I keep seeing “fuck tankies” everywhere, and seem to see people getting called “tankie” for any number of things–I used to feel like I knew what it meant (the formal definition, which I thought was the only application) but that’s clearly not the case anymore. Saw someone get called one because they… Liked the idea of universal basic income and wanted walkable cities? And now the same sentiment is on a large number of Lemmy communities, lol.
I feel like I’ve been living under a rock.
Edit: Wow, I guess it’s just as meaningless of a term now as it seemed. At least it’s a nice, bright flag for ghouls not worth engaging with meaningfully, lol. I saw “fuck tankies” on a genderqueer community and got pretty confused on how the two ideas correlated in the slightest, so I guess that was the tipping point on me finally asking about it.
tankie is when you don’t want to send tanks to ukraine
anyone with the smallest criticism of US Imperialism is a tankie now
It’s become a catch all insult for anyone to the left of Biden, pretty much. It’s totally divorced from it’s original meaning and used as a thought terminating cliche at this point.
Ah, that explains a lot. The current state of political discourse is… Very good and productive.
because there are some Stalinists or just dumb people who are proud of their country or a country they didn’t even live in.
The Soviet Union won World War 2 and saved the world from fascism. Millions of Red Army soldiers and Russian civilians died at the hands of fascists and we are in their debt
I don’t get how doing what is so obviously good makes you a good leader, that just makes the west bad because they basically helped hitler. Also this "we are in their dept thinking isn’t really a productive argument.
Why can people just admit that there are some truths and not everything was good.
Communism is not an ideology that can be done by just reading a basic rulebook and blindly believing historic anecdotes that are hard to verify or just straight up wrong.
I also want to believe that there were good and powerful communist leaderships, I can understand that.
How does wanting to understand make me a lib? Isn’t this kind of flagging people what left ideologies criticise?
Just give me some real facts or evidence and I am happy, if you can’t show me these you are reactionistic and conter-revolutionary.
Stalin was a bad dictator, Lenin I think was not, Mao tried to be good but also made some mistakes and turned evil in his last years.
Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist power structure.
- Declassified CIA report from the 1950’s
Even the CIA knew that calling Stalin a dictator was bullshit.
Also Mao “turned evil”? Come on.
Clearly you have totally internalized the “pop-history” view of socialism in the 20th century, surely you realize such a simplified narrative cannot help but hide ideological bias.
It means whatever it needs to mean in the context in which it is deployed.
It’s a tool deployed by liberals against people to the left of them in exactly the same way that woke is a tool deployed by reactionaries against people to the left of them.
It gets deployed against everything from ML to anarchist to even socdems, depending on whether you say something that goes against the US’ imperial core goals.
The purpose of the tool is thought-termination. To prevent people from listening to the person that it is deployed against. Reactionaries use woke to prevent people among their ranks from listening to anything reasonable the ““woke”” person might say, and liberals use tankie to prevent people among their ranks from listening to anything reasonable the left might say.
It is an adaptation of mccarthyite behaviour.
You ain’t done nothing if you ain’t been called a Red applies now to this word just as much as it applied back then.
Awoo as always never dissapointing and making one of the best responses in the whole thread. Love you for this 🫀
Liberals think it means someone who lies about wanting socialism and instead just wants to kill people. They think it refers to a proponent of a society where all decisions are made by a single crackpot dictator. They think they have a correct view on how to create and institute socialism, which would involve things like voting in elections, organizing pickets, and very slowly seizing power through mass appeal. As a corollary to this, liberals believe this type of socialism has already been achieved in places like Sweden and Denmark. Depending on how much they’ve read socialist theory they may also point to Catalonia or the Zapatistas, but they’ll usually be referring to completely imaginary mangled versions of these events that don’t reflect history.
What tankie means in practice though is something more like “race traitor.” Or “nation traitor.” Liberals will say they hate the west’s actions and what it stands for, but what they really mean is they hate everywhere else more. Any designated enemies of western countries are permanent enemies and outside of liberal values. People who call themselves socialists will still use this dichotomy. Tankie means someone who expresses sympathy for countries that have been designated as enemies to the west. You’ll notice that Xi Jinping himself isn’t called a tankie. Stalin’s not a tankie. Figures like that get called authoritarians or dictators. Tankie is someone in the west who has broken convention and gone to the bad guys. That’s all it means at this point.
I really believe there’s been a decades long project to usurp socialist rhetoric by liberals, whether they realize it or not. The existence of tankies threatens their reputation, because it draws socialist terminology back into scary communism. Liberals have spent decades trying to position themselves as the true, good leftists. That only works if they can paint socialist movements worldwide as liars and their own internal socialists as traitors
Was hoping to find your definition of tankie here
What tankie means in practice though is something more like “race traitor.” Or “nation traitor.”
