They make a boogeyman and then they tell one another campfire tales about how tankies are like this and how tankies do that.
It's really endemic especially across the progressive to radlib spectrum. (The conservative and more reactionary end also do it but it's in a different way - they appear to just make baseless claims that are post-hoc rationalisations to justify what they want to do but that's a different discussion.)
But yeah, the radlibs and centrists will gather round and assure one another that the tankie will simultaneously never actually read theory, they'll worship Marx/Stalin/whoever, they treat Capital like scripture, they actually support any sort of movement which drapes itself in a red flag, they can't argue and they'll just yell at everyone to read theory, they will enter into mainstream discourse and subvert it to turn people into Marxists if you let them, they spend all of their time online in circlejerks and they are no threat to anyone, they are a powerful voting bloc and they are an existential threat to Biden's reelection, they are all Chinese/Russian bots, they are all brainwashed victims of a political cult, they are all power-hungry opportunists who are just using socialism as a vehicle to achieve their power fantasies, they are all children who do not understand the real world, they spend all of their time reading and arguing about theory rather than doing anything effectual.
And they all sit around patting eachother on the backs for regurgitating these stories, each more fanciful than the last, and none of them seem to notice the contradictory claims.
It's a bit like the libs who cry fascism over Trump and when you ask them what did they do to resist fascism when Trump was in power you get cheap excuses and blank stares.
Like if I'm a brainwashed child that is a cult-victim then why would you berate me and throw all sorts of accusations at me?
If I treat communist theory as scripture and quote it at people then how is it that I also do not read any theory?
If I support anything that is draped in a red flag then why not start a "communist" wing of the DNC to funnel votes to Biden?
If I don't actually achieve anything and I'm relegated to an online circlejerk then how can I be a subversive infiltrator that will pervert good, honest liberal discourse to trick people into becoming communist (by yelling at people to read theory??) and how is it that I can influence the presidential elections?
They know there is a threat of well-meaning liberals moving leftwards when exposed to actual leftists. The entire goal is inoculation against exposure. Tell untrue tales about what we are that are so bad they do not wish to see it or engage. Make it so bad that when accidentally exposed to us they are pre-primed for a poor interaction due to the hostility and expectations that are set.
It's about making sure that liberal is the furthest left that people ever go.
I gotta admit that I kinda relish bursting these people's bubbles though. It's a bit of a bloodsport for me. (Maybe I'm some sort of intellectual masochist or something idk.)
There was this one ex-Soviet gusano I recently encountered online who you could just tell was born in the late 80s-early 90s chastising me about not knowing of the horrors of socialism and all that shit.
He accuses me of supporting atrocities because of muh Holomuddor and I threw it right back at him by telling him that he was engaging in famine denialism by implicitly arguing that the famine only affected the Ukraine and not other regions like Kazakhstan, not to mention the greater Eurasian region including China.
I asked them about how they feel about the cyclical famines that occurred under the Tsardom since they seem so fucking preoccupied with starvation in the Russian region and, I shit you not, they told me that they never heard about these other famines and they asked me to provide dates.
I roasted them over this because they claimed to:
Care about famines
Care about communism
Care about history, especially Russian history
Care about the fact that people don't know Russian history like they do
I was like bruh, if you don't recognise that one of the major events that directly preceded the October Revolution was the famine of 1891-1892 that generated a huge groundswell of anti-monarchist and pro-socialist sentiment amongst the Russian masses then what are you even talking about?
I also told them that they are welcome to weigh the political opinions of children however they like but if they demand that I must to defer to their political insights they personally had as a 6yo living in Russia in 1991 then they are a deeply unserious person - what are they going to tell me, that communism is bad because there wasn't enough ice-cream and naptimes were too short? Get real.
Anyway these discussions always go the same way and whatever silly liberal gets big ideas from hitting the kool-aid a bit too hard always seems to end up baffled and frustrated and kinda speechless when they have an exchange with an actual human being who happens to know what they're talking about instead of scoring some massive beat down on their caricaturised notion of the tankie, the way that it always plays out in their power fantasy. (I don't expect anything to come from these exchanges except maybe creating a Pavlovian association between talking shit and getting humiliated - I reckon they just scurry back to their circlejerk to seek out reaffirmation as a way to lick their wounds.)
!["Waiting for a tankie essay about how [banning an LGBTQ fedi instance is] actually an inclusive move from russia"](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/43a0ce85-70fd-4b23-8a1c-ad4c4c067213.png){kind=link}
It's just typical lib cope.
