edit: this is now closed future comments won’t be counted
I keep seeing this instance is overrun with tankies so hey, lets do an informal survey like I’ve seen on hexbear
respond with YES or NO in the first line of your comment and i’ll tally everything in a couple of days, lets say I’ll try and collect everything on the sunday the 9th (10+gmt sorry)
not sure thisll work, be nice, have fun
Tankie is a floating signifier. If you ask twenty liberals what a tankie is you’ll get
- Twenty different answers, and
- Several people upset at being called a liberal because they don’t have even a Wikipedia-level understanding of liberalism or socialism.
100 percent agreed. They’ll group anything too far left of them under the same name. Don’t care anymore. If they want to whine then fuck it, I’ll wear the term.
NO
Tankie is a meaningless word. If you point out China has undeniably made progress under communism, you’re a tankie. If you point out Stalin wasn’t the evil dictator westerners make him out to be (even though it’s disproven by the literal CIA itself) you’re a tankie, if you think capitalism is causing problems in the USA you’re a tankie. If you criticise US or NATO foreign policy you’re a tankie. If you criticise the Republicans you’re a Tankie. If you criticise the Dems, guess what also a tankie. If you think that the USSR and the PRC are/were perfect little angels that never made any mistakes or did anything wrong ever then you’re also a Tankie.
It’s just too broad a term for me or anyone to identify with any way. It’s not an ideology. It’s a dumb insult to dismiss the opinions of others you disagree with without having to engage with their point at all or critically analyse your own beliefs in any meaningful way.
Organizing a union? Pushing for higher wages? Defending your people from reactionary aggression?
Not voting? Don’t hate the US’s main enemies, like Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Syria, Palestine, the DPRK?
Believe it or not, tankie.
No, I think?
I don’t actually know what a “Tankie” is. I tend to try to steer away from labels; I consider them a form of intellectual laziness. People will use them to either try to gain a feeling of belonging by adopting a line of thinking shared by their peers, or they will use them to smear those who they have defined as “others” without consideration of why these “others” might hold opinions that they don’t. Labels and label-based thinking lead to tribalism and division.
If you want to know what I think about something, ask with specifics. If you want to convince me of something, present an argument with reason and evidence, and be prepared for me to pick it apart and look for flaws. There is nothing I respect more than somebody who takes a comment I make and considers it, researches it and then comes back to me with a response, or presents me with a perspective that compels me to do the same. I find both depressingly rare.
I always love when people answer my questions with an “I need to do some research”, that’s how you know you have a valid argument with someone.
Last time I can remember getting that response in an actual conversation was during the NFL kneeling protests. I guy I work with kept repeating how disrespectful it was to kneel, so I asked “Is it disrespectful to God when you kneel in prayer?” You could practically see the hamster fall off the wheel, and he said he needed to speak with his pastor.
YES
They would have burned me as a heretic in the middle ages.
- Carl Jung
Just like calling someone a “witch” or heretic in the middle ages, a “barbarian”, or “savage”, or “commie” or “pinko” in the 20th century, these terms are less about the actual meaning, and more about a demonization, scapegoating, or a power relation between the dominant class, and a group they seek to malign and rally their people around.
Creating a useful enemy promotes group bonding, unity, a sense of strengthened identity, and self worth.
“Tankie” had a meaning that generally referred to non-pacifist leftists (or those that agreed with using violence to defend socialist projects), but now it just means, “any leftist I don’t like”.
It functions in the exact same way that “commie” did in the the McCarthy era, as a xenophobic and western-supremacist scapegoating of socialist countries, and an internal purging of the working-class communist movement.
It’s additionally useful because it deters people from reading or engaging with the worldwide communist / socialist movement.
If someone uses this term, this is what they’re doing without realizing it:
My only regret in that photo is not seeing Bhagat Singh, because him and his Marxist comrades were responsible for liberating India from British Raj. Bhagat seems to be less recognised or celebrated among the poster boy global Marxist figures.
Wtf. Talk about twisting truths.
Don’t like people putting up a mirror to you?
now it just means, “any leftist I don’t like”.
With respect, there’s a bit more to it than that.
