Asklemmy

no. I'm probably a communist but authoritarianism can fucking shove it

Tankie is a floating signifier. If you ask twenty liberals what a tankie is you’ll get

1. Twenty different answers, and
2. Several people upset at being called a liberal because they don’t have even a Wikipedia-level understanding of liberalism or socialism.

I'm not from this instance, so probably not totally relevant to this poll, that said

NO, I'm not a tankie.

I think, however, it's worth considering that a lot of people that could be considered tankies probably wouldn't apply the term to themselves, and that could skew the results of your poll. First of all, tankie is sort of a pejorative term, and many wouldn't want to apply it to themselves for that reason alone. Secondly a lot of people just may not consider themselves to be a tankie, and genuinely do not recognize their own tankieness.

I don't think I'm the guy to come up with a definitive checklist of what does or does not make someone a tankie, but for the sake of getting the conversation going (and feel free to disagree with me here, I welcome the discussion) I think two of the biggest hallmarks of being a tankie are

1. Communism- not all communists are tankies, but all tankies at least claim to subscribe to some sort of communist ideology.

2. Authoritarianism- tankies either are authoritarians themselves, or are willing to support or overlook authoritarians as long as they see them as being in some way opposed to "the west"/capitalism/etc.

I think the authoritarianism aspect is going to trip some people up trying to answer this truthfully. A lot of authoritarians probably wouldn't consider themselves authoritarians, most people like to think they're standing for freedom, justice, liberty, equality, etc. even if their actual actions tell another story. Don't get me wrong, there are people out there who are openly authoritarian and proud of it, but a lot of authoritarians are a little brainwashed to the point they've lost sight of what they're actually supporting (take a look at the MAGA crowd, they think they're about free speech and anti-censorship but want to keep books they don't like out of libraries, they think they're about small government but want to regulate what kind of medical care you can get, they think they stand for law and order but also proudly proclaim that they are all domestic terrorists and have a convicted felon as their poster boy)

And politics are messy, full of moral grey areas and times where you have to choose between the lesser of two evils, make uncomfortable alliances, difficult choices, and kick some cans further down the road to deal with later while you tackle the current crisis. It's not always easy or feasible to draw a crisp line in the sand and say "we will not ally with/support/turn a blind eye to these authoritarian regimes," sometimes you have to play a little bit of the "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" game if you want to actually make any progress against that enemy, or you may have to prioritize and deal with something else before you deal with them. There is a whole lot of grey area to explore about when, why, how, how long, and how much you can support or ignore them before you're advancing their cause as much or more than your own.

I think there's probably some tankies who have been taken for a ride on the propaganda wagon and don't truly realize how authoritarian they are, and there's others who have justified it, thinking that they're only going to be/support authoritarians temporarily to achieve a specific goal and will pivot away from that later, but have gone too far or keep moving the goalposts.

Couple last thoughts from me.

There can always be bad actors who are falsely claiming to be (or not to be) tankies for their own purposes. Not really much you can do about that.

Personally, a lot of the criticism I've seen about tankies here has been directed towards the mods and admins, not necessarily the rank average users.

What's the definition of tankie ?

No. I'm a non-tendency leftist. But I disagree with tankies being labelled as "fascists". They're not. They're just Marxist-Leninists/Stalinists and I find their views pretty consistent with orthodox ML-ism.

Anarchist. I look forward to being kill by tankies moments after the revolution.

yes

but no in the way you mean

Yes.