They make a boogeyman and then they tell one another campfire tales about how tankies are like this and how tankies do that.
It's really endemic especially across the progressive to radlib spectrum. (The conservative and more reactionary end also do it but it's in a different way - they appear to just make baseless claims that are post-hoc rationalisations to justify what they want to do but that's a different discussion.)
But yeah, the radlibs and centrists will gather round and assure one another that the tankie will simultaneously never actually read theory, they'll worship Marx/Stalin/whoever, they treat Capital like scripture, they actually support any sort of movement which drapes itself in a red flag, they can't argue and they'll just yell at everyone to read theory, they will enter into mainstream discourse and subvert it to turn people into Marxists if you let them, they spend all of their time online in circlejerks and they are no threat to anyone, they are a powerful voting bloc and they are an existential threat to Biden's reelection, they are all Chinese/Russian bots, they are all brainwashed victims of a political cult, they are all power-hungry opportunists who are just using socialism as a vehicle to achieve their power fantasies, they are all children who do not understand the real world, they spend all of their time reading and arguing about theory rather than doing anything effectual.
And they all sit around patting eachother on the backs for regurgitating these stories, each more fanciful than the last, and none of them seem to notice the contradictory claims.
It's a bit like the libs who cry fascism over Trump and when you ask them what did they do to resist fascism when Trump was in power you get cheap excuses and blank stares.
Like if I'm a brainwashed child that is a cult-victim then why would you berate me and throw all sorts of accusations at me?
If I treat communist theory as scripture and quote it at people then how is it that I also do not read any theory?
If I support anything that is draped in a red flag then why not start a "communist" wing of the DNC to funnel votes to Biden?
If I don't actually achieve anything and I'm relegated to an online circlejerk then how can I be a subversive infiltrator that will pervert good, honest liberal discourse to trick people into becoming communist (by yelling at people to read theory??) and how is it that I can influence the presidential elections?
It's just ridiculous.
All of it is internal inoculation.
They know there is a threat of well-meaning liberals moving leftwards when exposed to actual leftists. The entire goal is inoculation against exposure. Tell untrue tales about what we are that are so bad they do not wish to see it or engage. Make it so bad that when accidentally exposed to us they are pre-primed for a poor interaction due to the hostility and expectations that are set.
It's about making sure that liberal is the furthest left that people ever go.
Absolutely this
I gotta admit that I kinda relish bursting these people's bubbles though. It's a bit of a bloodsport for me. (Maybe I'm some sort of intellectual masochist or something idk.)
There was this one ex-Soviet gusano I recently encountered online who you could just tell was born in the late 80s-early 90s chastising me about not knowing of the horrors of socialism and all that shit.
He accuses me of supporting atrocities because of muh Holomuddor and I threw it right back at him by telling him that he was engaging in famine denialism by implicitly arguing that the famine only affected the Ukraine and not other regions like Kazakhstan, not to mention the greater Eurasian region including China.
I asked them about how they feel about the cyclical famines that occurred under the Tsardom since they seem so fucking preoccupied with starvation in the Russian region and, I shit you not, they told me that they never heard about these other famines and they asked me to provide dates.
I roasted them over this because they claimed to:
Care about famines
Care about communism
Care about history, especially Russian history
Care about the fact that people don't know Russian history like they do
I was like bruh, if you don't recognise that one of the major events that directly preceded the October Revolution was the famine of 1891-1892 that generated a huge groundswell of anti-monarchist and pro-socialist sentiment amongst the Russian masses then what are you even talking about?
I also told them that they are welcome to weigh the political opinions of children however they like but if they demand that I must to defer to their political insights they personally had as a 6yo living in Russia in 1991 then they are a deeply unserious person - what are they going to tell me, that communism is bad because there wasn't enough ice-cream and naptimes were too short? Get real.
Anyway these discussions always go the same way and whatever silly liberal gets big ideas from hitting the kool-aid a bit too hard always seems to end up baffled and frustrated and kinda speechless when they have an exchange with an actual human being who happens to know what they're talking about instead of scoring some massive beat down on their caricaturised notion of the tankie, the way that it always plays out in their power fantasy. (I don't expect anything to come from these exchanges except maybe creating a Pavlovian association between talking shit and getting humiliated - I reckon they just scurry back to their circlejerk to seek out reaffirmation as a way to lick their wounds.)