The way political discussions are often policed on ML instances (This one, Lemmygrad, and Hexbear) is not conducive to helping new people see your point of view. If a, let’s say, social democrat says something critical of the CCP and then is immediately censured or banned, they are going to be left with a very negative impression that feeds into the stereotypes that already exist about these instances.
Creating a useful enemy promotes group bonding, unity, a sense of strengthened identity, and self worth.
Aren’t people on ML instances also doing the exact same thing when they shout down and decry the wretched “liberals” (which seems to refer to anyone left-of-centre who doesn’t support communist party rule)? Whether it’s “tankie” or “liberal”, it only further entrenches the us vs them mindset.
It’s a shame that leftist infighting exists to such a degree when we often share about 95% of the same views, compared to the general public.
social democrat says something critical of the CCP
You mean the same ones that support their western establishment and its narratives? Or the anti-China/Russia rhetoric that CIA, Bilderberg, USAID and Murdoch invent and push, that these socdems also help in pushing? Such people can never be aligned ultimately, and are subservient to western empire.
You think Bernie supporting the bombing of Yugoslavia was a one off incident? Name one US president that has not been a warmongerer.
I do not want the likes of Bernie, Vaush, Destiny, Keffals and such clowns to be representative of, and make the Left a populist thing.
Aren’t people on ML instances also doing the exact same thing when they shout down and decry the wretched “liberals” (which seems to refer to anyone left-of-centre who doesn’t support communist party rule)?
Liberal is a well defined category though. Liberalism as a self-described ideology opposed to both communism and monarchy has been around for centuries at this point. Most people being decried as liberals would themselves identify as liberals.
The way political discussions are often policed on ML instances (This one, Lemmygrad, and Hexbear) is not conducive to helping new people see your point of view.
If you ask in earnest, you’ll get good responses. A good number of people ask questions not to learn a different point of view, but to reinforce their own existing biases, which naturally becomes exhausting. Kind of like how POC get tired of justifying their existence to white supremacists, communists often for good reason get tired of trying to justify the existence of countries who choose to follow their own path, outside of the model of bourgeois democracy.
Aren’t people on ML instances also doing the exact same thing when they shout down and decry the wretched “liberals” (which seems to refer to anyone left-of-centre who doesn’t support communist party rule)? Whether it’s “tankie” or “liberal”, it only further entrenches the us vs them mindset.
Liberal, unlike tankie, has a fairly precise meaning in political discourse. It can be used too loosely IMO, but it generally means pro-capitalism, pro-individual freedom (including to exploit labor power to earn surplus value), pro free-market, pro-free speech (for all including reactionaries), pro wage-slavery, as well as specific limitations imposed on those considered outside of the “community of the free”. Its important to realize that even the US mis-definition of liberal (as vaguely socially progressive) includes all of the above, and the internationally accepted definition of liberal, is right wing (for example, the right wing party in Australia is the liberal party). The best book I can recommend here, is Losurdo’s Liberalism - A counter-history.
Not only that, but liberals rule most of the world, and especially most of the economies and governments of anglo-speaking countries, extracting a surplus from the sale of their labor power (who are mostly extremely poorly paid proletarians in the global south), and are responsible for most of the suffering of working-class people worldwide.
If you ask in earnest, you’ll get good responses.
This is not the case. Every time I’ve asked in earnest, I’ve faced mobs of lunatics.
[Citation needed]
If you ask in earnest, you’ll get good responses. A good number of people ask questions not to learn a different point of view, but to reinforce their own existing biases, which naturally becomes exhausting.
That is understandable, however I was more talking about good-faith attempts to express views that are contrary to ML orthodoxy being dogpiled, removed, and banned. I have personal direct experience with this, as do many others who have attempted to engage in political discussions in ML communities. Perhaps users of the ML persuasion are used to being attacked and this why contrarian views are so heavily moderated on ML instances, but quite often this defensive response only leads to alienating other leftists who could be sympathetic to your point of view.
Also, I already understand quite well the differences between classical, social, and neo-liberalism, and how the term is used in the US; I have a degree in political science. My point was that users on ML instances weaponize the term in the same way that other users utilize the term “tankie” in order to dismiss people who disagree with them, ad hominem.
