What’s with all the downvotes?
Saw a few threads get blasted, and a de-federation post - did I miss the drama?
My neutral take: a lot of people, for various reasons, don’t like hardline communists.
Yup. I’m a leftist, so naturally hold some of the more “extreme” left views. But holy shit tankies will say anything to avoid admitting that communism has been abused throughout history. Lots of “Maybe those genocides and famines weren’t so bad” apologetics.
I put it this way:
I want to maximize the level of equality in our societies. I want a floor of poverty below which a citizen cannot fall and a ceiling of wealth beyond which a person cannot rise. I do not think the tested and failed ideas of a 19th century philosopher are worth putting more time and human misery into.
We can do better, we SHOULD have learned something in the last 100ish years.
My favorite take is “Stalin was right wing”.
Like how delusional can you get?
I am a bit uncomfortable with the word tankies. It really applies to a different group from a different time. It was a right wing slur that was used to paint trade unions and vanilla liberals as enemies of the state.
I would like a new word to help us describe the highly online left that was radicalized. Whose hatred of capitalism got so hot that they started to lionize horrifying 20th century communism.
I guess tankies will do, but it’s a really complicated word from a complicated time.
The original “tankies” were British communists who supported Soviet violence against Hungarian and Czechoslovak communists. The revolutionary regimes in those countries were led by their communist parties, but independent of the Soviet Union. So the tankies showed loyalty to Soviet imperial power against communism.
I agree. Some people use the term tankie to call someone out for supporting genocide or denying any wrong doings of any authoritarian regimes with even a tangential relation to communism. Other people use tankie to delegitimize people who support social services and government actually doing something for its citizens. The latter group uses the term to make those they label as tankies appear as if they are extremists akin to the first group which, unfortunately, stifles progress and discussion. In conclusion, real tankies, the term itself, and those who co-opt it to stifle actual progress all suck.
They are the worst kind of communists, they love russia and china but fail to understand neither are even close to being communist they are probably as far as you can get the other way
Exactly. Although there is much debate over what Marx envisioned when he put forward the idea of a Communist society, it certainly didn’t involve an authoritarian, single-party dictatorship where The Party oppresses the people.
Tankies are more Stalinist and Maoist apologists than actual communists.