You know, I hadn’t heard the term “tankie” before coming to Lemmy/Kbin, and at this point I’m lost again on what it’s supposed to mean. I have a general idea but it seems to mostly just be a malleable catch-all for “someone I don’t like who possible sort of leans one way a bit on some things”. Like how “boomer” has become super over-ueed boogeyman term for “someone older than me I don’t like”.
Seems like a lazy way to categorize tribally, and group people as “others”. Or am I getting it totally wrong?
Tankies are angry leftists. They’re the alt-left that the extreme right always complains about. I suspect that many of them are actually neo-Nazi trolls trying to prove that they aren’t so bad by cosplaying as tankies. They’re bad faith actors.
Tankie is all about embracing the tanks. They’re the authoritarian left.
Primary beliefs (all stupid and wrong): the Soviets and People’s Liberation Army can do/did no wrong. Russia is still Soviet and still the good guys. Ukraine is a conspiracy from the West that is actually Nazi. Any geopolitical problems are the fault of the West who behaves as a complete bloc and is literally only motivated by the capital interest of billionaires. Africa and the subcontinent are the world good guys (just conveniently ignore literally anything bad that happens there). Lots of Islamophobia.
As with all authoritarians, it’s all about conspiracy theories. If you try to argue with them, they simply don’t believe counterfactuals or will shift goal posts and start talking about something else entirely.
Most of the angry leftists you encounter, especially in these parts, lean much more towards anarchism. Very different from tankies.
I’ve been including the ones who want to murder all the rich people and government officials with the tankies even though they don’t want to use tanks.
I’m an angry leftist, but I ain’t no tankie. I’m pissed cause I’m middle aged, and have been dealing with over a century of outright lies from the rich.
I’m a pragmatic leftist. I know that being angry and demanding the murder of all rich people and government officials isn’t going to happen. We need to get organized like the christofascists are and use the system. Until we do the christofascists will continue to rise.
What a tankie actually is, is a ML who supports violent force against a population - Hence being named after the Soviets driving tanks into Hungary to stop a revolution.
Right wingers have taken this word and think it applies to anything left wing they don’t like when it’s just a leftist anti-authoritarity term used for ML chuds.
Tankies are auth left. They support the policies of Stalin, the CCP, et al and are staunch soviet union defenders and revisionists. It’s an old term from the 80s in the UK
And so people that are anti-cop are Stalinists? That’s how it seems to be used.
CCP and Kremlin propaganda is dividing their geopolitical rivals however they can. Old vs young (boomers), police vs citizen, left vs right, rural vs urban, men vs women, etc.
It’s called divide and conquer, which is an old tactic that turns out to be very effective when you can have LLMs masquerade as citizens of the country you want to destroy.
The same way you can be small-government and right – by embracing an inherent contradiction.
Mostly, the tankies do so by apologizing for any and all bad behavior by self-professed anticapitalist states like the Soviets or PRC. Or by framing western democracies as the bad guys in every possible situation.
Authoritarian, not authoritative. The 20th century has a lot of history of authoritarian communist regimes, which would be standardly classified as left. It may not be the most appealing version of left politics, and it is just one version of communism, but it is still a version of those things.
I recall someone saying the term originates somewhere online, and describes literally those who are cool with the tanks coming out and government authoritarianism, so long as the people being run over by the tanks are seen as fascist righties.
But the other comment sums it up pretty well, the lefty extremist Boogeyman is real, it’s just a tiny minority being amplified. The right don’t like 'em, the rest of us don’t like 'em either.
Your total misunderstanding perfectly proves the point of the previous post about “tankie” being a term picked up by the far-right and taken way beyond its meaning.
Tankies are authoritarian far left types, such as for example Stalinists (so, not just any general Communist, but the kind of Communist that has a hard-on for “strong leaders” who murder by the millions those who such leaders themselves deem as “enemies of the Party”). They’re the Nazis of the Left (which is probably why they’re right alongside actual Nazis and assorted fascists in siding with Putin against Ukraine).
Meanwhile woke people are just moral liberals, often not even being leftwing in the true sense of the word because they don’t actually care about inequality in general or about a better life for the many, but instead are selective about the “injustices” they care about, invariably leaving out wealth-inequality (the biggest source of discriminatory treatment by a very large margin) and often claiming their own “identitarian” group is a “victim” of “injustice” and demanding compensation, which is really just doing what’s best for themselves personally but hidding behind the group, in other words being greedy whilst using leftie-like political structures and language.
In the Left-Right political axis, “woke” covers a wide range from “mildly leftwing” to “business loving hard-core neoliberal” (neoliberalism is just “money liberalism” so it dovetails nicelly with moral liberalism), because “woke” it’s not at all about the greatest good for the greatest number but rather it’s about freedom in the moral sphere.
