I think there's a small amount of truth to it especially when people target someone like Luna Oi, but at least for now it's in the vast majority of cases an equivalent of chud or lib etc. and historically was a term made by mostly white British leftists to make fun of other mostly white British leftists, not something to describe groups of people in the global south.
I think this is pretty similar energy to right wing ppl / libs last year claiming using gusano is racist, obviously the people who get called gusano are almost always more reactionary than people that get called tankies outside of maybe like 1 or 2 of nazbols, but I think neither in his words are frequently racist, and it's a weird energy especially as Ben Norton is a white American guy and seems more about wanting to own the people who use tankie as an insult than it is about making a stand against any racism happening.
https://unofficialbird.com/BenjaminNorton/status/1609586255641169921#m
Making libs stop using "tankie" because they heard it's problematic sounds funny as hell, let's go for it.
Have Kanye and Trump go on a rant about Tankies, that will do the trick
no they'll just start liking Kanye and Trump.
libs are anticommunists first
Anticommunism always had and still has racist, frequently antisemitic and strongly national-chauvinist undertones. As the vast majority of AES states are and have been countries of the global south using communism as an emancipatory program, this is simply inevitable. Racism is inherent to a rejection of the gloabl south's struggle for independence. It rests on the assumption that "these people" morally deserve to be ruled over by the imperial core, which is a deeply racist assumption. Even when you hear west germans talk about east germans and the DDR, there is a form of exoticising and othering that would undoubtedly have to be called racist if it wasn't white people portraying other white people of the literal same ethnicity as "underdeveloped", pauperized savages. AES states are universally imagined as backwards, failing and inept, not through the isolated, besieged position in geopolitics that is the price you pay for being a communist nation, but as an intrinsic quality of their communist nature, in short: they are seen as inherently inferior. Hierarchizising countries as superior and inferior based largely on vibes is absolutely racist as fuck.
So yes, i would agree that tankie often has racist undertones, just look at how V*ushites and other liberal anticommunists treat Hakim or Luna Oi. It's racism in full swing when a white amerikan liberal jokes about droning the home country of an Iraqi he's debating right after the US has murdered a million people in Iraq. It's racism in full swing when the advances Vietnam made for its citizens are mocked by terminally online amerikan pseudo-leftists whose parents' generation carried out a literal genocidal war against the Vietnamese that cost at least a million vietnamese lives and inflicts damage on the country and the people until this day due to aftereffects of chemical warfare. It is incredibly racist how the west talks about the PRC and DPRK, it is racist how it talks about communist liberation movements in Africa and LatAm, it has also always been racist and antisemitic how the bolsheviks were portrayed.
Reminding us of the trope of"oriental despotism" is an apt and exact comparison, another racist trope relevant in this context would be the "asiatic horde" or the "scheming jew". These are the narratives at play here.
And yes, i'm aware that the white college kid stereotype exists about western communists, but this completely ignores how many communists in western countries are from marginalized communities. This is on purpose: Admitting the liberatory, emancipatory nature of communism even at home violates the discursive hegemony liberalism claims. Theyhave to pretend that communism in western countries is the domain of middle-aged white cishet dudes in tweet jackets and their younger stoner selfs so they can pretend to be the sole advocates for the rights of the marginalized. This mayowashing of communism is part of their cynical ploy to present themselves as the sole advocates for our rights as marginalized people, to browbeat us into supporting the half-assed, insubstantial, uncommitted attempts at securing our civil rights that we may or may not enjoy when libs have won the latest election. So i would argue that the term even may be racist when it is used against an audience imagined to be white cishet dudes.
tl;dr: It's my new hill to die on that every liberal using the word tankie as a slur is a white supremacist amtisemitic transphobic sexpest and i'm asking you to all join me in this struggle.
