Asking because some of them supported Cuba a few weeks ago but now Cuba is enemy #1 and the US just killed 32 Cuban officers who were directly defending Maduro as his personal guard.
It kinda seems like you can’t be an enemy of Venezuela and also a supporter of Cuba so like… Are there any states left that these self-identified leftists still support at all?
“Rojava” (lmao)
Norway
Sweden
Ukraine
Yeah, I support socialist Ukraine
“anti-tankie” is just another word for the standard foreign policy of the west
No, they’re all liberal “democracies” now
Did they ever truly support Cuba? Or was it always a “hate the government, not the people” sort of thing? I always got the impression that they wanted Cuba to be less “authoritarian” and have more “freedom” for their people. Though as your conversation shows with that person from mander.xyz, the term “Tankie” is just a floating signifier with no real meaning and just means whatever a person wants it to mean, so an “anti-tankie” is probably not going to have any sort of coherent worldview.
Though as your conversation shows with that person from mander.xyz, the term “Tankie” is just a floating signifier with no real meaning and just means whatever a person wants it to mean, so an “anti-tankie” is probably not going to have any sort of coherent worldview.
Mmmmmm. There’s a whole thing to unpack there where a “tankie” is an unreasonable boogieman that some people have been convinced exists but really does not. It’s a caricature of a marxist-leninist who reverts to “stalin should’ve sent more tanks” with no understanding that statements like that are unserious and the real position held by that person in a reasonable conversation is quite different.
Support (encourage), perhaps Cuba, it’s the darling of currently existing socialism and gets a lot of sympathy or at least has been for quite some time.
Support (help), I don’t think “anti-tankie crowd” helps any socialist project much, perhaps some donations here and there.
Hi. I’m “anti tankie” and I support the decision of any country to be socialist. It’s my favorite economic model.
I don’t explicitly support any government, though. No one is above criticism, least of all politicians, militaries, etc.
It feels hard to be a socialist on lemmy though. All I see in most spaces (socialist or liberal) is a bunch of straw man arguments and dogpiling.
Fwiw, Cuba’s pretty cool in my book.
Che said of Stalin “In the so called mistakes of Stalin lies the difference between a revolutionary attitude and a revisionist attitude. You have to look at Stalin in the historical context in which he moves, you don’t have to look at him as some kind of brute, but in that particular historical context. I have come to communism because of daddy Stalin and nobody must come and tell me that I mustn’t read Stalin. I read him when it was very bad to read him. That was another time.”
You are displaying the revisionist attitude. I used to have it too, and then I stopped pretending I knew everything and actually read history and researched.
Che on DPRK (North Korea): Havana and Pyongyang developed their friendship in detail during the Cold War. Diplomatic relations were established immediately after the victory of the Cuban revolution in August 1960, and embassies were opened in the two capitals. That year, the then Cuban minister, the legendary Ernesto Che Guevara, visited Pyongyang and declared that Cuba should follow the North Korean model. Che was impressed by the post-war reconstruction and rapid industrial development. He told an American journalist that the DPRK “was a small country raised from the ashes of American bombing and invasion.”
I’m always puzzled by “anti-tankies” who support Cuba. Cuba are tankies. All communists in real life are “tankies”, you just were able to see Cubans are relatively normal people trying their best to do socialism because you are familiar with them and they are nearer to you geographically and culturally so the propaganda isn’t as effective as it with more “alien” reds. Stop being anti-tankie
Curious. Can you define tankie for me?
I’m asking because there hasn’t been a single socialist revolution that was not led by marxist-leninists and as far as I am aware MLs are what everyone is talking about when they say “tankie”. It’s odd to me to hear someone say socialism is their favourite model and yet every single example of socialism that has ever existed has been marxist-leninist which when you say you’re “anti tankie” this leaves me with considerable confusion.
This is not an attack, it’s a sincere question from curiosity.
I get where you’re coming from. I don’t mean it as the anti ML pejorative like people who’ve bought into red scare propaganda.
I define it as the people who deny any wrongdoing by governments and call anyone who does liberal.
