Forest of trees

The use of the word "tankie" these days is so over-used it has become synonymous with "left of the DNC." I've even seen Anarchists described as "tankies," it's getting ridiculous. Still, the word "tankie" is most often used by liberals against Marxists, though they won't admit to having an anti-Marxist bias, mostly because they think they agree with Marx generally but are unfamiliar with Marxist analysis.

Really, more people need to read theory before having an opinion on it to avoid speaking past each other. I wrote an introductory reading list for Marxism-Leninism if anyone wants to get a better understanding of Marxism.

The biggest irony of our times is blood thirsty liberals who are cheering for as much war as possible running around calling people tankies.

nowadays tankie just means someone who shills for china/russia with a communist background

It's always funny to me how the go-to examples of like, "See, they just blindly support anything the regime does!" tend to be relatively minor events after the state in question has considerably chilled out. Like, Stalin and Mao did much worse things compared to Khrushchev/Hungary and Deng/Tienanmen. The problem being, communists are generally willing to criticize things like the Great Leap Forward, because, surprise surprise, we don't just blindly support anything they do. The reason for this is that the word tankie isn't meant to describe someone who blindly supports everything a communist country does, as it's claimed to, but rather, someone who supports anything any communist country does.

The fear Western leftists had that led to the term being coined was that people who had previously been critical of Stalin and Mao would respond positively to the countries moving away from their approach, and so they had to create a label to discredit such people and associate them with the previous leaders. It's one of the reasons Khrushchev's approach was questionable, because no matter how much you try to distance yourself from someone like Stalin and paint yourself as "one of the good ones," you're still never going to appease the Western left that demands absolute perfection, let alone the West in general.

Do you deny the genocide happening in China or in Ukraine? Then you are a tankie.

Do you defend the action of the orks in ukraine, or try to claim that the war began because of Ukraine or NATO somehow? Then you are a tankie.

Do you support, even if only mentally, totalitarian governments that love to act that they are somehow communist/socialist? Like the terrorist state of Russia, China, or North Korea? Then you are indeed a tankie.

It's funny how angry tankies can get when people who are actually leftists call them out. They try to squirm and claim that "they didn't support tanks entering sattelite states when they tried to split off from the USSR" when that's not even necessary to be called a tankie.

If you would rather support a totalitarian government over the freedoms communism and socialism promises to bring, you are not a leftist you claim to be, you are a tankie. But if that term offends people so much, perhaps we can call you a redfash, a red fascist. I don't mind that.

But then again, I am on a .ml community saying this, so I would not be supprised if this get removed lmao

If you don't have an opinion on it, you might when you learn the fascists were putting chalk marks on the doors of communists and jews

The first time I saw this word being used was here on Lemmy, when I arrived during the reddit exodus. I'm not a native English speaker though.

Much like the Scots ruining Scotland, liberals seem to delight in ruining liberalism. As time passes, I see liberals more worried about some other liberal's little slot in life. And less and less concerned with getting things done. The Big Picture is eschewed in favor of fighting over minutia.

We get what we are asking for.

As somebody who isn't much on social media, I often have to look up slang terms I don't use. It's actually kind of relatable when an explanation doesn't convey the nuances people feel when these terms are just part of normal speech. Also tbh the general idea of mocking people for not knowing things doesn't really seem that cool.

And then there is me who keeps getting called both tankie and liberal.

This is the part where I would normally state my opinion in geopolitics but since both sides have their sources and "fact checks" I won't. I'm tired of this information war. The only geopolitical thing both sides (yes even the great majority of liberals) can actually agree on is the Palestinian genocide. The rest is split between Western and Anti-Western reporting with both sides having blind spots for sources favouring their side whilst denouncing the sources that do not fit their world views.

And whilst we - the economic left - are fighting an unwinnable war over geopolitics the economic right is making the economy less social whilst radicalising in nationalism and conservativism with every election.

/acc in name

Worse than tankie tbh

i’ve only ever seen tankies complain about the word “tankie” being over used. i guess us non-tankies just don’t hear it very often.

there’s also this false dichotomy i’ve seen many tankies present where they try to argue that people are either liberals or tankies. it is possible to be a leftist and not support authoritarian governments.

I thought tankie was for any government that used tanks on their own people? So many others should be included, China is missing, I think the Phillipines maybe? There's more. I'm open to being corrected.