Removed by mod
anyone who rants against "tankies" online is a liberal
Removed by modconservatives wouldnt use it because they don't follow leftist internet shit, and they already think liberals are communists so no point in even using the word.
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Yes but also no.
If you boil it down to its function instead of meaning, it represents going too far left. What that means in any context changes depending on how far left the person using it thinks is too far.
The reason it feels like it changes meaning so much is because it represents anti-leftism fitted to whatever context it is being used in. You are a tankie if you are an ML to a baby left demsoc, you are a tankie if you want to end capitalism to a socdem, and you are a tankie if you're a socdem to a neoliberal.
Someone on Twitter was trying to explain to me that Tankie somehow meant right wing because something something Maupin? And I just kept asking him "Who is Maupin? Is he some kind of twitch streamer?" because 1.) I don't actually know anything about Maupin except he is some kind of grifter sex pest and 2.) It's really, really funny that this guy was using some extremely online cult guy with maybe a few hundred followers to explain why millions of socialists around the world were actually bad socialists.
Maupin was a part of the Patriotic Socialism/magacommunism/mecha tankie dumb online shit we’ve been seeing crop up. So the person who was saying tankie means right wing is (in their specific view) correct because those types of debate bros see revolution stemming from their hyper idealized version of a right wing proletariat (middle class jet ski dealership owners, fail sons, foremans, hvac company owners, etc)
But they are also a reaction of leftist ideology, so calling them a tankie is also traditionally incorrect
yes but they are also a weird terminally online group of about 100 people so aren't a major part of the left. It would be like referining hexbear as proof unions are bad
I thought it meant anyone who agreed that the tanks should be sent in to Tianenmen Square.
Well, that's how I heard it. And anyway the Venn diagram of the two is nearly a circle.
Tiananmen Square is so easy to justify I do it to anybody who will listen
The whole "people who weren't even in the square and were almost certainly CIA assets were killing unarmed PLA soldiers with fire bombs and stolen machine guns and otherwise just beating them to death, and non one actually died in the square and all the students left peacefully when the PLA's deadline expired" does kind of knock the wind out of the usual narrative.
Which is funny because even Wikipedia agrees with this version of events now.
To be fair around 200 people died in the riots in surrounding areas but a good portion of them were PLA soldiers so
Yeah, it's kinda wild because it went from a fairly niche term used mostly by British Trotskyists during the mid to late cold war to refer to British Communists who supported the Soviets putting down the Hungarian counter-revolution in 1956 but has now blossomed into first a word for anglosphere liberals to use to describe anyone to the left of Bernie Sanders and then broadly anyone they don't like. I was aware of it from childhood solely because I have leftist family members who were around during the cold war.
Technically it was used within European ML parties first, including the Maoists decrying the "Krushchevite Invasion" who would split off.
This is literally CIA shit. They specifically cultivated a language when dealing with communists. Even their internal reports do this. "Communists don't 'join' or 'live in' or 'work in', they 'inflitrate', 'subvert', and 'invade'. Communists aren't people, they're all lying spies apart of an international conspiracy to destroy freedom."
Changing the word to "tankie" is the only thing that changed. They are brainwashed.
It also conveniently, as a word, implies the authoritarian or militarism of historical eastern european communism. Libs drink that shit like water. We have "Undercover FBI." Meanwhile They have "Secret Police."
Or even "plain clothes officers", because ours are at ALL levels.
Communists don’t ‘join’ or ‘live in’ or ‘work in’, they ‘inflitrate’, ‘subvert’, and ‘invade’.
it's nice to feel seen
I remember it being used by anarchists and Leftcoms on Reddit to talk about leftists that defended every socialist country that's ever existed. Then liberals started using it for everyone to the left of Bernie, and now it's used if you're even remotely anti-capitalist.
I'll defend every socialist country that ever existed. All the ones I don't like aren't socialist :gigachad:
It just means "commie"
Substitute the word "commie" any time you come across it and nothing will change.
It refers to a specific kind of communist, a Stalinist / Marxist-Leninist
Not to the wreckers and libs and those types. It's a title they throw on whatever opinion that is to the left enough that it actually challenges their narratives.
Anyone who says "I'm a communist but not one of those tankies" is a pick-me, and you can't convince me otherwise
not any more than the word yank refers to people from the northern US if a principled anarchist was to criticise US imperialism from an anarchist perspective they would be called a tankie
I call myself a commie or a tankie when I'm being upfront about my stance. Really sets the tone for the rest of the (usually blessedly short) conversation
I can't use the search function on this site to save my ass so I'll just type it up again:
I say fuck them all. Call me a tankie. I'm more or less ML in my leanings and philosophy and the whole vanguardism bit. I am by all definitions of the term "a tankie" from the sniveling liberal worm who only found out the term because of reddit and the historical grievances about IS-3s rolling through Hungary. All it confirms for me is that I have drawn my line in the sand. At least I'm sticking to my fucking principles. I can't go un-read Lenin to satisfy the brainworms of the terminally online. My ship has sailed. Damn year 40 years on this planet and nothing made more sense to me than classic theory. It would injure my soul to betray my own self. Do I define myself as a Tankie? No. Do I care what other people call me, this shiftless amorphous term that means nothing when you boil it down to the bones? Fuck no.
We need to stop using ANY insult when it comes to the important anarchist vs ML debate of what methods should be used to implement our ideas.
It is so very important that we hash this out now. We must determine how to best implement our ideas and divide our movement now while we have no power to actually do anything about them. :fedposting:
Conservatives can't call anyone a Tankie without making them look cool among other conservatives.