Edit- Looks like we’re on the same page meow. We seem to mostly have had an issue with semantics.
The ever shifting goalpost of tankies. Somewhere between all people left of Bernie Sanders and the last USSR hold-out soldier hidden in the bunkers of Siberia surviving off of 40 year old rations resides the true meaning of “tankie” within the Liberal mind. Shifting back and forth between the two as convenient for the current argument. Get cornered by someone asking specific definitions? It’s the holdout soldier only. Vaguely attacking all anti-imperialists in comments online? Back to everyone left of Bernie Sanders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
It’s motte-and-bailey fallacy you’re doing, probably unintentionally. I encourage you to shed the last vestiges of Liberalism that you hide inside. If you are “against tankies” at the end of the day you’re still on the Liberal side of the line. Hop sides. Switch to the side of socialism and the proletariat, not Liberalism and bourgeois optics and lies.
I see.
I define it as the people who deny any wrongdoing by governments and call anyone who does liberal.
The thing is that there really aren’t any people that fit that. No really. That’s not a particularly common position among any communists at all. At most it occurs when a communist is particularly fed up with a person’s behaviour as most conversations tend to occur in bad-faith and at that point they default to a sort of “fuck you stalin didn’t throw enough nazis in pits” sort of attitude.
For the majority of communists, Stalin is like, 70 good 30 bad. Similar situation with Mao, in fact that’s the official position of the CPC as well.
My experience with people throwing the word tankie around is they actually just tend to mean any communist, and when you ask them to clarify further the goalposts continually move around to a degree where basically any communist falls into the definition. That does not seem to be the case in your example, but I would argue that, generally speaking, you’re not anti-communist at all in any way because the “tankie” that you oppose is a boogie man that doesn’t actually exist outside of weird situations or examples of teens being teens.
To add on, I think you should really look into why certain revolutions are considered “authoritarian”. Firstly, a quick point - it’s almost always non-white countries. The more white-adjacent they are (Cuba has a large population of white latino/a, Fidel Castro was white Latino) the less “scary” they appear to the Liberal hivemind. African, Middle Eastern, Central Asian and East Asian revolutions always get called “authoritarian” even when they are doing the same things that Cuba did, or even less in some cases.
Hence this meme:
Yeah, I get it. I don’t like that meme.
why don’t you like that meme, elaborate. It has scare quotes around “tankies”, it’s a tankie meme pointing out that these are all communists. Self-proclaimed Marxists and Leninists and Marxist-Leninists and USSR sympathizers. People that the average western “leftist” likes to think positively about but not learn too much about. “Tankies” as they would be called today, or “pinkos” or “commies” or “reds” as they would be called decades ago. Tankies is a way of carrying on the anti-communist name slinging to people who consider themselves “left” and think they are “the real socialists” despite them being a new flavor of leftoid (2000-2026) and coming in and trying to take over the domain of “tankies” (historical communists).
socialism bad , capitalism is actually good.
Source?
Were there really ever? “Anti-tankiism” was never really a tenable position, as it required ignoring the good things communist governments did and inflating, or removing from historical context and comparison with worse capitalist actions, any negative actions.
Yeah I know but like, there’s a lot of anti-tankie soft-leftists who claim to be democratic socialists that I’ve seen be supportive of Cuba in the past and now they’re just flat out ignoring it because it doesn’t fit into their belief Maduro was an “evil brutal dictator” as I see repeated over and over again.
They also don’t seem to know what to think now that Maduro has been captured and yet the socialists still hold power. They’ve never been told that the socialists are evil, just Maduro. So they seem like they’re in a limbo state about what to think about Venezuela right now.
These sound like fascinating people you’ve encountered. That’s not disbelief, mind, but it’s interesting how they could come to the belief that Cuba is good but Maduro is bad. It seems like they have a lot of Cognitive Dissonance to contend with. If this is their belief system then it would be logical to assume that they’re 100% in support of Venezuela now that their only obstacle to support is in a NY jail.
I can corroborate her, I’ve met tons of people who defend Cuba because they see it as an underdog basically while calling the PRC and USSR evil empires.
