this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2025
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Originally, it meant people who supported the soviet union's use of tanks to crush uprisings.
Now its used to describe people who support Authoritatian Communist regimes, like the ussr, north korea or china.
On lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml there is a high amount of them.
And with the recent JFK declassified documents:
...it turns out the soviets were right to crush the Hungarian color revolution lmao
Damn, y'all are back.
Wait....you've been making post about us for the last several weeks, despite not being federated? What a nerd Loloolllooll
Somehow they even support modern russia which is as far from communism as it's possible to be without being US
I think the best evidence that "tankie" is a meaningless snarl word is the way the people who use it just make up what ever positions they like to ascribe to the mythical "tankie". Like, none of the people you call "tankies" support modern Russia, but you're going to insist that tankies support modern Russia anyway, because it's not meant to an actual descriptive word, just a way to punch left.
Their reasoning is that its anti-us imperialism, despite russia being pretty imperialistic itself.
That's such an oversimplifcation that it can just be dismissed as wrong. Here is someone who actually asked and didn't just assume
https://hexbear.net/post/4477584
Hey, y'all got federation working again.
yee the specter haunts again
You guys have great emojis, I'll give you that.
Ah, the classic "only western countries can be imperialist"
Love making up quotes
Don't forget that only US Capitalism is the root of moneys evils
It’s not a classic because no one says that. Japan did it for sixty years, until it was made a vassal of the US, which it still is today[1][2].
the other vein of pro-russian tankies i've seen is that it's impossible for a once communist country to backslide into fascis. how they square that and russia's claim that they must destroy Ukraine, a country that was once not just communist, but anarcho-communist, in order to stop their backslide into fascism, i have no idea. perhaps if a person is actually familiar with history and not just a single pro-hegemonic propaganda, they wouldn't be tankies.
i've been developing a theory, more of a hypothesis, really, that tankies, hoteps, white feminists, etc have figured out a part of the puzzle of oppression, and in their anger at waking up to that aspect of their reality, reject all other discourse surrounding the system of oppression that doesn't mesh with their experienced oppression. this, in many ways, is the root of leftist infighting. everyone sees everyone else's fight for liberation as a distraction from their own fight for liberation. the trick is, none of them are. they are simply different expressions of how the ruling class controls us.
when a tankie says shit like "the trans issue is a distraction" the are sparking leftist infighting, charitably unknowingly. our trans brothers, sisters, and thembers are our allies in this, and are generally speaking (not universally of course, i don't want to give the impression anyone is a homogenous group) left as hell. we need them to help us in our fight because they are experienced, battle hardened, and see things the rest of us don't see because they are tuned in.
the thing is that… yes. the culture wars are distractions. but that doesn't mean we shouldn't fight in them. that's like saying the best response to being bullied in school is to take your beating and tell no one because you're focused on a bigger issue. that's a great way to get your legs broke. the answer is to push back against the culture wars and say why we push back, and say that our enemy combatants are distracted from the real war. that they are acting as class traitors from a deep system of manipulation.
tankies don't realize it, or maybe they do, but they're conservatives. they seek to maintain a hegemony that oppresses us, the working classes, that has been shown not to work. authoritarian communism is still authoritarianism, and also expresses somewhere between most and all of the features of ur-fascism. it will never save us from our oppression. they also tell on themselves when they say "read theory" and all the books they reference were published before WWII. the world has moved on. we have learned more about our oppressors. they're leaving out a century of theory when they say to read theory. they are practitioners of the religion of Marxist-Leninism
A lot of people don't realize they are being manipulated to fight each other instead of dealing with the people who are actually causing the problems, the ones pulling the strings and syphoning off all the wealth for themselves and their friends.
I really haven't seen that? A while ago I looked into HexBear's opinion on it and it wasn't good.
Check out this thread, there really isn’t any Putin worship in these spaces.
https://hexbear.net/post/148426?scrollToComments=false
In this one some of the top comments are hoping Putin gets shot in the face. https://hexbear.net/post/3270551
shhhh! They haven't finished building their strawman
What people tend not to realize is they don't support Russia because they think it's still communist, but because of a combination of campism, accelerationism, and revolutionary defeatism. If you want to argue with someone in good faith you should try to understand their position first, otherwise they will just see you as a reactionary and dismiss what you say. I still occasionally get my comments removed from .ml but I've been able to get through to people somewhat by leading with an actual understanding of where they're coming from.
I don't think it's fair to categorize it as accelerationist, although definitely campism and critical support (that is, taking a side while remaining critical of it) - like you said, they know and despair that Russia is no longer socialist, they only side with the RF in this conflict as a 'lesser evil' than the dominant NATO camp. We saw the US prolong the proxy war (it's not their soldiers dying) until the they openly threw Ukraine away and negotiated terms with the RF when the war seemed no longer useful (this part usually happens more diplomatically and privately in a proxy war, but it usually happens).
Absolutely. The .ml instances are stricter than most and don't cater to anyone they perceive as ignorant and parroting propaganda in bad faith. From their point of view, it's just as simple as how most instances would ban conservatives coming in and starting bigoted, ignorant oft-debunked Fox News arguments about racism and transphobia. Why bother platforming it?
The authoritarian part waxes and wanes, there's a few anarchists in their ranks who have no real solution after "tear it all apart".
What then, boys?
"Tear it all apart" is only aimed at Western democracies. The then is that the authoritarian "communist" countries invade and subjugate you.
Thanks for taking the time to explain. Much appreciated.