I'm not one to post often. I'm not really one to rant to strangers online often, even. But, after migrating from r*ddit to lemmy, I've had this on my mind and this seemed like the place to vent.
I see discourse about tankies constantly on Lemmy. This struck me as odd. Why are these so called tankies such a threat? Why do I see people calling themselves left-wing and attacking tankies more voraciously than neoliberals and, sometimes, even fascists?
I think I know the answer, just as well as most people who will read this. These are the Zizeks of the world: people who do indeed think in a left-wing oriented way, but fail to recognise that they're also Western to the core and the biases that come with that.
I sincerely care about this much less than the actual reason I'm making this post. That is: why don't these people notice that their talking points, left-oriented as they may seem, always end up supporting US allies or attacking US enemies? I mean, do these people not see that Ukraine winning the war is a boon to the US, regardless of who is "right" in that conflict? Many other such cases, but I think I've made my point, or, rather, my confusion, clear.
That's it. That's the post.
I think that trying to empathize, even with fools, is a good exercise. In this case, I think their railing makes sense if you understand that, from their perspective, we look like Nazis claiming to be leftists (which is part of why sometimes they just flat-out resort to calling us Nazis), and we support several states that they would also describe in such a way. Imagine if a group like that actually existed! You and I would find it pretty vile and seek to attack it as a perverting, corrupting, discrediting force to the left. In reality, the closest we get are the patsoc/"maga communist" types, who are irrelevant and so are only occasionally talked about.
I do agree that they hold these beliefs because they ultimately have not challenged many of their views that they inherited from the western mainstream. They're ultimately still adopting views that are compatible with neoliberalism, even if they "reject" neoliberalism in favor of what they find to be radical leftism. If those views represented a serious opposition to neoliberalism, they would find such views just as repellent as ours, because they would be just as villified.