I’ve heard some people use that word so describe Lemmy users.
Tankie refers to people who support authoritarian “communist” regimes and often deny or justify the atrocities they commit. Stalinists mostly, but also supporters of the authoritarian aspects of China and even North Korea
People mostly use it to describe the Lemmy devs and the instance lemmygrad.ml
They’re not wrong but it is fairly reductive. Don’t federate with that instance if you don’t like its views.
Don’t federate with that instance if you don’t like its views.
TBH, I find even this view kind of… foreign? It makes sense to defederate from instances that cause harm to the ecosystem (whether by hosting trolls or not guarding against spam) but I just don’t think that “federation” should indicate “approval” in the way so many folk clearly do. Like, letting someone on gmail email me doesn’t mean I approve of what google does.
I view lemmygrad.ml as political spam and bad thoughts not worth propagating. lib.lgbt is also unfederated from sh.itjustwor.ks because they hosted a The_Donald community while wringing their hands about the free speech implications of jettisoning it.
You using gmail means you approve of what Google does. If Google started platforming alt-right content and you were fine with that, that does say something about your approval as well.
Ah gotta love the “We have to be tolerant and supportive of free speech, that’s why we let far right people have a place on our platform,” argument.
Tolerance is a peace treaty, we can tolerate each other in so far as others aren’t advocating harm for us or trying to make our existence illegal.
Guess what? Those far right people have broken the peace and they can piss off into their own space, I won’t have them at my table.
This is sensible.
Agreed, it should be a matter of whether moderating out what you don’t want to deal with is at all feasible. If it’s not, just cut them off.
A more authroritarian leftist, as oppossed to an anarchist.
The internet’s superpower is to drain words of meaning.
Initially the word Tankie was a very specific, very directed insult. It was a pejorative for like. Y’know, Soviet-Union simps. “Leftists” that spent a lot of time memorizing Soviet Union WW2 trivia and adorning themselves in Soviet ephemera, much like how certain nazi teens do. The accusation was very direct and very clear: “You do not care about the workers’ cause. You just like the Soviet aesthetic and have a very weird thing for ww2”. Like a Wehraboo except they’ll call you ‘Comrade’ instead of a racial slur.
It then, by simple extension, became a pejorative for Marxist-leninists. Cuz of course. Most MLs are Soviet Union simps, later they transitioned to being China simps and would you look at that, China also offers a lot of military ephemera they can be, y’know, weird about. Of course if you lack a bit of context you can then use it for any vaguely authoritarian ‘leftist’ and you won’t even be all that wrong, it’s close enough.
Eventually though? It sorta leaked (thanks a lot, Adam Something)
… And now there’s a lot of like, straight up Neoliberals using the term ‘Tankie’ as an insult in the same way their conservative grandparents would have used the term ‘Pinko’. It has entirely exited the purview of leftist discourse.
To borrow a segment from Wikipedia, Tankie specifically refers to those who might speak out in defense of the Soviet use of tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring uprising.
I’ve, on occasion spoken favorably of specific USSR policies or of specific Warsaw Pact or NATO policies without intending to show approval of militant or imperialist policies, which has gotten me accused ot being a Tankie of Atlantism and being kicked of subreddits.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 1•1 year ago
Fans of Stalin and Mao. In favor of conquest of other countries, extermination of minorities and undesirables, absolute power for the leader, and absolutely no nice things for anyone but the leader and his friends.
Oddly enough, despite Stalin and Mao being even worse than the Nazis (who at least allowed you to have nice things if you weren’t on their extermination list) and doing the same wrongs that the Nazis did (conquest, genocide, dictatorship), tankies get very angry if you compare them to Nazis, and bizarrely insist that they are in fact the opposite of Nazis.
