this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Weird meme this one. I'm 100% against tankies, or at least the type of communist here who seems hellbent on defending regimes like the Chinese communist party or (especially weird) Putin's Russia. There's plenty of stuff wrong about western nations, but that is no excuse for defending dictators and authoritarian regimes. And I'm definitely not the angry pepe in the image, because by all classifications I would be part of the "woke left".
The point is the word "tankie" is quickly becoming as vague and useless as "woke". Mearsheimer and Chomsky get called tankie nowadays for crying out loud. In three years when the USA Gulf of Tonkins itself in the Taiwan Strait, people are going to call you a tankie for dodging the draft!
What's your opinion of Nelson Mandela? The man wrote a book(although a revision of another book) called "How to be a good communist" and the very first line of that book is:
I never said I was 100% against the idea of communism, nor against people who think it's a good idea. I'm simply against the subset of commies that seems to blindly defend horrible regimes like the Chinese communist party. And sadly the latter seems well represented here, which is the group I'd refer to as tankies.
That seems like a complete deflection, it has nothing to do with my prior comment? Do you or do you not consider Nelson Mandela, a man who honored and revered Stalin, to be an evil tankie?
Since you're intent on switching this to be about China, here are his views on China: https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d414f3063444f78457a6333566d54/share_p.html
What I'm trying to get at here is that this whole "muh ebil tankies" shit is, fundamentally, something you would have been saying to GOOD PEOPLE historically, if you were alive at the time of Mandela's struggles you would have been among the crowd screaming COMMIE and PINKO and demanding his head.
This is the crowd you are putting yourself in with this all or nothing behaviour towards those of us in the marxist left.
Step away from the "tankies are evil" behaviour and talk to us. You'll find things to be significantly more complex than the cartoon caricature that this word creates.
Maybe I could've phrased that better, since I've indeed only seen 1 or 2 of those and most of them don't go that far. The rest were "only" defending countries like China, which still isn't exactly great.
If you are critical of western nations then you should stop uncritically swallowing their propaganda about their geopolitical enemies
I think communism is a fantastic idea but don't think it's truly workable in practice, regrettably. True democratic socialism seems more realistic, but also has problems. But being a communist and then just defending all communists regardless of what they're doing is problematic.
Yeah exactly. I don't mind people who read about communism and think it's a good idea. I used to think communism was better than capitalism when I was younger as well, although I was not at all as well read up on it as some people here. But a subset of them (who I refer to as tankies) appear to support all kinds of horrible regimes because they used to be "communist" like China or sometimes even Russia.