this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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Remember kids, Tankies wants to undermine democracy - same as facists.

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[–] TotallynotJessica 236 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Just like fascists, tankies could theoretically hang out here without getting the boot. It's just that genocide denying authoritarians cannot be tolerated in a tolerant, democratic society. The reason tankies and fascists get the boot is because they can't resist trying to bully and intimidate those that find their views abhorrent. They simply can't resist being terrible.

They're cultists with views that can't stand up to scrutiny, so they need use other tactics to spread their shit and gain power. They use the real downsides and weaknesses of democracy to argue we need an even worse system. Then they argue you actually hold the worst views of their enemies, even though they usually support exactly the same things that make those enemies bad. Tankies claim you're a free-market liberal for opposing them, when the countries they support are state capitalists. Fascists claim you're against freedom of speech, while they are always trying to ban ideas they hate. Some of them are misguided and believe their own lies, but others are just awful people.

[–] takeda 86 points 8 months ago (30 children)

Tankies traditionally are associated with communists, but today's tankies (even those that call themselves communists) are really after authoritarianism than communism, and given the history of the name (that they supported using tracks on civilians). I don't think they're is much difference between current communists and current fascists, both groups seem to support authoritarianism and feels like term "tankies" fits both of them well.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 8 months ago

🤔 There should be a fediverse-wide rule against genocidal rhetoric. Who cares what side it's from?

[–] [email protected] 104 points 8 months ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 76 points 8 months ago

I think we should consider the feelings of Hexbear users when posting or commenting.

If you think they'll dislike it, it's probably a good post.

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[–] [email protected] 81 points 8 months ago (77 children)

These threads are odd to me, considering how many people call all communists tankies. The word seems to be used by anarchists, conservatives, communists, anti-communists, and more, and every person has a slightly different definition.

Half the people here could consider the other half to be the tankies everyone is mad at.

To be clear this isn't me saying "be nice to the tankies" this is me saying "the overuse of this word is confusing the shit out of me."

[–] BigBlackCockroach 37 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (16 children)

I'm an anarchist, we don't call anybody tankies. Tankies is a term coming from the UK i think the 80s some eastern european nation was taken over by the USSR and some Brittish came out in support of it. So they were called tankies.

These political fighting words need to be layed to rest. Communists hate me as much as anybody else but I'd rather engage on the idea level instead of ad hominem attacks and name calling.

I suspect this whole tankie thing might be a coordinated propaganda campaign geared at discrediting communists and at the same time creating tension between them and other leftits. I suspect this as this whole infighting over small differences doesn't lead to a victory for the left but effectively disables and neutralizes it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsqE9kEsDVY

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[–] masquenox 35 points 8 months ago (2 children)

It became confusing when liberals learnt of the word - now they hurl the word at anyone who dares to remind them that being pro-capitalist is still a right-wing thing to be.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 8 months ago

Maybe it's just the circles I run in, but I understand "tankie" to mean leftists who think Soviet/Maoist/vanguard-party styles of Communist revolution/rule were good, actually, to the point of denying any bad things they did/do as "Western propaganda".

Given the red scare in the US, our ability as a whole to use any sort of leftist political labels accurately across the population is basically non-existent, so I do understand the frustration by both tankies and non-tankie leftists about how the term gets used lately, especially in produce circles on social media.

But again maybe that's just me. I don't know if I would consider myself a communist, but I do consider myself as a yet undetermined variety of socialist, if that helps at all.

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[–] [email protected] 71 points 8 months ago

Based AF

Fuck tankies

[–] [email protected] 60 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

196 is one of the greatest ~~subs~~ communities

ya'll should be proud. Thank you for adding a little queer fun to my normal CIS life

[–] [email protected] 59 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The guy needs a speech bubble that says "Stalin did nothing wr-"

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[–] PugJesus 58 points 8 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 56 points 8 months ago (25 children)

Hey everyone, just a reminder:

  • Yes Nazis are also bad, we don't have Nazis pop up anywhere near as often as Tankies
  • We remove and ban Nazis too
  • We're aware of Lemmy's main code writers being ML's, and it's not great.
  • Please report any bigot bullshit, or fascist/tankie dogwhistles.
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[–] [email protected] 49 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's funny that everyone is up in arms about this post but the literal sticky post says no tankies

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 8 months ago (5 children)

I think most of you need to worry way less about sounding sufficiently the "right kind" of leftist and focus more on promoting leftism through action. More than half the "tankie" discourse is, at best, a needless distraction from actual progress. Lose your buzzwords and stop the ideological purity pissing contest and actually put in the work in your communities instead, goddamn.

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[–] masquenox 44 points 8 months ago (34 children)

I'm not against the hostility being shown towards tankies here... but it should be remembered that there are a lot of well-meaning and well-intentioned people who get caught up in the technocratic ideology tankies buy into. Let's face it... if you google anything about leftism you are more likely to end up reading about Marx and Engels than Bakunin or Goldman - and right-wing propaganda is as perfectly fine with conflating everything "leftist" with the technocratic (ie authoritarian) left as tankies themselves are.

If we are leaving some doors open for fascists and capitalists who turn against their programming, we should remember to do the same for tankies.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 8 months ago (14 children)

Eh this argues that we even have a democracy that is functional enough to undermine in the first place, and I reject that premise.

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[–] merthyr1831 40 points 8 months ago (4 children)

i wonder why this post about tankies is suddenly popular

sees top posts criticising israel and fascism

ah there it is

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 8 months ago (7 children)

Loving to see tankies come out of the woodwork to seethe and troll at this

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 8 months ago (5 children)

what democracy?

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

[...]

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

something like 70% of Americans want universal healthcare and yet it remains politically impossible.

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[–] spacesweedkid27 33 points 8 months ago

Tankies as well as fascists are imperialistic scum.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

the only tankie with rights

lori petty from the movie tank girl

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 8 months ago (9 children)

I swear almost every American election cycle, some weird word will start popping up everywhere. like how all the trump supporters started saying cuck out of nowhere in 2015-2016

[–] NIB 46 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (5 children)

Tankie has been a thing for over half a century. The Soviets used tanks(from other countries) to invade and crush antisoviet revolutions/protests in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

This was considered shocking for some communists and other leftists while some communists supported those actions. Those who supported this "intervention" were called tankies, in order to differentiate them from the non tank invasion supporting communists.

In Greece(my country), which was in the "West", this event caused the split of the greek communist party(KKE) into 2 separate parties, KKE(Moscow controlled tankies) and KKE "interior"(weak ass soy communists who cant stomach the use of tanks in order to create a better tomorrow).

KKE "interior" kinda eventually became SYRIZA which surprisingly won the elections in 2015(breaking the 2 party status quo). Then the EU decided that the greek people decided poorly and punished them. So when the greek people decided correctly(elected a right wing government), the EU rewarded them. Carrots and sticks make the world go around. Thats how you make a majority leftist country, into a right wing one.

PS Greek debt is as high as it has ever been but Greece issued negative interest bonds. Tell me again how is the economy supposed to work? Noone talks about the greek debt anymore, it's a non issue, Greece has been accepted into the EU's infinite money glitch scheme.

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