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Define “tankie” please
You know… I am genuinely curious how many of the votes here are purely a response to cyrillic text.
You mean in my display name? Yeah, it’s a funny way of getting prejudiced responses LMAO
Interestingly, Voyager doesn’t seem to be respecting display names:
Yeah, Voyager just breaks peoples profiles/doesn’t even bother displaying them properly/at all…
One of the many reasons why I switched away from it to Summit
Yeah, considering the ‘downvote all .ml’ mentality that exists.
The word Tankie originates from 1950s British Communist circles. Specifically, it was used by British Communists to derisively describe their comrades who supported the 1956 invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union.
Images of the Soviet invasion featured a lot of tanks, hence, “Tankie”.
After that died down, the term didn’t come back into use really, until the 2010s, when leftists on the internet started using it in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way. It was fun to bring back a stupid sounding, incredibly niche, British slang word.
At some point the word breached containment and started to be used by liberals, in a very cavilier sort of way. I’ve seen people use Tankie to describe anyone from Marxist-Leninists, to Marxists generally, to Leftists generally, weird right-wingers who converted to Russian Orthodoxy, pro-Palestine activists, mods of Lemmy instances someone doesn’t like.
Shit, I’ve seen literal Anarchist get called Tankies.
Basically, it’s a meaningless nothing word now, that’s a bit like your boomer grandpa who still thinks it’s the Red Scare, calling Joe Biden a Commie Pinko.
I really appreciate the summary you provided. I’m sure the user that asked got downvoted for a reason. I’ve never felt comfortable asking myself. I’ve googled it, read other explanations, and have always decided I just don’t get it. A big part of that is I read comments that are all over the spectrum and have a response from somebody saying they are a tankie. I never even heard of the term until I got on here like two years ago and it just feels like it’s a “I disagree with you so I’m going to call you a niche name that’s popular only on this particular platform” vernacular.
I wish it would die out because it’s been so diluted of meaning in this community.
The people who support mowing down civilians with tanks in an effort to protect authoritarian regimes, just because they label themselves as communist.
Almost 100% overlap with “Murica bad!”, which while true in a vacuum, ignores that other countries can also be bad. This results in tankies unironically supporting the Kim family or doing some heavy revisionism about Stalin.
Any leftist and every sane person says “Amerikkka bad”
It’s the worst thing to happen to humanity in the second half of the 20th century and beyond
But the same people usually praise other regimes that also abuse human rights. It’s not about the humanity, it’s about not being the right brand of authoritarianism (the right brand is anti-west)
I suspect once Trump goes far enough up Putin’s ass and turns on its European allies, tankies will also start celebrating the USA and ignoring everything that the US is doing in… *gestures broadly everywhere*
What.
Where do you stand on the war in Palestine and where do you stand on the war in Ukraine?
What version of ‘tankie’ is the one that would praise the US for literally anything trump does?
Like if there’s one thing I thought I knew about tankies, it was that they fucking loathe the US and Trump
They tend to hate Western democracy as a whole. If Trump brings about complete Russian domination in Europe and ends elections in the US for good, of course they’d cheer for their comrade.
That’s my theory anyway. I don’t see modern tankies caring about socialism, that’s more of a guise for their authoritarianism fetish. After all, one of their most celebrated countries, Russia, is not at all socialist either.
Mind that I’m talking about tankies specifically. Plenty of leftists out there who are sensible. Asking about the two wars was kind of a litmus test. To me, if you approve of one offensive war, but not the other, you have some heavy geopolitical bias. Tankies are happy when Ukrainians die, but against the war in Palestine. Fascists are happy when Palestinians die, but have differing opinions on Ukraine. If you just don’t like people dying and think neither Israel nor Russia is in the right, then you’re not a tankie. Oversimplified, but very quick way to gauge whether someone is opposing some geopolitical bloc, or injustice and violence.
Spoken like a true lib who shares 99% of their perception of communist states with the CIA.
“Murica bad but also commie countries bad” is western capitalist propaganda to drive progressive people into apathy and inaction.
To quote Michael Parenti:
So, you compare a country from what it came from, with all its imperfections. And to those who demand instant perfection the day after the revolution, they go up and say: “Are there civil liberties for the fascists? Are they gonna be allowed their newspapers and their radio programs, are they gonna be able to keep all their farms?”