I already assume this of white liberals whether or not they use tankie, but sure. I'm game.
this completely ignores how many communists in western countries are from marginalized communities. This is on purpose: Admitting the liberatory, emancipatory nature of communism even at home violates the discursive hegemony liberalism claims
This (and the sentences after, didn't want to just quote the whole thing) is an incredibly good point that I had never considered before. Saved for future reference.
and i’m asking you to all join me in this struggle
:im-doing-my-part:
The term is racist
Nowadays, when properly used, tankie is an insult almost always from a Westerner towards people who support nations like USSR, China, and DPRK
And the reason why they believe supporting those nations is a terrible idea is because most of them love believing propaganda since it validates their Western chauvinism and xenophobia
So when Ben says it's "frequently racist", that is absolutely correct
I think the word tankie has been appropriated by the left in the same way the word chud has been appropriated by the right. We use the word tankie to refer to ourselves unironically, even though the word itself originated with the right.
Speaking of the word chud, I try not to say it anymore. The right wing just sort of owns it now and it’s like saying based, cucked, cringe, or woke. I don’t expect to be taken seriously when using these words. But tankie, I think I can be taken seriously at least among leftists by calling myself that.
the right wing just sort of owns it now and it’s like saying based, cucked, cringe, or woke.
okay, cannibal human underground dweller :gigachad:
How do you know what race someone is on something like Reddit or forums or left book or anonymous Twitter? There’s tons of non-white people who use social media and they get called tankie all the time if they point out western chauvinism and imperialism and fascism
Ask a leftist or patriotic Chinese person about their experience on the English speaking internet and how many times they get called tankies or chicoms or CPC shills or wumaos etc
again, libs and radlibs on twitter calling people tankie have no idea who is at the other end of their insults. they have no idea if they are white coastal elites or chinese communists or what. So black, asian, latin people are called tankie all the time by rich white anglos
libs and radlibs are probably colorblind racists who think they're calling another white person a tankie most of the time, and they probably also think it just means "authoritarian left" or whatever and don't even know about hungary.
the entire chain is devoid of racial consideration and none of these people know anything about history so i'd argue that the racism comes in somewhere else and that "tankie" isn't any more racist than some old timey shit like "pinko"
Western libs will call mediocre socdems in global south and anyone who supports them "tankie" its definitely a racialzed term
More often then not it seems to be the polite lib version of "race traitor"
I've seen plenty of POC MLs say the term is deployed as a slur and de facto racist, so maybe that's what Norton is referring to.
I didn't see anyone questioning the observation that "woke" is used by many people who would like to use the N word during that conversation. I can think of a few countries people who use the word tankie will have the same kinds of crude opinions on.
historically was a term made by mostly white British leftists to make fun of other mostly white British leftists
The prior were white British chauvinists who support western colonialism and imperialism. The latter were white British anti-imperialists who had solidarity with the global south.
It was always chauvinist, and the accusation was implicitly racist immediately because it made solidarity the 2nd and 3rd world a bad thing. “You are a traitor to good civilized proper socialism. You agree with dark, evil, foreign socialism”
:us-foreign-policy: <- top line: indirectly racist. bottom line: directly racist.
Oh, they're calling white leftists tankies for (checks notes) ...supporting the political systems of countries that they have racist opinions about
shitheads would have to understand that the global south is full of maoists for "tankie" to be racist by default.
there's racist and sexist components to the hate luna gets but those aren't why clown man or his idiot followers call her tankie
Eh, it's not really any more racist than any other insult in a racist society. When a group of people is criticized, even if the object of criticism is the whole group, it is often in practice directed disproportionately at the more oppressed parts of the group. This is further amplified by how the internet works. The use of term is of course affected by a racist worldview, but so is the use of every other term, and I don't think racism is very primary in this case, or else you would also have to argue that "liberal" is a racist term.
The term is definitely deployed whenever an anti-imperialist makes defence of places that are under attack or exploitation by imperialists. This invariably means that one side is white and the other is another ethnicity.
There is a racial element in all such interactions.