The last time I smiled was on August 19th, 1991. I wear a dirty ushanka at all times, do not shave, and only take cold sponge baths because hot running water is bourgeoisie decadence. Every day at exactly noon I have the same meal of an expired Maoist MRE I store in a pit covered in old issues of a revolutionary newspaper. I sleep in a bed made of flags from every failed revolution so that they are never forgotten. In the evenings I stare at a picture of vodka by candlelight, but I do not allow myself to drink because there is nothing to celebrate. Every local org has banned me after I attempted to split it by assassinating the leadership. There is no plumbing in my house I shit in a brass bucket with a picture of Gonzalo and Deng french kissing in the bottom of it. My house is actually an overturned T34 in an abandoned junkyard in Wisconsin. I have a single friend in this world and it is a tapeworm named Bordiga that I met after ingesting spoiled borscht on 9/11 in the ruins of building 7 (I blew it up after finding that a nominally leftist NGO inside of it wasn’t sufficiently anti-imperialist, the attacks on the world trade center were a perfect revolutionary moment for me to enact direct praxis against liberalism). My source of income is various MLM schemes in the former soviet bloc that have been running for so long no one remembers who I am, they just keep sending money. I have not paid taxes since McGovern lost the Democratic nomination for president and my faith in electoralism died more brutally than my childhood dog after it got into an entire jar of tylenol. I own 29 fully automatic rusted kalashnikovs and three crates of ammunition entirely incompatible with them or any other firearms I own. My double PHD in marxist economics and 18th century Swiss philosophy (required to understand Engels) sits over the fireplace of my home, my fireplace is a salvaged drum from a 1950s washing machine that was recalled for locking children inside of it. I chose that washing machine model on purpose because I am anti-natalist. During the latest BLM protests I firebombed a Nikes outlet in the middle of a peaceful candlelit vigil. William F Buckley and I wrote hatemail to one another for 47 years until my final letter gave him an aneurysm. The only water I drink is from puddles. George Lucas and I dropped acid together during an MKULTRA southern baptist summer camp and he went on to write the movie Willow about our time together. The best way to test whether an electrical wire is live is to drool on it and shrimp salad is racist. You can make an IED out of potassium and the instructions are online thanks to Timothy McVey, who was actually a committed antifascist communist slandered by the deep state as part of operation condor. Every time a liberal files a restraining order against me, I carve a mark into the wall. I am running out of walls. When Amerika finally collapses I will be ready to lead the revolution. I am very smart and people like being around me.

No

To clear definitions, at least for me"tankies" are a subset of communists, who praises/defends the actions of all/most communist states far more than similar actions from capitalist states. The difference between communists and tankies is a bias in favor of communist states when looking at things like human rights violations. Very few people will self identify as a tankie, since it's hard to see your own bias.

Lemmy needs proper polls.

NO

I reject the label because it's meaningless. I'm a Marxist-Leninist who has nothing to do with the USSR and frankly does not have an opinion on what happened in Hungary because I don't know enough about the specific event. I acknowledge that Soviet Russia, like all countries, had positives and negatives. I believe that socialism can only be achieved and maintained using centralized planning and authority (which is the not same as a dictatorship) because they exist in a world dominated by capitalist forces that want to see them destroyed (see the ongoing US sanctions on Cuba and the many budding socialist governments the US has toppled).

As a citizen of the United States, I also recognize that my country very frequently lies about its own actions and their justifications (see the Iraq War) to the detriment of people in other countries. Frequently to protect the interests of capital. Thus, I express skepticism when my government tries to tell me that another country is unilaterally 'bad', as is constantly the case with places like China, which I've visited several times and study academically. So when other countries take action to separate themselves from us, get out from under historical US domination, and practice an economic and social system that is not US-style liberal democracy, I applaud their successes and try to understand their failures. This is true even if those success harm me, usually economically, as I do not want my existence to be predicated on the suffering of others.

To anyone on .world, which is obnoxiously in line with the United States status quo, I am a 'tankie' because I do not believe that China is evil, that Russians are 'orcs', that the Cuban people deserve to be starved by our sanctions, that Joe Biden has to support Palestinian genocide and continue Trump's border policy because 'its complicated', and anything else that is critical of my own country and its actions that continue to harm people not as fortunate to be born in my same geographical location.

I will also be accused of 'whataboutism' for this post unless I also say something like modern Russia is a capitalist hellscape and that the Cultural Revolution and most of Mao's later career after the Jiangxi Soviet was a mistake due his own incompetence as a large-scale political leader instead of a guerilla fighter. But that's a level of nuance the people crying 'tankie' won't usually care about anyway.

NO. Not a fan of the current or former CCP or the former Soviet Union

Yes, although I personally prefer "central planning enthusiast".

I think we're approaching the point where the word gets taken back by the community it was used to malign, if not there already. "

YES

They would have burned me as a heretic in the middle ages.

• Carl Jung

Just like calling someone a "witch" or heretic in the middle ages, a "barbarian", or "savage", or "commie" or "pinko" in the 20th century, these terms are less about the actual meaning, and more about a demonization, scapegoating, or a power relation between the dominant class, and a group they seek to malign and rally their people around.

Creating a useful enemy promotes group bonding, unity, a sense of strengthened identity, and self worth.

"Tankie" had a meaning that generally referred to non-pacifist leftists (or those that agreed with using violence to defend socialist projects), but now it just means, "any leftist I don't like".

It functions in the exact same way that "commie" did in the the McCarthy era, as a xenophobic and western-supremacist scapegoating of socialist countries, and an internal purging of the working-class communist movement.

It's additionally useful because it deters people from reading or engaging with the worldwide communist / socialist movement.

If someone uses this term, this is what they're doing without realizing it:

I am to the left of Ronald Reagan. A lot of people would classify that as tankie.