YES
My understanding is that a tankie is defined as someone who seeks to promote global peace, understanding, and equality, with nuanced views that incorporate marginalized and international perspectives, grounded in historical evidence.
That’s how I see it used anyway.
Yes.
I don’t care to hide my aims; I don’t move sheisty like some of y’all favorite Democrats do. Til all are fed and all have beds; my skin is Black, my star is Red.
I don’t consider myself a tankie, because I’m an anarcho-syndicalist.
I’ve been called a tankie for suggesting that workers should organize tenant unions to kill the apartment bidding wars in NYC. I’ve been called a tankie for pointing out that their image of a tankie needs to almost have power to be any kind of threat worth warning against, and there are no tankies anywhere near power with the global rise of fascism. I’ve been called a tankie for asking someone to clarify what they meant by tankie. I’ve been told that scientific socialism both is and is not tankie behavior. The term is utterly meaningless. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s part of a 3rd red scare in an effort to sow division amongst the anticapitalist left.
NO
I reject the label because it’s meaningless. I’m a Marxist-Leninist who has nothing to do with the USSR and frankly does not have an opinion on what happened in Hungary because I don’t know enough about the specific event. I acknowledge that Soviet Russia, like all countries, had positives and negatives. I believe that socialism can only be achieved and maintained using centralized planning and authority (which is the not same as a dictatorship) because they exist in a world dominated by capitalist forces that want to see them destroyed (see the ongoing US sanctions on Cuba and the many budding socialist governments the US has toppled).
As a citizen of the United States, I also recognize that my country very frequently lies about its own actions and their justifications (see the Iraq War) to the detriment of people in other countries. Frequently to protect the interests of capital. Thus, I express skepticism when my government tries to tell me that another country is unilaterally ‘bad’, as is constantly the case with places like China, which I’ve visited several times and study academically. So when other countries take action to separate themselves from us, get out from under historical US domination, and practice an economic and social system that is not US-style liberal democracy, I applaud their successes and try to understand their failures. This is true even if those success harm me, usually economically, as I do not want my existence to be predicated on the suffering of others.
To anyone on .world, which is obnoxiously in line with the United States status quo, I am a ‘tankie’ because I do not believe that China is evil, that Russians are ‘orcs’, that the Cuban people deserve to be starved by our sanctions, that Joe Biden has to support Palestinian genocide and continue Trump’s border policy because ‘its complicated’, and anything else that is critical of my own country and its actions that continue to harm people not as fortunate to be born in my same geographical location.
I will also be accused of ‘whataboutism’ for this post unless I also say something like modern Russia is a capitalist hellscape and that the Cultural Revolution and most of Mao’s later career after the Jiangxi Soviet was a mistake due his own incompetence as a large-scale political leader instead of a guerilla fighter. But that’s a level of nuance the people crying ‘tankie’ won’t usually care about anyway.
YES
YES
Everybody to the left of biden is considered a tankie nowdays, and I’m proud of being to the left of (and opposed to) genocide enablers.
I wish stalin drove tanks straight into west berlin, then france, then the UK, then atlantis, then NYC, then chicago, then seattle, then anchorage, then Tokyo, then Seoul, then Beijing, then KFC/tacobell.
Sorry nerd, that was Trotsky that wanted that, and your boi put an icepick in his brain for being good at it.
Oh, yeah, with all the tanks the USSR had in 1923
He was that good! Also the Red Army actually captured some tanks from Allied forces that were helping the Whites during the war.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_intervention_in_the_Russian_Civil_War
Bonus fun fact: Three of the captured Mark Vs were recommissioned to defend Stalingrad
no i am a girl
based
me too
No.
Granted, I’m not on lemmy.ml either.
Maybe just yes or no isn’t enough either. Maybe have someone post a picture of tanks in tienniemen square to prove they aren’t a tanker.
No
Oppression is oppression independent of the ideological basis, people who support oppressive governments based on a loose ideological basis deserve the worse.
Yes, although I personally prefer “central planning enthusiast”.
I think we’re approaching the point where the word gets taken back by the community it was used to malign, if not there already. "
