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Authoritarian communists. Think Stalinists, and people who support regimes like the CCP. The top left of the political compass.
Does the word Tankie comes from the tanks in tinnamen square?
The term “tankie” was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defense of the Soviet use of tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring uprising, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions.[5][6]
Tankie refers to the when Russia sent tanks in Hungary to stop them from setting up a communist government that didn’t follow their particular communist ideology.
Sort of but the talkie part originated from a Russian invasion of some country
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956, which was crushed by Soviet tanks.
How ironic that Hungary is now Russia’s pawn in the EU.
Another layer of irony, US conservatives love Viktor Orban of Hungary and even I had him speak at CPAC.
A few days ago Hungary’s minister of foreign affairs said that if Trump was president the war in Ukraine never would have happened because Putin feared Trump too much. What a fucking joke, can’t decide which dick to suck.
It’s not much ironic considering how… fascism-leaning Hungary always was, historically. It was a large faction of Hungarian native politicians who invited Soviet intervention in the first place. The Hungarian secret service at the time also shot at protesters, which escalated the protests. Moscow at the time wasn’t an entire culprit, that changed with 1968. But internal power struggle is at core of these interventions, to legitimise them Moscow needed collaborationists.
Ironic since they running out of tanks.
So should the opposite faction be called tractorie?
A respectful answer that does delineate the shades of communism and shows education. Admirable.
Except Russia and China aren’t even pretending ti be communist.
Russia is a christo fascist oligarchy.
And China is a corporatist authoritarian state.
This doesn’t stop tankies from being pro-Russia and pro-China. Modern tankies are absolutely happy with oligarchies and gigacorporations running the world, they just hate western society.
In essence, they worship authoritarianism rather than communism itself.
I’d say the difference between a tankie and a socialist is that a socialist wants equality and well-being for everyone and tankies just want people they don’t like to die at the hands of an authoritarian regime, regardless of whether it’s actually a communist regime.
Communist philosophy has a lot of really useful analytical tools. It describes and criticizes society, especially capitalist society, in a very sharp and insightful way. People should read and learn it because it’s interesting, useful stuff that is easily applied to modern politics.
Communist philosophy also calls for a (typically violent) revolution involving an authoritarian transition to get rid of capitalist society and usher in the future collective state. When a violent revolution is being called for in (mostly) functional democracies, that should usher in some skepticism from a normal, reasonable person.
The tankies reallllllly seem to like the violence, though, and are extremely supportive of any state that claims to be communist regardless of what atrocities that state commits along the way. They will be intensely defensive against any criticism (criticisms like “maybe Stalin shouldn’t have starved millions of people to death through incompetence and genocidal inclinations”, “maybe Mao shouldn’t have wiped out all the doctors and artists”, “maybe Putin shouldn’t be allowed to try and annex Ukraine”, etc.).
At some point, it becomes hard to properly separate these supposedly “authoritarian left” types from the “authoritarian right” fascists. Political compasses are stupid anyway.
Communist philosophy also calls for a (typically violent) revolution involving an authoritarian transition to get rid of capitalist society and usher in the future collective state
This is a reductionist explanation. The initial modern movement of socialists debated a lot on whether to support reform or revolution. Marx argued in favor of an authoritarian revolution after the failure of the Commune of Paris, but near the end of his life, he thought it was more sensible to seek out power through democratic means in societies with a liberal political framework, such as Britain. At this point, socialdemocratic parties still hadn’t renounced to socialism - they just wanted to achieve it after democratically reaching power.
Through the start of the 20th century, there’s a heavy rupture in the socialist movement when socialdemocratic parties begin moving away from the goal of actually achieving socialism, just at the USSR is born. This divide wider as the Cold War progresses, but we can still find a few important reformists who are aiming for a democratic form of socialism, such as Attlee in Britain and the French and Italian Communist Parties, although these two are, unfortunately, too loyal to the Soviet Union for their own good. As we enter the 21st century, socialist parties, for the most part, only want to tweak a few things about capitalism, but we can also find supporters of democratic socialism in the eurocommunist parties and the Communist Party of Japan. On the other fence, authoritarians who denominally support socialism, typically called tankies, tend to support the actions of whatever self-denominated communist regimes exist, such as China, and reject participation in liberal democracy.
Political compasses are stupid anyway.
It’s a political torus. Walk of one end and you end up in the other
Tankies aren’t the only ones who call for revolution tbf. There are revolutionary anarchists as well. “Tankie” has usually been used to describe auth-lefties in particular.
When your group is so left wing that all your real big arguments are against the radical side of your ideology rather than the other side! Somewhere there’s a fiscal conservative arguing against a guy screaming about anarcho-capitalism on parler or something.
“Fiscal conservative” is a nonsense term anyway, I suspect. It doesn’t really mean anything. I’d venture nearly everyone who uses it is either philosophically confused or else is a genuine conservative that thinks if they say “small government” enough it will cover their genuine desire to crush civil rights of people outside of their tribe.
The smallest and most efficient government possible that delivers the services of the government is what nearly everyone wants. The only people who don’t want this are the fascists who want the biggest and strongest government possible in order to bully everyone else.
Gotcha, labels of different ideologies are meaningless to you because you prefer to bucket everyone in them because it makes it easier for you to deal with emotionally, got that one? Not that I don’t agree with you, I’m here to after all.
Labels are incredibly useful, but only if they’re definable. I don’t think “fiscal conservative” has a coherent definition.
