. That doesn’t mesh very well with most people’s sensibilities.
Who supports genocide? What genocide? Who do you define as tankie? This is not one homogeneous group lol
The Uyghur genocide for example
Want to see the transphobia and homophobia that Lemmy tankies from Hexbear are getting up to? Check out !dronerights@lemm.ee (https://lemm.ee/c/DroneRights) to see their months long harassment of a single trans person for being nonbinary.
It’s a bit ironic to make that claim given that user was banned for transphobia.
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.
Since when are screwdrivers tankie symbols?
The original says keep nazis out of punk. Skrewdriver is a neonazi band
