this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025
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The Democratic People's™ Republic of Tankiejerk
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Dunking on Tankies from a leftist, anti-capitalist perspective.
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I define a Tankie as someone who loves authoritarian strongmen like Putin and Xi while denying they have committed a single atrocity all in the name of going against the evil imperialist West, which is totally different because reasons.
And that's also how pretty much everyone else on Lemmy defines them.
The "Tankie = leftist" canard is just some high-level bullshit considering the vast, vast, vast majority of Lemmings are on the left. (I know, they're "liberals," not on the left. Another sign someone is a Tankie, when they tell you that almost no one passes their purity test.)
I like your definition. The centering of a strong man type does seem to tie into why a lot of the fall into the type of thinking that leads to being a tankie. very similar to maga and the other fascist movements that seem to be taking root in other parts of the world.
I rather thought this summed it up nicely.
I don't think there are many people I interact with (lemmy, reddit, nostr) that love Xi or Putin. I think, however, that there are many who hate Biden, Clinton, Obama, Bush(es), Reagan because of their corporate-friendly/people-poison bullshit policy. These people, very often, get called tankies, just because not every leftist has yet understood that Obama was actually in the pockets of big banks (and pharma, etc). If they don't like Obama criticism, they call the criticizer tankie.
And when everyone is a tankie, no one is.
Count yourself lucky. Outright Putin bootlicking is less common (they prefer, usually, the 'UKRONAZIS CAN'T WIN' style discourse in support of Russian fascism), but Xi bootlicking remains distressingly common, if only done by a very vocal minority.
They just tried to get me to prove such people exist with screenshots.
I think I have.
Even Noam Chomsky doesn't pass their weird purity test.
If you are a political analyst with war experience, and you think Ukraine, with their 44 million people, can't win over a country with 144 million people, does that make you love Putin?
Not inherently. It could just make the political analyst a moron.
Unless one's view of war is that of some kind of Command and Conquer style total slugfest, raw numbers are only part of the story. War is politics by other means - asymmetric desires and willingness to suffer losses to achieve them are often the deciding factor.
And it's weird that this person doesn't seem to remember that the massive U.S. military and a big coalition of other militaries couldn't defeat the very small Taliban military in 20 years of war.
I guess it's different when it's Mother Russia.
"I haven't talked to these people so they don't exist" is a weird as fuck take.
Technically, they said "people I interact with". Then...he kinda made it clear you hadn't really misunderstood him. sigh
Only thing worse is when someone claims that I really know their position is correct, I'm just lying/misguided/being stubborn or some similar flavor of bullshit.
Ok then. Screenshot of someone saying they love Putin/Xi (or anything that might be interpreted in that way) that you have encountered...
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Why the fuck would I waste my time doing that? If you want to believe those people don't exist in the face of this specific community being dedicated to showing that they do, in fact, exist, with tons of screenshots already, nothing I could show you would convince you otherwise.
Ok, then.