YES

Everybody to the left of biden is considered a tankie nowdays, and I'm proud of being to the left of (and opposed to) genocide enablers.

Idk. I'm really bad at history and such cause I never pay attention. I used to take everything I saw on the internet at face value, so I decided to slow down on current news. Doesn't help that I like programming and video games a lot, so I don't spend a lot of time thinking about world events.

I just like communities that are tolerant and won't let people bully the lgbt or the disabled. It feels less tiring.

Yes.

Just go ask the 196 mods.

Maybe?

What the heck is a tankie, anyways? Every person I have asked has had a different answer, and the vast majority of these definitions don't really fit any major communities on Lemmy, not even Hexbear or Lemmygrad.

I have been called a tankie for numerous reasons, like saying that people should read Marx, to saying the US is a net negative on global stability.

Is being a Marxist sufficient for being a tankie? What about a Marxist-Leninist? Are only Dengists tankies? Is Anarchism the only non-tankie leftist position? I've even seen Anarchists be called tankies over on Lemmy.world, which is currently undergoing Red Scare-era anti-leftist witch hunts (like return2ozma's recent ban for "bad-faith spam").

I think this question needs a definition first. If you ask 10 different people what a "tankie" is, you'll get 11 different answers.

No, I think?

I don't actually know what a "Tankie" is. I tend to try to steer away from labels; I consider them a form of intellectual laziness. People will use them to either try to gain a feeling of belonging by adopting a line of thinking shared by their peers, or they will use them to smear those who they have defined as "others" without consideration of why these "others" might hold opinions that they don't. Labels and label-based thinking lead to tribalism and division.

If you want to know what I think about something, ask with specifics. If you want to convince me of something, present an argument with reason and evidence, and be prepared for me to pick it apart and look for flaws. There is nothing I respect more than somebody who takes a comment I make and considers it, researches it and then comes back to me with a response, or presents me with a perspective that compels me to do the same. I find both depressingly rare.

A ridiculous question. "Tankie" isn't a term anyone self-identifies with, it's mostly a term used by liberals to hurl at anyone to the left of them or anyone who agrees with western foreign policy. The survey results will be as meaningless as the term "tankie" itself.

I havent figured out yet what a tankie is.

NO

I like having no boots on my neck, not just changing out what demographic is wearing it

No.

Maybe I'm way off the mark here but... I think the reaction to tankies seems very overblown. No one you could describe as a "tankie" is currently in charge of any of the countries/companies/organizations that are busy destroying the world right now, so I don't super understand why everyone's talking about them like they're at all a priority? The authoritarians that tankies are obsessed with are all either long dead, or totally unaware of their existence.

Maybe some people on the left are just trying to look at future dangers here, like tankies are gonna be "Bolsheviks Part 2", somehow come into power, and then purge all the anarchists or something. But didn't Bolsheviks actually have a lot of power and influence prior to the revolution? Tankies don't seem to.

I think it's just mostly teen drama from Lemmy.world users. :)

No.

This isn't my standard instance but I do take a look at it sometimes. I'm definitely very far left leaning, I don't have a label that clearly fits me but I'm probably close enough to anarcho-communism or syndicalism. I live in the UK so it's pretty common for my views to fall further left of the USA.

I'm not particularly good at actually adhering to my own views, infact I don't think I've ever done e anything substantial to bringing my ideals into reality. My dream would be for small federated housing / workers co-ops and unions to get a good handle in my area, and then have the stability to grow.

The crucial reason I'm not a tankie is that I actively oppose top down leadership structures, and I'm actually more against authoritarianism than I am against the right, but I feel that in my country, conservatism and authoritarianism are deeply linked, and a bottom up power structure would do more to actively oppose facism and power consolidation than a far left authoritarian regime.

In short, No. My principles may make me a commie, but I'm an anarchist first.

Yes

I think people would probably call me a tankie

No. I had no idea about this instance's reputation when I joined Lemmy but it's nothing like the other instance you mentioned.

It gets very tiring trying to have a conversation with contrarians who think everything Western is bad and anything Chinese/USSR is good. Or worse, that their highly suspicious news sources (some random blog usually) are telling you the real truth, while using any mainstream news media source makes you a deluded Lib

NO

When the current government is not doing a very good job at maximizing the happiness of its citizens, it's a natural reaction to look for answers from a different type of government. America has some enormous problems with capitalism as it currently operates, and communism offers solutions to many of those problems. The issue is the top-down power structure. Democracy keeps the most power in the hands of the general population, and i will always oppose giving that up. Beyond that, I'm open to any solutions for modern problems, public or private.