The passion that some of our liberals feel, the day after the revolution, the passion and concern that they feel for the fascists, the civil rights and the civil liberties of those fascists who were dumping and destroying and murdering people before. Now the revolution has got to be perfect, it has got to be flawless.
Well, that is not my criteria, my criteria is what happens to those who couldn’t read? What happens to those babies who couldn’t eat, who died of hunger? And that’s why I support revolution. The revolution that feeds the children gets my support.
I love Micheal Parenti but that quote doesn’t address the criticism. Parenti talks of revolution, OP talks of a government preserving the status quote.
Of course it addresses the criticism. The USSR securing a revolutionary sphere of influence against the USA is obviously about the “looking for perfection after the revolution”.
It’s pretty obviously social imperialism and not relations on equal footing IMO
Not sure I get your comment, care to explain?
I am referring to the Maoist concept of social imperialism of the USSR, which I tend to agree with.
I am not talking about capitalist financial imperialism, this allegation being well refuted by Castro:
How could the Soviet Union be classified as imperialist? Where are its monopolist enterprises? What is its participation in multinational companies? What industries, what mines, what petroleum deposits does it own in the underdeveloped world? What worker is exploited in any country of Asia, Africa or Latin America by Soviet capital? The economic cooperation which the Soviet Union is offering Cuba and many other countries did not come from the sweat and the sacrifice of exploited workers of other peoples, but from the sweat and effort of Soviet workers
Edit: Castro’s refutation is also a great explanation, of why I would classify today’s PRC as regularly imperialist, even if not to the degree of the USA/EU etc.
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Establishing a hegemon can only be done after the revolution. Once you eat that pill there’s no perfection afterwards without some self-destruction.
Again, I’m not the one looking for perfection. I’m the one supporting “the revolution that feeds the children”. That was the Bolshevik revolution, so I support it.
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Excellent contribution
Those on the left who support the state using force to keep the people controlled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
Y’know rolling tanks into Hungary in 1956 when leftists first started using the word.
It’s a well known leftist term and is almost 100 years old now. I have a hard time believing you didn’t already know this.
Do you also have an evil gun word to refer to people defending socialdemocracy? Do you call them “bombies” for defending the socialdemocracy in EU states that helped bomb Libya and Yugoslavia and destroyed millions of lives in the process? Do you call them “dronies” for voting for the democrats that threw missiles with drones on brown children during the Obama administration?
Or is the usage of militaristic sounding bad words reserved for those who defend the revolution that saved Europe from Nazism, that industrialized Eastern Europe and saved it from extermination and colonization, saving a hundred million lives in the process from hunger, genocide, disease and exploitation?
Are your bad words reserved for those, and not for the leftists in Spain (my homeland) who refused to repress the fascists during the Spanish Second Republic and allowed a civil war that ended up millions of deaths and in 40 years of fascism? No evil military word for those?
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Libtard is used by the right wing, no communists I know will use anything ending “-tard” because there’s ableist meaning there. Lib is not a militaristic bad sounding word, it’s the shortening of “liberal” or “libertarian”.
Good job in calling out the ableism. I’ve reported it, so hopefully the mods clear it up quickly.
But we do have the more inclusive term of ‘shitlib’, which is a centrist analogue to ‘tankie’ especially so in being ardently uncritical supporters.
“Shitlib” is not a militaristic sounding word, though. We reserve those only for communists who oppose the western supremacy status quo
particularly i call people with shallow politics who spend more time virtue signaling than trying to engage on topics of critical analysis shitlibs
We know that the Hungarian “popular revolt” was recently proven to be a CIA color revolution, right? Like CIA documents were released proving they instigated and supported the whole thing to destabilize the USSR, right?
Not that the USSR of that time was all that great, but why are we using Cold War anti-communist operations and propaganda for our arguments…?
No, but they have declassified a paper about them being completely unprepared and unstaffed for this, and scrambling to get Hungarian speaking agents into Hungary after it started.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/(est pub date) clandestin[15503634].pdf
all i can find is that the CIA used Radio Free Europe to communicate to the independence fighters that the NATO allies would support their uprising. then when Hungarians revolted, they found themselves wholly unsupported.
do you have any good articles showing this to be a color revolution? because this reads to me just about what happens when a fascist org (CIA) co-opts international solidarity in order to thwart real change from ever getting organized, something they were very fond of doing throughout the cold war leading to devastating effects in the global south
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JFK Files Reveal CIA Role in the 1956 Hungarian Uprising | The tankies were right.
