• Carl@lemm.ee
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    5 days ago

    True but only for terminally online liberals. I still haven’t heard anyone in real life ever use that word.

  • eldavi@lemmy.ml
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    6 days ago

    – and they both punch left; exactly as conservatives like to do.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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      5 days ago

      The liberals are still doing this in 2025. We shouldn’t really be surprised I spose.

    • u_die_for_elmer@lemm.ee
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      6 days ago

      I consider tankies to be on the right end of the socialist spectrum, so when I say it I’m punching right. They’re still comrades even if they are miss guided by state-capitalist governments. Cheers

      • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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        6 days ago

        I love it when people call a transitional economy state capitalist because it betrays a lack of understanding of actually existing capitalism and the role the state plays in it.

      • BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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        5 days ago

        If you’re one of those people who just considers “tankie” to be a synonym for “Marxist-leninist” then I suppose I agree, but I think the term is used too nebulously to meaningfully place on the political spectrum.

      • davel [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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        6 days ago

        Because the Chinese state has fiat monetary sovereignty, it doesn’t function in the capitalist mode. It has no need to make a profit because it has infinite money[1]. It doesn’t need to extract surplus value from workers to satisfy investors, and it doesn’t even need to break even. The logic of capitalism doesn’t apply.

        Ultras fear the scroll.

  • TheOakTree@lemm.ee
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    5 days ago

    Tankie doesn’t really mean anything to me anymore. Even self-proclaimed tankies often have trouble defining it in a way that is consistent among leftist groups.

    • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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      5 days ago

      I believe in reclaiming “tankie” in the same way as “queer.” Schoolyard bullies don’t really care to distinguish between the many different labels encompassed by LGBT+, and so they inadvertently invented a term that could be very inclusive and all encompassing, even if you’re still figuring out who you are, you call always fall back on “queer” to give the general idea.

      In the same way, the term “tankie” gets applied to people of all sorts of different left ideologies. There are significant differences between different leftist ideologies, but our critics don’t care to understand or distinguish between them, so I consider tankie to be a similarly inclusive term. Do you support anything that any socialist government has ever done? Do you think Cuba had an effective literacy program? Congratulations, you’re a tankie, welcome to the club.

      Note that my identifying with the term isn’t really an invitation for people to use it. But, you know, if people want to keep using it as this broad, meaningless term that lumps a bunch of people together, as I see it, it only works to our advantage as “tankies,” it pushes people towards us and helps us remember what we have in common instead of fighting over our differences. So I’m not exactly going to fight the label particularly hard.

    • Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.de
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      5 days ago

      Tankie always meant a fan of authoritarianism but not of the nazi variety. And hand to hand with that goes hate for America, but hate for America isn’t enough on it’s own, it should be paired with love of Strong Hand Of The East.
      Tankie thinks China, Russia, North Korea are just swell, and not because of some underlying ideology, but because they have an authoritarian model of governance and generally in opposition to the west to some degree.
      And that’s the reason why it’s so hard to define for some people, boiled down to it’s definition, it’s very hard to spin into something universally good, so talking to a general public they have to do what authoritarian lovers from the other side of the spectrum call “hiding the power lever”, which muddies the water.

    • Golden Lox@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      its the one with the… and they have ttank, with… the one with ehe tan, you takn. rhe tanker. tabker is the with the

  • __nobodynowhere@lemm.ee
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    6 days ago

    I’m not into that authoritarian stuff. Worshipping a fascist authoritarian state is not a leftist make.

  • Kwakigra@beehaw.org
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    4 days ago

    From Wikipedia:

    The term “tankie” was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defence of the Soviet use of tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions.

    I’ve never understood why there is any confusion over the word “tankie.” It applies to the pro-cop left. If a leftist believes that it’s necessary for cops to beat minorities and dissidents into submission for their society to function, they’re tankies. If they approach leftism in a way that does not involve state violence against civilians to enforce those ideas, they’re not tankies. To me there isn’t a lot of gray area.

    • audrbox@beehaw.org
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      4 days ago

      I’ve always thought of them as the communists who think communists are somehow uniquely immune to the “power corrupts” doctrine

    • Carl@lemm.ee
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      5 days ago

      He starts a lot of shit, but dammit if he isn’t right most of the time.

  • Plaidboy@sh.itjust.works
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    6 days ago

    The conversation around “tankies” reminds me heavily of “neolibs” - loosely defined in the minds of the folks discussing them. Basically a catch-all term for your own idea of what a liberal outgroup should be.

    • ltxrtquq@lemmy.ml
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      5 days ago

      [Referring to the Tiananmen Square Massacre] We (at least many of us) have read the sources that have been linked. What is described there, particularly the accounts of people who were there, is what we assert is what happened. In the few instances where there may be contradictory first hand accounts (and mostly, the accounts are not contradictory but rather corroborate each other) there may be some ambiguity. But even taking that into account, it is ridiculous and downright ahistorical to say “Chinese authorities massacred people.”

      This is from a conversation with the kind of people I would consider “tankies”. It’s from a community I think has since been deleted, but the general vibe of the comments in the post was that the Tiananmen Square massacre isn’t a real thing and any civilian deaths were actually justified.

      • BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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        5 days ago

        You consider tankies to be people who have actually dug into the sources and done enough research to come to their own conclusion rather than just accepting the cold war narrative without question?

          • BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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            5 days ago

            You consider tankies to be people who have actually dug into the sources and done enough research to come to their own conclusion rather than just accepting the cold war narrative without question?