Remember kids, Tankies wants to undermine democracy - same as facists.
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.”
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.
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.
They literally support a transitionary period and a capture of the bourgeois state for the interests of the proletariat instead of its immediate dissolution, compromise is the thing ultralefts criticize them for.
Then there’s folks like me who have no idea what the term means, you’re not alone in your confusion.
Edit: thanks for all the replies folks! TIL
Tankies are ‘communists’ ala Mao and Stalin, i.e. okay with the violent opression of democratic movements and minorities.
196 is one of the greatest
subscommunitiesya’ll should be proud. Thank you for adding a little queer fun to my normal CIS life
Based AF
Fuck tankies
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.
its not great
Then stop using it. I’m sick of you people building your stupid meme communities on top of good hard working communist laborers.
lol
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
What’s this large leftist group you speak of?
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.
Bro it’s very different. You think America run by Chairman Musk is indistinguishable from president Biden?
I hate the death of nuance. Yes, the US and many others are very flawed democracies, but that doesn’t mean they’re the same as north korea…
Yeah I mean the DPRK has had much more local democracy, especially since the taean work system has increased worker self management
Many oligarchs is better than a single oligarch. In true capitalist fashion, they are sociopathically self interested and their undermining of each other can occasionally benefit the rest of us.
And one time they almost got into a ring to fight, which was pretty funny.
Both situations are bad, but I don’t think oligarchs hinder each other that much. They compete, but in their overall control of society they are fairly unanimous, because they all share the same basic material interest to pay us as little as possible for as much work as possible and to destroy any trace of meaningful working class political power that might challenge them.
For the most part, their interests align, that’s true. And it could be copium to say that many is better than one - since that’s what we have.
At least if there was only one oligarch, we could have direct communication - as it is now, all the oligarchs can just kinda shrug their shoulders and mumble something in the universal language of plausible deniability.
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.
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.
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.
Op is a fed
You’re not to the left of us.
What are you trying to say? Legit question, not sarcasm, just confusion.
They said “how about we work on that and not build artificial walls to those to the left of us.”
MLs and other similar ideologies are not to the left of anarchists.
MLs? I tried googling it, but the closest approximation is Marxist-Leninists?
Yeah, marxist-leninists. There was this guy called Joe who really liked Marx and Lenin, but he didn’t understand them. So he created this new ideology called Marxism-Leninism that he claimed was a synthesis of their two ideas, but was actually about establishing a one-party state and abandoning the goal of world communism. In the end, he never succeeded in creating a communist society, he just invented state capitalism.
So now Joe Stalin’s fans run around calling themselves marxist-leninists and say we need to achieve a classless, stateless communist utopia by establishing a nondemocratic state ruled by an elite class called the “vanguard party”. They’re super cringe, but they think they’re to the left of anarchists because they use more violence against minorities or something
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.
starting the timer to see how long it takes for this to be removed and for you to be labeled redfash or some such nonsense
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.
Vote harder next time
It’s funny that everyone is up in arms about this post but the literal sticky post says no tankies
let’s be honest, they should be removed from society
- Omega_Haxors ( @Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml ) 27•1 year ago
You are aware that the .ml doesn’t stand for machine learning, right?
Some people made an account there right in the beginning of the Reddit fiasco before there were any viable alternative instances, like I did. Looking at the age of the account, I’m guessing that’s what they did too.
- Omega_Haxors ( @Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml ) 2•1 year ago
Makes sense.
Yeah it’s the TLD for the country of Mali
This weird equivalence some people draw between liking/agreeing with a significant amount of ML work and defending everything the Soviet Union and CCP have ever done…it’s really weird
- Omega_Haxors ( @Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml ) 6•1 year ago
Maybe they know something we don’t.
EDIT: JSYK, it’s CPC. CCP is the intentionally wrong abbreviation that nazi propagandists use and I don’t think that’s what you intended.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP),[3] officially the Communist Party of China (CPC),[4] is the founding and sole ruling party of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). - Wikipedia
No, it’s CCP. I don’t call Nazis by what they choose to be called so i will also not do that for the CCP
Don’t tell me you think the Nazi party were socialist because it was in their name?
No, but i will not call the CCP what they want to be called. The commies caused china to be what it is. Just because they are auth now doesnt change my hatred for the governing body.
Apologies I misread your comment and thought you were saying the CCP were Nazi’s.
Since you mentioned it, i have to ask what’s so bad about China now?
Not a big fan of any nation state myself as an anarchist but want to know specifically what you’d consider bad that couldn’t be applied to the US or other western nations.
what does machine learning have to do with it?
- Omega_Haxors ( @Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml ) 8•1 year ago
It’s a joke at the domain name for people who think it means “Machine Learning” and not “Marxism-Leninism”
TIL it was picked for Marxism-Leninism
I thought it was just a very cheap domain.
yeah, they used to be free
- Omega_Haxors ( @Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml ) 2•1 year ago
I mean not really? I just say that because the developers of lemmy are quite left-wing. I wouldn’t even be surprised if it was the reason.
It’s been done before. There’s a documentary about it called The Act of Killing, and a book called The Jakarta Method.
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
This is more a lemmy thing. Tankie is an older word but like you dont usually run into stalinists in the wild too much. The Lemmy creators and one of the biggest instances when the site was still small was a communist one promoting not just like the ideal of communism but legit stalinism.
As a result there was a lot of weird very pro russia pro china pushback and whataboutisms on the platform in the early days before the number of non stalinist users drowned them out
Loving to see tankies come out of the woodwork to seethe and troll at this
Do you have nothing better to post?
Agree, but to me they’re no different from any other genocide denying pieces of shit. If you are a NATO apologist that sees what happened to Iraq or what is currently happening to Gaza as any less abhorrent, you are just as bad as someone apologizing for Russia or the USSR.
The economically motivated NATO intervention in Libya was justified with false claims of a genocide. This was the conclusion reached by the British parliament report. Now Libya is a war-torn failed state with open-air slave markets. That intervention was less than a decade after “Iraq has WMDs,” a lie that has killed over a million people. When we have all witnessed these events in our lifetimes, I think we should be a little skeptical when enemy states are vilified. I don’t know if public backlash could have prevented the intervention in Libya, but I hope we’ll at least try to prevent the next one.
Am I an apologist if I say, “It’s okay for them to exist, they just need to stop doing bad things”?
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.
no but it is a tankie dogwhistle
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.