This article contains a shitton of falsehoods and omissions. The tankies were wrong.
Király was not a fascist. He served in the Royal Hungarian Army as a career soldier, joining after his father before the rise of fascism.
He did indeed serve in the invasion army of the fascistic Horthy regime as a captain, and he was indeed put in command of Jewish slave labourers, for which he received the Righteous Among the Nations accolades, as he treated them as humanely as the situation allowed, defying his orders, risking execution.
He was kept on with the Hungarian People’s Army, promoted by the communist leadership multiple times. He married Gömbös’ niece under Communist rule, way after it would have been politically advatageous. Despite that, he was put in command of the Hungarian participation of Stalin’s planned invasion of Yugoslavia.
He fell out of favour after the invasion was cancelled and was caught up in one of Rákosi’s purges, and he spent the three years after in abysmal conditions until the 56 revolution. He got out a month before because of the buildup to the revolution had some political prisoners released. He spent the next month until the revolution in hospital.
The Nagy provisional government asked him to organise the defense against the Soviet invasion, which he tried and understandably failed. He then left for the US along with hundreds of thousands, and got a job as a CIA trainer for Cuban anti-communist insurgents, which got him in the JFK files.
Then the Putin government put those files out and started a coordinated propaganda campaign to whitewash the genocide and rape the USSR committed.
BTW I’m a leftist and think the CIA is the scum of the earth on par with the SS, but let’s stick to the facts.
Your ‘evidence’ is a random blog post?
A random blog post that upon five seconds of inspection is outright abusing the truth?
In 1996, journalist Michael Smith published a book where MI6 officers, a branch of British intelligence, admitted they trained and armed Király’s fighters.8
Hmm okay, so let’s actually read the source provided here:
according to the author of a new book on the history of the organisation.
So random author, advertising a book is the basis of this whole claim.
“There is no evidence that this was specifically sparked by MI6 because there was another series of events”.
So no evidence.
Unfortunately the Budapest students met in a coffee bar to discuss their activities and were swiftly rounded up. Mr Gorka was interrogated for several weeks, strung up from a beam and immersed in icy water. Under torture, he confessed, and was sent to prison for 15 years.
So the few they did try to recruit and train were caught.
Laszlo Regeczy-Nagy, the President of the Committee for Historical Justice, representing the interests of the veterans, said: “There were thousands of Hungarians living in Austria at the time and some were undoubtedly organised and trained by the British.” He believes that foreign intervention played a modest role, and “the vast majority of those taking part [in the revolt] were locally trained and led”. He added: “Even without training, they pretty quickly learned how to fire machine guns and hurl Molotov cocktails.”
So to re-iterate, the claim that they ‘trained and armed Király’s fighters’ was a complete fabrication by the author.
They, as one would expect of them, were trying to build up a network to maybe do so in the future but they actually had nothing to do with the 1956 uprising.
Why are tankies always so dishonest ?
Why are tankies always so dishonest ?
Because they usually, eventually, end up in a position or situation where they have to either justify or gloss over or invent apologia for or just deny the existence amd actions of Beria, who… is the kind of person with the kind of power and cruelty that is an inevitability of their worldview put into practice.
Its not dissimilar from American Extremeist Christians who just start frothing at the mouth when you point out obvious hypocrises and ‘justified’ horrors in their worldview.
Somewhat ironically, the ego of being a ‘correct’ collectivist overrides a basic sense of human decency, resulting in fanaticism, and fanatics, basically by definition, don’t care about ‘the’ truth, they use language as a weapon, not as a means of genuine communication, and they ultimately use it to affirm their own moral/intellectual superiority over others.
It would be funny if it wasn’t so deadly serious.
It’s a well known leftist term and is almost 100 years old now. I have a hard time believing you didn’t already know this.
There’s an ongoing campaign by the usual suspects to pretend the word doesn’t have a definition beyond “epithet for The Real Left used by ignorant libtards.” Usually followed by a wall of text containing circular references as citations.