That’s fair, I don’t think the US has had a strong class of RoI conservatives in a long time. Now “fiscal conservative” means more someone who has classically voted Republican but not because of religiosity or because they hate LGBT people. At this point you can’t even point to a good reason, beyond a feeling like they want to be taxed less.
If you aren’t making somewhere north of half a mil a year, or don’t have capital gains (15-50% tax on millions of dollars of inheritance really sucks to worry about), voting conservative might as well be cutting of your nose to spite your face.
Communists who glorify murderous regimes or dictators.
Stalinists
Isn’t it really more to do with pro Chinese? The name literally refers to the Tiananmen Square massacre.
It predates Tiananmen square by 3 decades. It comes from the Soviets using tanks in the Hungarian revolution.
TIL, thanks. It’s even in the Wiki for the Hungarian revolution, and of course the wiki for Tankie lines up as well.
Best way to explain it is to give a link to a really good definition I read. Here it is, and it’s in-depth and gives you a real understanding of them.
The one benefit of ziq being an anarchist extremist is that his article is probably one of the least biased things you’ll read against modern Tankies who try to hide behind their support of culturally progressive politics to defend their ideology and make it seem like they’re good people. Because it’s a critique from someone who is just as left-wing as they claim to be so they can’t hide behind their usual excuse of the critic being pro-capitalism/anti-communism/culturally conservative because ziq is none of those things.
I second this article as a fantastic overview of what Tankies stand for and why they should not be tolerated. If the article is too long to sift through - one particular paragraph summarizes the main issue with Tankies:
Tankies celebrate Lenin and Trotsky’s massacres of socialist revolutionaries, including the Mensheviks, the sailors of Petrograd, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the anarchists, unaffiliated peasants who had their food confiscated and so on. Tankies also celebrate murdering ‘kulaks’, a word they use to describe any peasant that resisted Soviet imperialism, but especially the Ukrainian peasants that resisted sending all their food to Russia, which they rightly guessed would lead to mass-starvation and one of the worst atrocities in history; the catastrophic Holodomor man-made famine.
The Holodomor is largely considered to be a genocide of the Ukrainian people - by 26 countries and the European Parliament. Tankies deny it ever happened, and if it did it wasn’t their fault, and if it was their fault the kulaks deserved it.
That’s not a simple explanation, that’s a Ted talk.
Wikipedia has a good article on this. Basically authoritarian “ends justify the means” leftists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
Tankie is a pejorative label for communists, particularly Stalinists, who support the authoritarian tendencies of Marxism–Leninism or, more generally, authoritarian states associated with Marxism–Leninism in history. It is commonly used by libertarian socialists and left communists to criticize Leninists, although the term has seen increasing use by liberals and other non-leftists as well.
The term “tankie” was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defense of the Soviet use of tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring uprising, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions.[5][6]
The term is also used to describe people who endorse, defend, or deny the crimes committed by communist leaders such as Vladimir Lenin,[7][8] Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Kim il-Sung. In modern times, the term is used across the political spectrum to describe those who have a bias in favor of authoritarian states with a leftist legacy, such as the People’s Republic of China, the Syrian Arab Republic, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Additionally, tankies have a tendency to support non-socialist states if they are opposed to the United States and the Western world in general, regardless of ideology.[4][9]
They basically view the “western” capitalist system as the source of a lot of pain and misery and so “evil”. America is viewed as the leader of this system.
Thus a country which pushes back on this system must be good. Brazil, China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, etc… are examples of countries pushing back on this system or America.
Under this logic the USSR was one of the good guys and so its actions were righteous.
This is how tankies got their name, they supported the USSR invasion of Hungry when the wrong type of communist won power.
Even though Russia is more extreme in its capitalist position, the Russia demand for a multi polar world order and attempts to compete with the USA, make them heroes to many Tankies. They will justify this as Russia is the successor to the USSR.
So you will see Tankies support the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They will often claim Ukraine provoked Russia, that both sides are at fault, Russias fears about NATO justifiy the invasion, etc…
The problem with this world view is reality, Russia has been raping women and children, castrating PoW’s, kidnapping children, operating mass torture centre’s, etc…
When faced with Russian actions it’s impossible to justify them. So a tankie simply declares all of that as “propaganda” and then looks for sources of information that help justify their position (ironically Russian state produced propaganda).
Either they dismiss it as propaganda, cling to whataboutist fallacy or engage in a little bit of both.
Outta topic but is like the official r196 and where everyone has moved to? I’m glad to find it still alive. If so, how are the other 196es on other servers doing?
There’s also !lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/196 that seems to be doing well.
Nah that’s the 196 in blahaj which another sent. That ones been suggested by the origional mods. This one came up too, and has since renamed. Think of it like 197 or 19684 but without any real difference
I’m new here to! I think 196 has branches all across the lemmyverse, at least that’s what I think happened.
moss made this channel as an alternative to reddit in lemmy.world, but since the blahaj.zone/c/196 that other people are already pointing to already existed, they just changed this channel’s name. The other channel is far more active, I recommend subscribing to it.
“I’m saying that, when a communist does it, it’s not an atrocity.”
If we wanted to mess up scansion for the sake of correctness, “when someone who calls themselves a communist.”
Go on r/Genzedong. You’ll get it in a second.
is that unblocked now?
Man I feel bad for all the not terminally online people getting thrown into this madness lol
Communist
Authoritarian Communists. Not all communists are tankies.
Remember kids, Authoritarianism is bad, no matter which side you wield the stick for.
