I empathize with some of the thinking, but I don't necessarily agree with it. To keep it simple, imagine how many different world powers are working to sabotage openly Socialist and Communist governments. What kinds of tools and resources might these world powers have at their disposal? I can't imagine being part of a disfavored leftist government and not becoming haggard and paranoid beyond reason.
this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2025
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For the same reason people fall into fascism. Capitalism is putting the screws to people. Rent is too high, food is too expensive, people are on a treadmill, and dissatisfaction hangs in the air like miasma. People are mad, and they don't know at what. They sense something is rotten, they dont have the words. Fascism co-opts leftist talking points, but pulls a bait and switch with the Jews and migrants and whoever.
Tankies also start from this choking miasma, you look at Tankie propaganda, its compelling. The US commited genocide and war crimes, and is more racist than you know. Capitalists are terrible, yadda yadda you know it. Tankie propaganda also frames politics as a team sport. When you look at the US (or you can look at it as the "Nato Empire," which can be an interesting way to think about it), as the ultimate evil, can be easy to see anyone opposing them as good or worth supporting.
same way people fall into conservative mindset, propaganda. you hear a little snippet of here and there, and ragebaiting or drama, add in a little racism and authotarianism, which both extreme loves. you fall on either opposites of the spectrum politically. they also dont bother to research on the actual material of being "hard left"
How do people fall into any mindset. Scientology is more wacky but also way more prolific than Tankies. Why do you have a hard time wrapping your mind around Tankies if something even crazier exists.
Tiananmen square is one of those things Tankies are generally correct about. There was no massacre, but they also fail to realize there could have been one if things had gone differently that day.
They use this as a decent proof that Western propaganda is lies. Of course it is, so is China's propaganda. There are no good guys. As someone who discovered the awful truth of the US early on I spent a lot of time contemplating alternatives.
I could see how if I had stopped studying and just landed on the "West is wrong" I could have adopted many of their views. I didn't though, I kept digging.
As other posters point out they are not really large. They also hit above their weight with their constant pushing of propaganda along with many alts and suppressive behavior on their instance. This is why I found them so distasteful. Their admins were outright abusive. I blocked a few and that solved 99% of the problem.
scientology is a pure grifting "religion" made by a guy that dint like to pay taxes on his books.
Propaganda and self interest. Pick whatever story is being told that you feel like picking and that's it.
I’d argue that they functionally don’t exist.
Sure, here you run into them here in this universe…not a great sample size. I’m a really social person who spent years in deep leftist Canada…and I’m one of the most radical socialist (whatever you want to call it…all the terms are fraught) folks I’ve met. I’m definitely nowhere near a tankie.
I’ve met exactly one true “tankie”. Good friend…always making excuses for atrocities…it spills over into radical support for modern day Russia etc…but dude is also a silver spooner who works for his dads investment firm.
I honestly wish there were more tankies…and among the lower classes where they should be…but many of the poor people I know are conservatives or nihilists/anarchists.
that friends sounds more like bourgeois, oligarchy than a leftist. kinda like how "hasan" pretends to be a leftist on his streams, hes a grifter.
I'd wager half or more of the tankie posts are bots, paid posters in 3rd world countries, or slave labor in 3rd world countries. The rest are a combo of incest, edge lords, nihilistic, and some vanishingly small number of actual true believers in the power of Fascist accelerated forced Communism.
Marx and his allies believed Communism can't come about by force, only by natural progression following the unavoidable natural collapse of capitalism. Our experience seems to demonstrate that attempting to force any of it only ever sets the process back.
alot of does sound botty.
Well for sure one of the reason is that even in non marxist communities they show up and write comments in a style that many people resonate with. I mean using citations, good grammar, appealing to logic, (seemingly) good argumentations etc.
This makes them look reasonable and even if you do not read all their sources, you might remember their comments and talking points in a pretty positive light.
I dont want to say this style of arguing is bad, but I think it gets valued higher than arguments based on intuition and emotion with a less "scientific" style, because that is what many people are taught when growing up, going to school etc.