That is by far not a universal definition anymore and not at all how it is used on the internet by a lot of people 😑
E.g.: Liberals often use it to refer to anyone revolutionary, from anarchists to Maoists…
It’s a loaded and really unclear term nowadays and could even be interpreted as whistleblowing
Edit: Hence my question, because this could have been a rule 1 deletion and/or a temp ban e.g.
I have often seen people say this but I’ve never seen an actual example of someone misusing the term tankie.
Then I’m glad you got spared the headaches
Imma be real: If someone tries to tell me, that Stalin’s purges were totally justified, they’re a tankie. If someone tells me that only “bad people” have suffered under regimes trying to achieve communism, they’re a tankie. If someone tells me that I must support Iran or Russia because they are not the US, they might be a tankie.
I use tankie the same way. Authoritarians and genocide deniers. It’s a fairly common way to use the word by leftists. Libs and tankies muddying the definition sucks, but how else am I supposed to refer to tankies?
Edit: Also let’s be honest. Tankies call everyone who calls them out a liberal whether it’s warranted or not.
If you demonize previous (even if flawed) socialist experiments (e.g. for being successful and not perfect), then you are a revisionist, if not outright a liberal
Fair, fair.
I’ve used this definition many times on Lemmy/PieFed so far, it’s my genuine meaning of the word.
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🍿
I’m stealing that gif.
People who’s opinion tends to be “anything ‘the west’ does is bad and anything ‘the east’ does is good”, regardless of the specifics of what you are talking about.
You are not OP LOL
That’s not how Lemmy works. It’s for discussion. If you genuinely only wanted to speak to OP, DM them.
Guess what, moderation involves asking OPs for clarification in a thread so there is transparent reasoning in case of e.g. deletions 🤯🤯🤯
For some reason I didn’t see your M earlier.
Nevertheless, it now seems like you wanted to publicly have an argument with OP over the use of the term, but instead of directly calling them out on it, you phrased it as a request for information, perhaps in the hopes of trapping them into betraying their prejudices or something.
Now other people started trying to answer your question, which doesn’t meet the agenda you were trying to push and you’re acting like people were unreasonable or silly for answering your question, but you asked it openly on an open discussion forum and in a way that didn’t mention OP and just seemed to be phrased like a request for information.
Being a mod is about moderating discussion, not controlling or directing it. I don’t think it’s about blanket control over who speaks.
(By way of balance, some of the mod actions in this thread have been absolutely spot on, thank you.)
Hey, I was only rudely replying to the comment which was oversimplifying a lot of positions as a way to get back at them (and then kinda disingaged). I don’t really take issue with the other comments, since as you said, the question was worded abiguously on purpose.
TBH I’m just tired of the whole semantic circus around muddy words like “tankie”, hence my harsh reactions LOL (sowwy ~w~)Also I have a shitposting side that’s hard to turn off ^^’
Oh and thanks for the constructive feedback, positive and negative :)
I was only rudely replying to the comment which was oversimplifying a lot of positions as a way to get back at them.
I may be overly aspergic about this, I accept, but please try to say what you mean more.
Instead of “Please define tankie”, why not say “@OP, tankie is a muddy and overused word, please state what you mean by it, and if you don’t have a useful and valid meaning for the term, avoid it.”
Instead of “You’re not OP”, why not say “Wow, you’ve certainly oversimplified a lot of positions there!”.
I’m afraid I’m finding your hidden meanings constantly unsettling. I don’t mind you disagreeing with people and entering firmly into the debate, and I thoroughly approve of the bans you put in place, but I’m finding the indirectness harder to come to terms with.
TBH I’m just tired of the whole semantic circus around muddy words like “tankie”
This is the best thing you’ve said. I found it properly eye-opening because it communicates something about how the word is used that wasn’t as clear in my mind as it is now.
Hey,
:)
Btw, I liked this whole comment overall a lot because it was open and honest, showed me how you feel, made you human and very relatable, and clarified concepts for me. Quadruple win!
Please label your coordinate axes
So true, thanks for the laughs!
A classic.
The funniest part is all the comments replying to this post claiming its liberal (exactly same talking points as far right)
Is it inconvenient for them to accept anarchism and libertarian socialism? Because it feels like there is often deliberate erasure.
