Given that tankie now means anyone who didn't want to drop a nuke on the USSR, yes.
He died in 1955, so I doubt he was familiar with 'tankie' being a thing.
Einstein's opinions on the Bolsheviks changed with time. In 1925, he criticized them for not having a 'well-regulated system of government' and called their rule a 'regime of terror and a tragedy in human history'. He later adopted a more balanced view, criticizing their methods but praising their goals, demonstrated by his 1929 remark on Vladimir Lenin: "I honor Lenin as a man who completely sacrificed himself and devoted all his energy to the realization of social justice. I do not consider his methods practical, but one thing is certain: men of his type are the guardians and restorers of the conscience of humanity."[55][56] Rowe translates the beginning of the second sentence as "I do not find his methods advisable".[57]
In 1949 Einstein stated "The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?".[58]
In the twenties, when no dictatorships existed, I advocated that refusing to go to war would make war improper. But as soon as coercive conditions appeared in certain nations, I felt that it would weaken the less aggressive nations vis-à-vis the more aggressive ones.
In September 1942, in a private letter to Princeton University president, Einstein criticized the U.S. for not doing enough to fight Nazi Germany. He argued that "If Hitler were not a lunatic he could easily have avoided the hostility of the Western powers" if not for his threats of world domination.
Most of us are not neutral in feeling, but, as human beings, we have to remember that, if the issues between East and West are to be decided in any manner that can give any possible satisfaction to anybody, whether Communist or anti-Communist, whether Asian or European or American, whether White or Black, then these issues must not be decided by war. We should wish this to be understood, both in the East and in the West.
There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.
He was probably more of dem soc then an ML, but I think if he had lived through the 60s he would have been pretty close to Parenti after seeing how things unfolded in the geo-political landscape.
he didn't think Nazis were a necessary evil against judeo bolshevism, so yes
I honestly doubt it, though he was a sympathizer and supporter of the Soviet Union.
Thats literally what qualifies you as a tankie in the common parlance
Not really?
He wasn't really a Marxist-Leninist... that we know of.
And technically, wouldn't tankies also just be a subset of MLs, based on the original usage of the term?
Your mistake is thinking that people who use the word tankie have any kind of consistent definition, or even understand the politics of the person they're name-calling.
It used to refer to a very specific incident where Khrushchev sent in tanks to suppress unrest. Anyone who supported that decision was called a tankie.
Now it just means "person on the left that I don't like." Trots are tankies, anarchists are tankies, Joe Biden is a tankie. The word doesn't mean anything.
Ah, to me, MLs are tankies only and I prefer to keep it that way.
I like the word "tankie" and, well, am one, as far as I'm concerned.
But that's just me. For a long time, that was my definition.
I thought the term was coined by Brit MLs, who opposed force to suppress unrest in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, to describe those that were on with it. If I'm incorrect, please hit me with those facts, I don't want to be misinformed.
Einstein was a socialist. He believed in world revolution. He believed in the need to reach a set of pre-requisites to achieve it.
Beyond that? We don't know his exact ideology. We know he honoured Lenin. We know he defended Stalin, including the purges. We know he defended the USSR with a huge amount of passion. We know that he came to regret coming to the US and in his late life said that it was a mistake he could never correct in the balance of his life. We know that he advocated for socialism, real socialism, for his entire life.
In the context of what people now call a "tankie". Einstein would be regarded as one by modern liberals. They will try not to do that though because they don't want to give Einstein to us given that his name is literally used as a synonym for "genius". Instead they will argue that he didn't know what we know today (false), and that politics was outside his expertise (also fairly bullshit he was very active politically).
Was he a marxist-leninist? No. Post ww2 he was a complete and total pacifist which excluded him from both marxism-leninism and hanarchism. He would more likely be described as a democratic-socialist. Given that most marxist-leninists are practicing demsocs within the imperial core this doesn't really exclude him from ML though. You could view it as simply the only practical option to take within imperial core countries under the conditions that exist.
The FBI files call him an anarcho-communist near the beginning but don't really offer any evidence for his lean toward one ideology or another. It's easily seen as just an FBI toolbag not knowing what he's fully talking about especially as it compares anarcho-communism to stalin in the same sentence.
With all this said, Einstein is one of the easiest and most powerful appeal-to-authority you can make when selling people on socialism, the ussr, stalin and marxism-leninism. Especially because it's something most liberals don't know about because it has been intentionally excluded from their education and popular-knowledge about him which makes them feel like something in the world is being kept from them (because it is).
He was absolutely a tankie, you xan find comments from liberals about how they couldn't understand him defending the Bolsheviks when he was such a peaceful dude
