edit: this is now closed future comments won’t be counted
I keep seeing this instance is overrun with tankies so hey, lets do an informal survey like I’ve seen on hexbear
respond with YES or NO in the first line of your comment and i’ll tally everything in a couple of days, lets say I’ll try and collect everything on the sunday the 9th (10+gmt sorry)
not sure thisll work, be nice, have fun
No. Not a tankie. It would be nice if autocorrect let me type tankie and not talkie. I had to cut and paste it I’m not proud.
Well… i wouldn’t say i am full authoritarian, but i definitely identify on the left. I have maybe false ideas of tankies, but i just want that the world change without going full revolution, so i would say NO.
but i just want that the world change without going full revolution
Nobody wants a violent and bloody revolution. It is a position we will be forced into as a matter of self defense as we see throughout history.
A great example is Salvatore Allende in Chile and the 1973 CIA backed coup against him. He did everything the proper peaceful democratic socialist way and they still had him murdered because he was not friendly with US business interests in the region.
YES
Everybody to the left of biden is considered a tankie nowdays, and I’m proud of being to the left of (and opposed to) genocide enablers.
And they sometimes get called “tankies” too by people to the right of them. That’s why I both think it’s a useless term (if everybody is a tankie, then nobody is) and why I think I fall in the definition (as most leftists do, I’ve seen pretty mild social democrats being called “tankies” by liberals)
Plus ultimately these blanket descriptions are pretty useless IMO, you’ll find extremely heated debates between “tankies” themselves on many topics, there’s no consensus, and there are many different ideologies “tankies” subscribe to. It would be like saying that Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians and Greens are all the same thing. We could call them “dronies” maybe.
deleted by creator
Actually we do tend to apply “liberal” correctly.
It is liberals themselves who tend to not have even a Wikipedia-level understanding of liberalism—their own ideology!—or of socialism. And that’s how a centrist liberal like Bernie Sanders can get away with calling himself a socialist despite never calling for the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, because Burgerlanders don’t know their asses from their elbows politically thanks to over a century of red scares and cold wars, which are still ongoing[1][2].
Hang on, so you’re telling me you guys lump social liberals in with classical liberals and neoliberals? That’s definitely not common, but then I suppose if you’re a communist then it kinda makes sense.
Also, while I wouldn’t call Sanders a socialist either, he is not a centrist by any standard measure. I presume you don’t consider anyone a leftist if they don’t advocate for collective ownership and a centrally planned economy?
No.
Maybe I’m way off the mark here but… I think the reaction to tankies seems very overblown. No one you could describe as a “tankie” is currently in charge of any of the countries/companies/organizations that are busy destroying the world right now, so I don’t super understand why everyone’s talking about them like they’re at all a priority? The authoritarians that tankies are obsessed with are all either long dead, or totally unaware of their existence.
Maybe some people on the left are just trying to look at future dangers here, like tankies are gonna be “Bolsheviks Part 2”, somehow come into power, and then purge all the anarchists or something. But didn’t Bolsheviks actually have a lot of power and influence prior to the revolution? Tankies don’t seem to.
why everyone’s talking about them like they’re at all a priority?
Because the red scares and the cold war[1][2] never actually ended, and our government, think tanks, and corporate media still feed us a constant drip of spooky stories.
The global wave of fascism isn’t coming from nowhere, it’s largely the result of neoliberalism, which is a form of capitalism in decay. And you don’t have to be a Marxist to understand this: even Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges get it. Noam Chomsky: Neoliberalism and the roots of fascism
deleted by creator
Yes
I think people would probably call me a tankie
Why
Not unless you enjoyed the crunching sounds
What’s the definition of tankie ?
Explained in this post to !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world.
Supposedly it is a pejorative label applied to authoritarian communists, particularly Marxist–Leninist socialists. I presume it is the “pejorative” part that people do not like, b/c many of the places labelled as tankies by others unabashedly do precisely that!
I’ve only used the term twice myself, both kinda self-questioning what it even means, but if it is truly pejorative, then I should stop regardless.
I wouldn’t feel bad using a pejorative for fascists. Neither do I feel bad using a pejorative for other authoritarians. Their disrespect for human dignity, liberty, and worth disqualifies them for protection against such a minor indignity.
Tankies is fine for anyone on the side of the tanks at Tiananmen Square.
