I swear, if I were an elite trying to conserve my power by making leftist ideas look bad, I could not think of a more effective tactic than introducing tankies
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2026
167 points (98.8% liked)
Memes of Production
1436 readers
798 users here now
Seize the Memes of Production
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the “ML” influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
Rules:
Be a decent person.
No racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, zionism/nazism, and so on.
Other Great Communities:
founded 2 months ago
MODERATORS
The trick is realizing that people that support capitalism are not leftist. It's not infighting if it's against people supporting regimes suppressing anarchists and (left-)communist's. Also a nice quote by Bismarck:
Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the Black and Red unite!
Is your profile picture Tux?
Yes
should ever again the Black and Red unite
I believe tankies are shills their ultimate goal is to prevent that from happening
The quote is attributed to Bismarck, but there is no German source for it, so I don't think he really said it.
Also the unification of the German states was a grave error and a lot of innocent people paid the price for it.
Fuck Leftist, Fuck Rightist, Fuck Nazi, Fuck Maga, Fuck Tankies. Basically fuck any honey-trap ideologies.
Judge action, not ideologies. Facts, not ideas. Double-check sources. When not sure of what's going on follow the money. Privacy first. Demand a social contract and double-check the fine prints in the margin.
"But my figurehead dictatorship is better than yours! Let me count the ways"
I swear "tankie" has lost all meaning on this site, if it ever had any to begin with.
Tankie means you pretend to worship "communist" counties than run over their civilians with tanks.
It has always meant those people who obsessively espouse support for authoritarian dictatorships with xommunist in the name.
if they think North Korea, USSR, and CCP are awesome and nice and the only true communists, then they're tankies.
They tend to have a lot of other toxic behavior but that's the defining characteristic
Sure, but people on this site call basically any leftist they disagree with a tankie. I've seen so many discussions of leftists just talking about how much the US sucks and needs to be destroyed and rebuilt only for people to call them tankies cause they brought up the need for violence. Even people that openly state that even if they like certain aspects of those governments, they're not communist and are very much capitalist get called tankies. It's just this site's buzzword insult.
Tankies aren't leftists.
And there has been a huge problem with tankies on lemmt. It not a buzzword, it's a kneejerk reaction.
Also if your account is on one of the tankie-triad instances then people will assume you're a tankie no matter what you say
Also if your account is on one of the tankie-triad instances then people will assume you're a tankie no matter what you say
Well tbf they definitely are tankies if their acct is there, even if the comment is about flowers the only reason to be there is because they're a tankie, they just also happen to like flowers. Slight exception goes to .ml because of them positioning themselves as the not-default-but-actually-default instance.
Tankies are leftists, the authleft exists and to pretend otherwise does nothing to resist them.
The authleft have gone full circle to authoritarian right
Tankies aren't leftists.
See, that's part of the loop here. Tankies are definitionally leftist, else they'd be called something other than tankie. It is the application of leftism, be it deemed, fake, real, red fash, bot, etc, is what's uneven and arbitrary.
So much so it is to the point that applying it based on the user's instance is considered a norm.
Tankies aren't leftists
That last point is the worst one. People come here not knowing a damn thing about any of the various instances and will be judged for things they didn't do all cause they made an account on ml or dbzero. I made mine on zip just cause it was the first option listed and I didn't know there was anything special. As much as many of the people I have problems with coming from world, I don't think negatively of someone just cause they made an account on that instance.
You're only thinking about your own experiences.
From my experience, tankie triad instances allow the most abusive of their users to create endless accounts, then brigade, spam and harass people... And the admins never moderate that kind of abuse...
So if the message is one of those, im guessing it's going to be another tankie.
I do wait until they show themselves as such before telling them to fuck off though.
From my experience, tankie triad instances allow the most abusive of their users to create endless accounts, then brigade, spam and harass people...
Come on, you were just in YPTP where in your thread got jammed with this exact behavior by someone using quokk.au accounts, cranking out transphobic right wing xenophobia.
That was a troll, they use any instance with open registration to harass DraconicNeo. It's not reflective quokk.au users.
Overarching point here is it appears when it isn't a 'tankie triad' instance, that becomes a reasonable explanation.
Or that this troll also somehow reflective of those tankies anyway.
Well the difference is that other instances are actually banning them.
When places like HexBear use an alt account to troll and start shit, the admins don’t reprimand their users.
YPTP
Ye Power Trippin' Pastards.
Yes that also sucks, what's your point?
If that experience doesn't temper that perspective then I think you might provoke more controversy than your average user.
Disengage