Too many people are confusing the two. Whenever lemmy.ml or its devs do something stupid, people go “Lemmy is getting worse and worse,” or “I’m leaving Lemmy,” or worse, “I’m leaving for Beehaw.”
If you’re using Beehaw, then you’re using Lemmy. Lemmy is the software these instances run on. If you don’t like lemmy.ml, join another instances that have rules that match your philosophy. Some instance hosts authoritarian or fascist shit? Turn to another Lemmy instance. Lemmy.ml is not even the biggest instance. People who just joined and are unfamiliar with the platform will just think the entire Lemmyverse is run by autocratic admins if we don’t get our terminology right.
I joined Lemmy a while ago and I suddenly got exposed to many “tankie” debates going on. Is there a reason this group suddenly became relevant on Lemmy (I mean, from the view of a Reddit migrant)?
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I use “tankie” to refer to the type of people that claim to be Marxist but are actually just anti-West, like the ones that support Russia’s love of genocide simply because Russia is opposing the western world. I’d love to have conversations with actual Marxists, I’ve just become increasingly less sure that they exist.
Honestly a lot of Marxism would absolutely have a lot of criticism of NATO, US, the “west” how they have handled the situation and got us here in the first place. But that doesn’t give Russia a pass for invading a sovereign nation.
Under Marxism this is basically a bullshit neoliberal capitalist power structure vs an oligarchic Imperialist POS.
Ngl you’re going to probably isolate yourself from Marxists by using the label “tankie” since they typically see it as a label used by liberals to put down revolutionary leftists. I can’t speak for all Marxists/ml’s but that’s what I’ve noticed
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Read the comment you’re replying to carefully. He’s not referring to Marxists. He’s referring to pro Russian warmongers / anti wests trolls that wrap themselves in Marxism flag.
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That’s because that’s just Russian propaganda used to justify doing imperialism and conquering Ukraine.
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Wonderful revisionist history you have there. Russia blindly believed they could roll over Ukraine and seize the country in threeweeks, (Russia’s words not mine). They didn’t do a “shock and awe” destruction raid at first because they wanted to steal the land in tact and re-add it to the Russian “empire” that Putlin wants to rebuild. Putin knows he doesn’t have much time left and he wants to rebuild the glorious USSR before he dies. He has made moves towards that for the last 10 years. So far his only real success is the puppet state of Belarus. If it was really about Nazi’s this was the stupidest police action in modern history.
Lmao which proxy war? It’s Russia committing to a full scale invasion of Ukraine and losing. That’s like calling WW2 a proxy war because the soviet union received critical amounts of US aid.
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China is not communist, it’s an authoritarian state doing state capitalism and performing ethnic cleansing/genocide. It’s quite far removed from the ideals of communism.
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This is a good comparison because I also oppose car-dependant infrastructure and think we would be better off with more public transports and an infrastructure closer to the people in general.
I suppose I don’t get why someone who claim to be communist would adhere in any way to capitalism knowing full well how much harm capitalism bought about.
But then I’m an anarchist so it’s not that surprising to me that a state would perpetuate oppressing power structures such as Capitalism or Police forces.
OMG Chick-fil-A becoming “woke” was the highlight of the week. 🤣
Tankie is a term coined by dissident socialists and communists to refer to authoritarian Stalinist/Maoist leftists who are hostile to libertarian or democratic leftist movements, or any other kind of democratic movement. Comparing it with “woke” (which has no well-defined meaning) is ridiculous.
The people who are labeled tankies are very much anti-democratic. Them being leftist or communist is actually not an issue at all. The problem is they either 1) Attempt to gaslight about authoritarian regimes (for example by claiming said regimes are not authoritarian, that their “elections” are real, or that everything is western propaganda), or 2) Unabashedly support these regimes, sometimes claiming that their victims “deserved” it.
Tankie was recouperated from dissident socialists, the way it’s used today has very little to do with its origin. Just because something starts out as a politically radical idea doesn’t mean it can’t get twisted in bourgeois society. It’s mostly just used as a smear to mean “communist I don’t like”
It’s like woke - what started as a term used by BLM to criticize oppression of minorities was recouperated and now it’s been turned into a right-wing smear and lost all meaning.
No, not at all. It simply means “Communist who supports oppression & authoritarianism”. European socialists, especially eastern Europeans, still use it in this exact same meaning to this day. The non-bourgeois workers & trade unionists who were subjected to decades of oppression under various Stalinist regimes also use it.
The entire argument is pointless and trite anyway. Most of the people in this thread taking offence at the term “tankie” do in fact support authoritarianism and are attempting to gaslight readers about it.
“support”
You keep using this word, but do you really think any of the people you call tankies have actually done anything to support these countries? Or, more likely, are you using “support” to mean “refuse to condemn/disavow”?
Well, count me in to that group.
I will not join the imperialist dogpile against China. My opinions about their government is irrelevant at best, and at worst by joining in the echo chamber of “China Bad!” then I am helping America pave the way for a war it so obviously wants.
If you want to call that support, then I have to ask why supposed “socialists” are joining America in attacking China!
I couldn’t care less if tankies “only” refused to condemn China/Russia/DPRK or whatever oppressive regime they think is anti-imperialist – indeed, I wouldn’t even describe this group as tankies. The cold-war “tankies” weren’t passive or neutral either.
The tankies you see here, even in this thread, actively dehumanize and gaslight people resisting these regimes, and attempt to delegitimize any act of resistance against them, even if indigenous. These are the kind of people who would smear actual leftist activists in Russia, China or Iran as “CIA Agents” in the hope that said regimes continue existing, to take revenge against the US. This worldview espouses that nobody has any agency except the US (and its authoritarian adversaries), because every opponent of these regimes has to be agent of the US.
Refusing to condemn something isn’t the same as lending support. Gaslighting people about the Tianamen Massacre, about the treatment of Uighurs, or about creeping authoritarianism in HK is, however, definitely a form of support.
Socialists who oppose the CCP tend to do that for entirely different reasons than the US. Not that there is much socialism to support there. Labour rights and protections under the CCP are inferior to the average European country, with the rampant 996 culture and very few instances of collective labor action, which is seen as undesirable and suppressed by the party.
As the saying goes, you can’t be neutral on a moving train.
By refusing to condemn China, I must therefore support it. That’s how it works. You can’t just be a third positionist about this and say “I oppose everybody with my own special snowflake socialism!”
My country managed to legislate better labor rights and worker protections under milquetoast SocDem governments than whatever the CCP managed to implement in China. So the CCP’s brand of “socialism” is not appealing to me.
This is literally the tankie position, so I’m not sure why modern tankies take offense at being labeled so. Even in 1968, socialists & communists disagreed over the squashing of the Prague Spring, but tankies now still demand unconditional loyalty for their anti-US crusade, with little regard for anything else.