That’s not even where the term originates. Come on, if you’re going to use the term at least do the 10 second Google search.
As EchoCT said, do you even Wikipedia?
But since you brought it up:
Okay, I wasn’t going to respond to any of this, but all the bullshit sources you’re using proves my point exactly.
I wasn’t implying that tankies draw their name from Tiananman. I genuinely don’t give a fuck where it comes from. I was pointing out that they’re actually on the side of the tanks that literally crushed protestors.
If you’re going to quote wikipedia, it’s funny that you suddenly stop using it when it no longer suits you.
Wikipedia, BBC, NSA de-classified national archives, etc…
No one will argue that the death toll is this or that number, because no one knows.
There is no debate that it is a significant number, that hundreds or even thousands were murdered, and that China has desperately attempted to obfuscate every detail of these events.
The protestors called the soldiers fascists as they were killed. We could quibble over that terminology, but there can be no doubt that they were authoritarians willing to kill in order to suppress the natural desire in humans to be free and self-determining.
If you side with those soldiers then fuck you, tankie trash.
Dealers choice, no wait thats me, colour me surprised, it feels like one of those words that basically means whatever you want it to mean ay this point, answer the question bub ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
NO
Supporters of Lenin and/or China and/or Russia shall go in front of firing squad
Cool, face the wall lib.
Ahhh, only tankie haters are libs ??
I must have forgoten the memo 🙄
deleted by creator
beep beep beep
Salty takie calling others Nazi… Cope harder 😏
If you don’t want to be called a nazi, simply don’t have the same opinion of communists as adolf eichmann. it’s that easy!
Lmao
If you are commie then you must love sending people to gulags, right ?
it’s that easy!
People who root for the tanks when pictures of tiananmen square are posted.
Where do people get this stuff from when Wikipedia is right there?
But since you brought it up, I’ll copypasta myself.
“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 defense 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.”
See: Tankie - Wikipedia
It originally meant someone who supported the USSR’s intervention in the 1956 Hungarian revolution. Now it means whatever the labeler wants it to mean, usually as a means of punching left.
No
If Tankie means somewhat supporting what the URSS/China did, then YES.
I’m not communist, I’ve never read the manifesto but I’m more aligned with their ideals and the materialism philosophy than anything else, and I saw this quote that marked me. I paraphrase: “… the worst communist implementation was still better/on par than the best capitalist country”.
There’s not much reason to have never read it at this point, regardless of personal politics.
Well a simple reason is interest, is not my priority.
We’re not talking Atlas Shrugged or Das Kapital.
And I also want to read Capital, but again is not my priority in the near feature.
i may or may not have a tanksona, but that doesn’t make me a tankie.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
You Ain’t Been Doing Nothing If You Ain’t Been Called A Red
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
deleted by creator
NO
Neither do I self-identify as a tankie, I don’t think anyone who’d identify themselves as tankies would think of me as one.
I dont think there’s anyone worth taking seriously who self identifies as a tankie, thanks being earnest though
Tankie is an empty signifier
That is to say, it’s a label that can be used to describe an array of different and conflicting ideas, values, and identities. Because of this it serves as an obfuscatory device rather than a communicative one. The sub-logic becomes tankie = bad, so if someone I don’t like = tankie, then person I don’t like = bad.
Almost none of us were alive when Khrushchev rolled tanks into Hungary. Most MLs aren’t particularly fond of Khrushchev.
It’s made a resurgence in this new, weird context because most of the terms used during the previous red scares lost their power through similar misuse. It’s become unfashionable to hate on leftism in progressive spaces, doing so using old terminology makes you sound like a fox news conservative. But you can do the same thing by calling it this instead.
Almost none of us were alive when Hitler was alive.
You should still have a clear and simple opinion of anything Hitler is known for.
The reason that MovingThrowaway said ‘Almost none of us were alive when Khrushchev rolled tanks into Hungary’ is that certain British socialists coined the pejorative ‘tanky’ to nickname communists who approved of the Warsaw Pact intervention in the Hungarian People’s Republic (and later, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic), but hardly anybody uses the pejorative this way anymore.
In practice, application now varies widely, from approving of the Bolsheviki to opposing the Ukrainian government to suggesting that maybe North Korean politicians think and behave like ordinary human beings. The contemporary criteria are so variable that many would argue that the term is too vague to be useful.
NO, I’m also not from this instance for similar reasons
