this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
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What is a tankie?
Since we're counting to ten:
Classic tankies are the authoritarian leaning communists, that is communists willing to use (military) power to accomplish their goals and will voice those more aggressive sounding opinions.
Ah, thank you!
No, that's not true. Authoritarians can't be communist, because communism is stateless. You mean authoritarian socialists.
Read On Authority by Engles.
Read The Player of Games by Banks
EDIT: Okay so I actually read the first three paragraphs, and no. On Authority isn't relevant. Engels is using a different definition of authoritarian than I am.
It used to be a word for people who defended Stalin sending tanks to Hungary in the 50s. It caught on in leftist discourse as a word for leftists who excuse illegitimate state violence, domestically and abroad. Though on Lemmy, like reddit before it, it's mostly thrown around at anyone who disagrees that the US used to a be radiant light in the world until 2016 or anyone left of Pelosi.
Stalin was dead by then!
For God sake, could people learn about things before giving their takes?
Is anything else wrong or are you just gonna be anal about something that doesn't even pertain to the point?
Westerners really are unbelievably arrogant; not spouting off about things you demonstrably don't know even the most basic facts about should be normal behaviour
I'm asking if there's anything else so I can either cross out only the name or the whole section.
Please, If you disagree, say why you disagree. If you want to correct something, correct it. If you're going to add nothing, you might as well be the asshole correcting people's grammar.
You're making a lot of assumptions based of one mistake, but you don't have to insult me.
You're a member of the wrong instance if you don't like assumptions and insults.
What you can do is not comment at all unless you know at least the basic facts.
And the fact that you think factual errors are equivalent to grammatical errors is absolutely breathtaking
I don't think the mistake poisons the well, but point taken. Pointing out misinformation is helpful, but not if you're aggressive and arrogant about it, at best it makes people more quick to dismiss it.
Look, I want to be amenable. It's easy to take random historical anecdotes for granted so I promise to make an effort to fact check these things. Like, really.
To me it seems the arrogant one here is you
Lol that makes a lot of sense. Thank you!
Only if you're too historically illiterate to think Stalin was still alive
I think Wikipedia's description is good: "Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support acts of repression by such regimes, their allies, or deny the occurrence of the events thereof."
Radical centrists who want a form of socialism where everyone is oppressed by the state, thereby combining the ideas of the left and the right.
That sounds.... terrible.
Yes, which might be the give away that it's a strawman, and nobody actually believes in that or wants that.
They claim to be the only real leftists, because communism requires putting down revolutions with tanks and supporting genocidal dictators. They call it "the dictatorship of the proletariat", where proletariat means worker. They think a dictatorship can be leftist.
How many of them ate paint chips as children?
So if you know what the word "commie" meant during the cold war, "tankie" means the same thing, just said by people who don't want to seem like elderly boomers
You're about to get 10 different answers, most would say
Any user from the Lemmygrad and Hexbear instances, and some from Lemmy.ml
Genocide deniers
Pro-Russia and pro-China users
I think it's just a derogatory term for anyone that's anti-imperialism/liberalism
Nah we anti-imperialists don't fit in to that
See, I don't even know. The term is used so broadly. It's basically just "Lemmy users I don't like"
Got it, thank you!
I have never seen a tankie oppose liberalism. I've seen plenty of tankies say they oppose liberalism, but then they act like liberals. It's very confusing.
The nationalists hanging around in leftist spaces
Thank you!
Thats not correct, by the way
To me seems to be people that think that the evil imperialist actions of countries that claim(ed) to be Communist are excused by the evil imperialist actions of the USA.
Got it, thank you!
People who support real communism. Think the USSR and Communist China. They're called tamkies because they used tanks to kill civilians.
How exactly do you define this?
Well obviously it's only real communism if being gay is illegal and the government sells lumber and steel to Nazi Germany to use in weapons.
They weren’t civilians, they were fascist counter-revolutionary gangs who wanted to reinstate a Austro-Hungarian monarchy.
Thank you!