There’s a weird current on the left where you sympathize with Latin American socialists and are willing to consider the material constraints they have to contend with, but you have nothing but disdain for Asian and Russian communists because they didn’t just snap their fingers and out of thin air create productive forces and a classless society. I guess it’s unexamined Cold War racism?
Yeah, that’s my experience too.
I think this also explains why Vietnam is mostly just ignored by these people. It’s doing well enough that the “underdog” thing doesn’t really work, and it’s also not powerful enough to have all that much influence outside its own borders. Doesn’t fit any sort of preconceived narrative? Just don’t talk about it.
I can’t put my finger on this, but I bet there’s some psychology behind rooting for the “underdog” and being repulsed by the “powerful”
There’s a fair bit of writing on this topic, for example this article
There is also this one that more explicitly links this mindset to Christian cultureThose are the same essay just published in two different places. It is a banger though
I’m very silly sometimes. I read the first version but not the second. Thank you for the correction.
I have to imagine it has to do with identification. Unless you’re at the top of the social order, you’re going to identify with the “underdog” to some extent, but few will identify with the powerful. Even at the higher echelons, there’s still plenty of people with more power, which can lead one to the false assumption of one’s own downtrodden status: hence the difficulty of many white-presenting people to recognize their own privilege, even when it becomes increasingly obvious when bolstered by wealth.
I’ll admit that used to be me when I was a radlib but even then I supported Venezuela and Chavez because of how much I hate bush
Huh. Well now I have to do what I always do when confused by confounding situations: Go do some reading. It’s hard for me to conceptualize what goes into someone’s head to produce such a dissonant view, but it takes all types I guess. Maybe it’s incomplete propagandization? Like genetic co-dominance but applied to a worldview.
If you use their definition of socialist state, yes definitely. If you use the real definition, definitely not
“DeNmArK iS gOoD sOcIaLiSm”
The liberal is someone who supports all socialist projects except the current one
Only failed socialist projects can be supported by anti-tankies: Allende’s Chile, the Spanish Second Republic, hell, even non-socialist States such as the pre-Bolshevik Russia (after the February revolution).
The anti tankie support for Cuba was always framed as support for the people not the government, wasn’t it?
that’s just anti-Cuba, when the majority of Cubans support the government. It’s paternalistic “I know better than you and will dictate what should happen in your country to you”
That’s just step one of libs getting into regime change. In reality it means they want the U.S., the cause of Cuba’s problems, to turn it into another Puerto Rico.
Of course, they don’t actually believe it but that is how they frame it.
Just like the “hate the sin not the sinner” crap that christians push, it’s just a condescending way to be paternalistic and controlling.
Makhnovshchina, Paris Commune, that time anarchists took over a part of portland
Actually they really dislike the part of Portland taken by anarchists from my experience
And I wouldn’t put it past them to be fully made of contradictions, as long as it reaffirms the base that is ‘west is somewhat better’ in every aspect
CHAZ was Seattle, and they murdered a black kid and disbanded in shame after recreating the exact same racist overpolicing dynamic within their new zone as outside of it
I think I once read a comment in Hexbear that “tankie” is usually a pejorative used by western leftists against other western leftists as a disciplining rebuke.
These sorts are social chauvanists. They do not really engage in political, labor, or social activism outside of their desktops/phones. I think they’re just embarrassed & disillusioned Democrats, perhaps as we all once were, but still side with the nation state as a pillar of identity and moral North star.
Did they ever?
Well I had it in my head that they at least nominally thought Cuba was good but now I don’t even know. Their seems to be a complete avoidance of the topic when I bring up Cuban officers were Maduro’s entire guard, like they don’t want to consider that a country they don’t see as bad were so supportive of Venezuela, they don’t want to think about why.
I noticed the same thing. It seemed pretty common to find “leftists” aka liberals who would call Maduro a dictator, but voice support for Cuba prior to this. They just don’t have a full understanding of imperialism or socialism, or the “leftism” they claim to believe.
huh, I’m surprised. I can’t recall a time when I heard a lib support Cuba.