Also I would like to say, in some cases this "showing up" is done in a way that feels invasive to (parts of) communties. Like an online version of Jehovas Witnesses.
Tribalism
They opposed one tribe so they joined another
This. Treating politics like team sports.
They can't see that any government is going to create corruption so they picked the government they have the least experience with to side with. Of course at the heart of the tankies is a huge amount of fud being generated by russia and the ccp.
Corruption is a very generic word, can you be more specific?
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Imo this has been a good thread with opportunities for large and well thought out posts from marxists who are being responded to with well thought out positions, and responding in kind. There's a lot of the classic dross, but I like seeing people's posts appear to be getting up and downvoted based on content.
Not the usual entertaining brigading, but a good read nonetheless.
100% agreed
There is no one answer. Dr. Bob Altemeyer‘s book “The Authoritarians” sheds some light on the psychology.
Regardless of what you think about vanguardism as a means to leftist ends, they also seem to miss the logical point that vanguardism and the state are meant to wither away. It is a theoretical rightist means to a leftist ends, it is not itself leftist.
But again, if you read The Authoritarians you find that logic and reason do not matter to them. Trying to reason with an authoritarian is pointless.
Tankie brigade incoming in 3... 2... 1...
Some people just have a Right Wing mindset. They're drawn to concepts like loyalty & obedience to authority and gravitate to political doctrines that stress those values. If Communism makes economic sense to you but you're politically uncomfortable with shallow/non-existent hierarchies or don't feel that everyday people can be trusted with political power you gravitate towards being a ML. If you're willing to force those views on others by threat of state violence you're now a Tankie.
But anarchists are definitely also in favour of forcing their views on others by a threat of violence? Like, I'm a Spaniard, the anarchists famously resisted fascism in the Spanish Civil War using weapons. Projects often praised by anarchists such as the Rojava or Zapatistas also have plenty of violent power in their region, and exert it when needed to defend their project and ideology.
I don't like your framing of "right wing essentialism" in Marxists, it sounds almost eugenicist the way you're describing it, as "people predisposed to authoritarianism". I'm a tankie not because I love state violence, but because the only large societies that have managed to actually collectivize the lands and resist western imperialism have been Marxist-Leninist. Failure to utilize such state repression mechanisms against fascists and capitalists is what led to the fascist coup in Spain, to the failure of the German revolution, or to the murder of Allende.
I agree with that "right wing" and "authoritarian" are two different things, but lots of people, including tankies are absolutely "predisposed to authoritarianism". It has nothing to do with eugenics though, because the genetics behind it are universal to humanity. It's all about how people are brought up, the social influences they encounter, and level of education.
the only large societies that have managed to actually collectivize the lands and resist western imperialism have been Marxist-Leninist.
I don't think many non-tankies, or even anti-tankies, would disagree with this statement. However, it does seem to be a frying pan to fire situation. It's no good escaping the grasp of "the west" if the cure is worse than the disease, and that's almost always the case.
The Soviets are gone and modern Russia is little more than a Mafia state. China is ascendent, but it's also growing more capitalist by the hour, and even with the current US administration, we still have more freedoms in America than in China. Whether that remains true is yet to be seen, but if America falls to authoritarianism and joins Russia as a second Mafia state, we know we can count on tankies to cheer it on, oblivious to how much worse that will be for pretty much all of humanity.
The world is too absurd right now and in order to best fit into it the easiest way possible you must take on the mantle of absurdity yourself. There is not a lot of self-awareness or self-knowledge within these lazy thinkers.
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The process is probably identical to how people fall into the alt-right/far-right mindset. Their life sucks, they have connections to no-one, nobody fucks them. But then this one group start showing them sympathy and camaraderie and things start to look better.
And some of them just get born into it.
As a couple of poster here are already demonstrating, they discover that western nations have lied about communist nations, but they don't learn the more fundamental lesson that they shouldn't trust everything a nation says. So instead of adopting a nuanced view, they just counter believing everything a western nation says with rejecting everything a western nation says and instead believing everything a communist nation says.
Yep.
I'm perhaps older than some here, so I saw something similar after 9/11.