If Anarchists share the same views on Actually Existing Socialism that liberals hold (i.e. CIA propaganda), what’s the problem with calling them libs in this instance?
There’s no deliberate erasure. This is a left-punching meme directly attacking Marxist-Leninists, and so Marxist-Leninists like me respond accordingly.
Tankies are so close to the far right when they defend the dictatorship of the totalitarian USSR.
Far right stuff like the defeat of Nazism in Europe which saved all 100+ million peoples between Berlin and the Urals from extermination.
Far right stuff like universal healthcare and education to the highest level for free, leading to an increase from 28 years of life expectancy in pre-revolutionary times to almost 70 years of age by 1960s.
Far right stuff like universal right to housing and to work, bringing the complete abolition of homelessness and unemployment.
Far right stuff like bringing about the lowest income inequality that the region has seen in its history by an incredible margin
Far right stuff like supporting anti-imperialist liberation movements all over the globe as early as 1936 (civil war in Spain, my homeland, was only given weapons by the Soviets to fight the fascists) and throughout its entire existence (Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, anti-colonial movements all over Africa, Latin America and Asia)
Far right stuff like having the highest female representation in institutions at the time and being the first country to give voting rights to women
Far right stuff like the policy of preservation of local cultures and languages (for comparison, look up the number of Occitan speakers in France between years 1900 and 2000)
Far right stuff like having a self-sustained economy that didn’t rely on the exploitation of billions in the global south and which had favorable trade terms with other countries in the COMECON and subsidy of third countries such as Cuba through e.g. the “programa petróleo por azúcar”
But yeah, the evil stalinists had prisons during WW2, a war that killed 25 million Soviet citizens!! What a bunch of evil right wing totalitarians!!!
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Lemme guess, malding Pole/Baltic?
The most liberal take of the meme: the need to trademark Far left:
🤦🏼
It’s trademarked because capital has the ability to subsume all criticisms into itself.
Isn’t this just a dumber version of horseshoe theory?
Ya but life no longer makes sense of horseshoe, it’s more whacky like above
Horseshoe never made sense, so it’s impressive they made something even dumber than it
Enlightening liberal drivel. Truly the stuff of visionaries.
Thank you for bumping the post.
Sounds like there’s a centrist who’s maaaaaaaaaaaad
Not that I don’t find reactionary tankies infuriating nonsense people.
Lemmy and its users accusing other users of political affiliations without basis while pretending it’s disgusting, name a more iconic duo.
Lmao yeah the openly anarchist OP is a centrist.
It’s not just tankies. Almost the entirety of human history can be boiled town to various more or less effective movements for liberation getting co-opted by selfish assholes and becoming the thing they swore to destroy.
liberation getting co-opted by selfish assholes and becoming the thing they swore to destroy
Totally, like the USSR. They started out with a good idea of redistributing and communalizing the means of production, but ended up creating a new ruling class of politicians that exploited people just as much. Just look at modern evidence of income inequality in the USSR compared to Tsarism (pre-1917) and capitalism (post-1990):
See? By looking at factual evidence… wait… hold up… Income inequality actually maintained itself at the historical lowest in the region during communism’s entire existence… Well, time to disregard my comment because I’m a tankie and a Ruzzian bot, amirite?
The hierarchies present in the USSR didn’t take the form of income inequality. You’re taking a metric that is very useful for analyzing capitalist countries and using it in a context where it doesn’t make much sense.
Anyway, the comparison with the west isn’t really relevant to the comparison I would make in that case, which would be between the initial revolutionary movement and where it ended up.
The hierarchies present in the USSR didn’t take the form of income inequality
Wonderful, do you have any numeric data to present?
Non-income sources of access to goods and services perhaps? Such as the universal access to jobs, and universal access to housing mostly through the work union? Universal access to education to the highest level for free? Widely available, high quality, dense, affordable, high frequency public transit? High quantity of public sport facilities, art centres and so-called “culture houses”? Which of those was, numerically and with data, less egalitarian in the USSR?
the comparison I would make in that case, which would be between the initial revolutionary movement and where it ended up
The graph goes from pre-revolution, to Bolshevism, and to capitalism. You can see that income inequality remained somewhat stable during Socialism, and was much lower than before or after.
