Fascists that like soviet aesthetics.
Totalitarian ✅
Supports genocide ✅
Supports purges ✅
Cult of personalities ✅
""Socialist"" in name only (is actually state capitalist) ✅
Us against them thinking (Campism) ✅
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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Authoritarian "red state" apologist.
For me, a tankie is someone who plays apologist for fundamentally authoritarian regimes just because those regimes are painted red.
I would say there's a larger Chomskyite-style group of useful idiots who often get lumped in with tankies, but who are not, themselves, actual supporters of authoritarian-style socialism. They just eagerly eat up and regurgitate agitprop from actual tankies. Campist brainrot often runs rampant here, but they aren't actual tankies. I sometimes mock them with similar lines, though, under the old "Nine Nazis at a table" logic - when you're working for fascists, whether you agree, strictly speaking, with their ideology is of less importance.
Basically every leftist who doesn't believe that the path to socialism is by a vanguard party detached from actual democratic processes taking control of the entirety of society and enforcing its will on the populace is not an actual tankie.
They're not even painted red. There is nothing whatsoever communist about Russia and Putin would never claim that Russia was a communist country. But they oppose America and Europe, so that doesn't matter to Tankies.
All that matters is that the strongman is against the West.
That's part of the campism. If you nail them down on the topic of Russia, specifically, they will disavow modern Russia precisely because it isn't painted red. But for every action on the international stage, they will unfailingly support Russia, because Russia is against the West's 'camp'. Same with Iran.
On the other hand, if you nail them down on the USSR and the PRC, actual tankies will almost always outright speak in support of both, if not necessarily unconditionally. Though the conditions they apply are... party-approved. In the spirit of "MAYBE there were SOME excesses and bad choices, but also you have to understand that the bourgeois FORCED us to take most of these measures!" that dedicated Communists who got swept up into the GULAG still parroted to their fellow inmates during the Stalin years.
Regimes with a very thin coat of red paint, like Assad's Syria, still often receive this bootlicking treatment from actual tankies.
I don't disagree. I especially enjoy it when they start talking about how Stalin was a great leader. I've also seen "everyone sent to the Gulags deserved it" being bandied about lately.
The best one was definitely that time that a hexbear user joined in to lemm.ee's "do we defederate from hexbear?" thread to tell the admin that "your kulak great grandparents deserved it" apparently on the basis that he's Estonian and doesn’t like the Soviet Union
I got a better one than that one. I was told by one of them that Stalin put thousands of Jews in the gulags for the same reason Nazis put them in concentration camps (apparently deservedly both times)- "they were radical Marxists."
Like, WTF? Isn't that a good thing to you?
Is the distinction being drawn between Marxist and Marxist-Leninist, or is "radical Marxism" referring to radicalism as in Jeremy Bentham? Or is there some third thing going on?
I decided not to delve into the topic because I can only stomach so much bigotry.
That was probably a sensible decision
I mean... they are painted red from the blood that they have spilled.
Chomsky wasn’t an authoritarian… and most anarchists are led there from Chomsky. I’m one of those people who started with manufactured consent and ended up in anarchist land.
But yeah, I’d agree that tankies are all authoritarians and support for authoritarianism (even as a means to an end) is the dividing line between tankies and non tankies.
Chomsky wasn’t an authoritarian…
As I said, "who are not, themselves, actual supporters of authoritarian-style socialism. They just eagerly eat up and regurgitate agitprop from actual tankies. Campist brainrot often runs rampant here, but they aren’t actual tankies."
Kinda like others here said already, one who praises the authoritarian flavor of "communism" and the countries that promote it (China/Russia) and who try to deny even basic historical facts and real primary sources as "CIA propaganda"
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.
I don’t think there are many people I interact with (lemmy, reddit, nostr) that love Xi or Putin.
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...
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.
For me personally I would define a tankie as some one who cares more about the name of what they are supporting as compared to the actual outcome. eg someone that supports the CCP because it calls itself communist or Russia for the same reason. But just saying that the CCP is not the bogeyman* that the US says that it is does not fall into that category for me.
If someone said that china was actually a communist paradise and that all of the bad things were western propaganda I would think they were a tankie. If they said that China was a country they enjoyed living in and it was not as bad as it is often portrayed as I would probably think that that person was not a tankie.
Edit: boogie man --> bogeyman. (thank you Ilovethebomb)
Bogeyman. Boogieman is someone good at dancing.
That's an American vs. British thing. In America, it's the boogieman.
As a dual national, it is both for me, bitches!
I don't get to be afraid of the bunyip though.
ngl I solely based it off of oogie boogie for how to spell it at first.
Someone I don't like is a tankie or racist or literal hitler /s
Weird, the people I usually see calling others Hitler are the Tankies.
It's just name calling. The words have lost their meaning. "It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."
No, no it isn't. I have given a very concise description of a Tankie elsewhere in this post. Perhaps you should read it.
Why are you here then?
I like to challenge ideas.
What "ideas" are you here to challenge? This is a libertarian socialist community that is against tankies, if you don't fit that criteria then this isn't a good place for you.
I like libertarian socialists, I might be one myself. I just think that the word tankie gets thrown around a lot. If everyone (I don't like) is a tankie, no one is.
Let me put it this way; If Bernie is a sexist (and he was called sexist many times from different groups of people), then everyone can be called a sexist, and the word has lost it's meaning.
You really think the word sexism has no meaning anymore?
Do you think the same about racism?
It is still a real term, and it is a problem.
It can be thrown around by liberals sometimes but most tankie criticizers ARE leftist in my experience. This place is one of them, and if someone disagrees with basic leftist sentiment us mods will take action.
"More recently it has seen a less specific use of the term" from wiki 2020 (oldest I found, kinda weird)
But yeah, it was just a gut feeling, now "verified" by wiki... Doesn't give much more information though...
https://web.archive.org/web/20200923023209/https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
I have no idea why you won't use the current Wikipedia page, but it says:
referring to hardline authoritarian or Marxist–Leninist positions on the left.
Yeah? It was saying it deviated from the original meaning which was supporting the crushing of the Hungarian revolution and Prague spring. And there's a huge venn diagram between MLs and "actual" tankies.
As for the actual Wikipedia page:
It is commonly used by anti-authoritarian leftists, including anarchists, libertarian socialists, left communists, democratic socialists, and reformists to criticise Leninism, although the term has seen increasing use by liberal and right‐wing factions as well
I'm not going to argue about this anymore. This is not a debate community, and this is your final warning.
I feel you may have misjudged this group then. That is part of why I made this post to try and get a consensus as to what the people of this community define as tankies and it is surprisingly consistent for something that you claim has lost all meaning.
Tankie, eh?