Western media, especially American media, were often blatantly biased in favour of the US government and the so called 'war on terror'. Especially when stuff leaked out about torture, mass killings and abuses. People turned to alternatives and often found channels like Russia Today. And to be fair, at first glance Russia Today did (certainly at the time) appear to be far more nuanced than mainstream media. It was certainly and often justifiably critical of what the US and its allies was up to around that time. But people who spent a lot of time uncritically watching Russia Today, often ended up believing the Russian government propaganda mixed in with truths.
I think it's also in large part due to the human tendency to simplify reality. Reality is often complex, but we prefer to thing in categories, like black and white. And so you often see people thinking in or blindly accepting false binaries. Side A bad, so side B ~~bad~~ good. (e: brain fart)
It's surprisingly common. I mean, look how common it is to think of Germany as the bad guy in WWI, when the reality was far more nuanced. The British empire really wasn't great.
And in WWII the nazis were obviously evil, but that doesn't mean the allies were particularly good either. For example, Roosevelt didn't do that much to stop the deportation of up to 2 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans, putting Japanese Americans in concentration camps wasn't moral, America was still virulently racist, and contrary to what you may have been led to believe about the Soviets up to 1 in 4 rapes by allied troops were perpetrated by Americans. Churchill arguably helped kill up to 4 million Indians during the war. Etc. etc.
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Edit: The amount of conjecture and thought terminating cliches in this thread is through the fucking roof lmfao. Peak reddit.
A lot of tankies are actually posting how and why they believe what they believe. If anyone's seriously interested in an answer look at this thread from https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/60633370?scrollToComments=true
There are 206 comments in total at this time.
My journey started here:
https://hexbear.net/comment/3763871
How they piqued my interest:
https://hexbear.net/comment/5606499
The reason I switched:
https://hexbear.net/comment/5355388
It was a combination of them just not being horrible "redfash" monster everyone says they are, them being able to consistently back up their seemingly "obviously wrong" takes and me and seemingly no one else being able to come up with better answers.
In discussions tankies were the only ones who had good faith discussions, obviously they didn't always, but if it wasn't just an internet slapfight the tankies were the ones citing sources and having incredibly nuanced understandings while me and the other libs didn't really. All I ever saw was a "nuh-uh" backed up by "obvious" claims that "everybody" knows like your "mao zedong was the worst mass murderer".
There is a post I could make about this "black book of communism" statistic now, having read about these sorts of claims, but not on my phone.
I don't think they're redfash monsters, I just know most historians disagree with what they say, and as someone who is not an expert, I will trust the experts over the people I see post 18 paragraphs that the one time I looked into was not very relevant and often just cause more confusion. An easy example is china's treatment of the uyghurs, I have yet to see a response that isn't, as you say, a thought terminating cliché.
See that for me was quite the opposite. The people everyone was piling on as tankies had demonstrably better knowledge of not just both history and current events but could trace a lot of the claims levied against them, like the uyghur genocide hoax, to their source, in this case Adrian Zenz, and really completely decimate them.
Those contradictions kept piling on, tankies were rebutting "common knowledge" and backing up seemingly ludicrous claims in depth and clearly previously researched. Whereas the libs were just consistently out of their depth, either insulting, claiming without anything to back it up or in the best case throwing around tangentially related articles or wikipedia entries that were obviously just the first results from an ad hoc google search. Until just sort of all came crashing down and sent me reeling, my whole worldview coming undone. My family and especially my wife got really worried even, but it kind of tapered away and settled into a new approach to things that feels like I am actually able to take at all these complex and finally have the tools necessary to understand them if I invest the time to do so.
I do not know better than the united nations or several peer reviewed journals. The journal also has references to dozens of historians. It is possible some small group on the internet know more than they do, and are interpreting it better than people who do it as a job, I just find that unlikely. The UN believes it is a persecution if not a genocide. I am a layman on this topic and will defer to experts, because I know there is a lot of astroturfing and I have previously seen arguments that seemed flawless but were missing key details that an expert showed why they were flawed.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623528.2020.1848109
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