What somebody formally owns and gets in income isn’t the same as the wealth they actually control in authoritarian systems.
Also, wealth equality through being poor isn’t that brilliant
What somebody formally owns and gets in income isn’t the same as the wealth they actually control in authoritarian systems
Great, why don’t you provide us with some numerical metrics of that in the Soviet Union vs. modern Russia or USA? Or are you possibly just making it up without evidence?
wealth equality through being poor isn’t that brilliant
I agree. So did the soviets, and that’s why they took a backwards feudal nation in Europe with 85% of the population composed of exploited peasants with an average life expectancy of 28 years, and industrialized the country until it was the second world power, the majority of the population were city dwellers with modern lives and amenities, and rose life expectancy to 70+ years.
Just wanted to say: keep up the goated work, like in this thread in general
Thanks comrade
fascism is the status quo recognizing that the people are waking up to the status quo not working for them, and the coopting the symbology of liberation to maintain itself
Trump’s hands are drawn way too big. Other than that, yeah, that’s about it.
Because of the current social political climate, I’m learning so much about things I never thought I would. This little comic just made it click why the Nazi Germany party was a national socialist party.
it’s also worth noting this pattern of ebb and flow, subjugation and liberation, is as old as civilization itself. political theorists didn’t invent any of this, they just wrote down what the dissidents of their age were doing. fascism wasn’t created in the 1920s, it was merely named. Karl Marx didn’t create communism, he just named what he saw people working towards. for as long as humans have lived in hierarchical societies, they have discussed and planned how to bring about an end to these hierarchies that they suffer under.
Mussolini was more honest about it (inasmuch as a fascist can be honest). Despite having practically invented the term, he admitted that fascism should really be called corporatism, as it was a merger of state and corporate power.
Of course he still called it fascism, though, because it was a (then) meaningless name with roots on the Roman empire which could be attractive to his supporters. If he’d called it by its proper name probably no one would have supported it, other than the oligarchs in charge.
worth noting: he named his party the catholic socialist party.
That’s a pretty broad statement for the amount of nuance history has on liberation movements. From what I can tell it’s usually more along the lines of 8 steps forward and 6 steps back over time. Voting rights for women are very unlikely to be removed for example.
Right now it’s a period of democratic backsliding and fascism but this is nothing compared to the imperial era where European powers would just massacre Africans and take their resources.
To sum up my point, we swore to destroy a lot of things, then we destroyed a bunch of them, reintroduced some back and ended up making progress.
Maybe I didn’t explain it very well. I wasn’t saying progress was impossible. But the individual organizations, nations, leaders, etc. often end up getting caught up in this trajectory. Once this happens, there will usually be a new movement to try to fight against the new dominant hegemony. Sometimes the old power wins, sometimes the new one does, but inevitably, whoever wins will keep regressing. But there can still be a big change as the old guard is replaced (or sometimes bullied into submission).
So, it’s probably not universally true, but it’s a pattern that I’ve started noticing again and again as I study history.
That makes sense and I agree with you, I got a bit confused by the the way it’s phrased since I felt like it implied “Good kicks out bad, good becomes the bad” infinite loop. But general enshittification of most things is a very strong trend in history.
I’ve read about a bunch of “Power consolidation - > one man controls all - > successor is unqualified - > people get upset - > regime change”. Have an upvote for intention :)
it’s why us lefties focus more on systems than on people. a marxist approach to history reveals that this has been happening and likely continue happening until we muster some fundamental change in how we organize. it’s like there’s an 80 year cyclical race where the “revolution” (not the revolution) happens, people accept that it’s not perfect, but it’s an improvement, they fail to educate their children about the problems with the old regime and the current regime, until eventually a time comes when no one remembers the last cycle anymore and the whole process gets repeated.
fwiw, i thought what you were saying was pretty clear hence posting the fascism definition comic that just takes what you said and puts doodles to it. but for some reason you got downvoted to hell and i got hella upvotes. i even looked at lemvotes and saw several people downvoting you and upvoting me, which i find confusing. it seems like lemmy is going through a weird moment
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I think you’re describing the horeseshoe theory:
Not really, they dont say that when you go far left enough you wrap around to the right, they say that selfish or malicious people have ruined movements for liberation historically by twisting them
