Michael Parenti, from Blackshirts and Reds:
During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
I’m an anarchist who gets called a tankie on Reddit for using the word “imperialism” and I approve this meme
Nah g I’m not a fan of anybody who makes excuses for genocide, oppression of LGBTQIA+ folks, “forced resettlement”, or authoritarianism in general.
Tankies are nowhere near as bad as the far right but they’re hardly allies. Historically, any time authoritarian leftists have taken control they’ve murdered all the anti-authoritarian leftists they could find in order to cement their power.
Fun fact Cuba is currently the best for LGBT rights, and the reunification of Germany dragged east germany decades back in LGBT progress… just some food for thought
That fictional tankie in your head living rent-free would like you to defederate
Are you saying they are the same, or that people think that they are the same? I’ve seen the meme used both ways
I believe the point is that they’re equally vague knee jerk reactions to seeing trigger phrases and relevant social signifiers, as opposed to legitimate and useful political categories
What would you call people in favor of even authoritarian communism? (Such as in the USSR and China?)
Communist, Socialist, on the right side of history, feel free to take you pick from the 3
downvoting it doesn’t make it any less true :)
WFT is wrong with you?
I read books 😱😱
i’ve read marx. at precisely no point does he say anything justifying the various atrocities state capitalist countries have committed. i think he’s wrong about some stuff, but even if you accept that his word is gospel, tankies are still just people who took leftist principles as an excuse for the imposing the kind of brutal authoritarianism that leftists are supposed to be against.
If you’ve read Marx, then you’ve surely read Engels as well?
On Authority - Marxists Internet Archive https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
you expect liberals or anarchists to have read the ENTIRE PAMPHLET, if they did that how would they be able to blindly call us athoritarian, with no real understanding of the word.
Sounds like you struggle with nuance.
Tankies are a very specific subset of “the left”.
They support stalinist policies specifically.
Thats very narrow in comparison to a vague “the left”
ed. downvote me, idgaf. But maybe reply, discuss your position
Nothing eliminates more nuance than viewing some of the broadest and most substantial social upheavals in world history through the lens of Great Man Theory. To write off the struggles and sacrifice of millions of people, their successes and their failures, and lay them at the feet of one man. To treat history like this is to believe that the vast majority of its participants are unthinking, uncritical beats of burden with a predisposition to subservience. (The same applies to contemporary “hate the government, not the people” discourse, in which we are to assume the majority of Chinese citizens are helpless, brainwashed victims of totalitarianism)
When you treat history like this, you open up a lot of convenient shortcuts for yourself. You can claim that the October revolution was a much needed intervention, but then drop it immediately after the honeymoon period is over with some hamstrung claim that Stalin was too stupid or too selfish to understand what Lenin was trying to accomplish, or maybe Lenin himself was too stupid to understand Marx and the whole project was doomed. Or that we would be living in fully automated luxury communism right now if Trotsky had taken power.
None of this discourse delves into the actual social or economic conditions involved, nor the theory and practices which emerged from the crucible of revolution. Most importantly, it never makes any attempt to LEARN from this history, so previous mistakes can be avoided, and so proven effective strategies can be developed further and incorporated into contemporary struggles. It is navel gazing bullshit which conveniently discards the whole thing. The only lesson you learn from this treatment of history is that revolution leads to dystopia and that we shouldn’t even bother. The takeaway we end up with is that the people who disintegrated the Third Reich and put the first humans into space were better off when they were a backwards feudal monarchy.
And today, among the English-speaking online left, any time somebody comes along and argues “You know what, maybe we shouldn’t stick the entire history of the USSR or the PRC into a furnace. There are some valuable lessons in here.” they get derided as a Tankie by some vote blue no matter who sicko. Lots of people throwing the word “authoritarian” around who have never had to confront the sharp end of the US state once in their lives.
best reply in the thread
nuance
But maybe reply, discuss your position
I’m going to take this point in good faith, even though I disagree with it. The people that scream “tankie” often use the word in exactly the same meaningless way that the people who scream “woke” do, then they claim it has a specific meaning but clearly apply it very very broadly to basically anyone who is a marxist and waves a red flag.
But, since you suggest you’re willing to get into nuance. I’m going to throw reel off a few groups, people and countries. Would you mind telling me which ones you consider tankie and evil, vs which ones you consider good?
The Black Panthers
Fred Hampton
Huey Newton
Albert Einstein
Nelson Mandela
Che Guevara
Fidel Castro
Thomas Sankara
Chavez
Cuba
Venezuela
Bolivia
Vietnam
Laos
Nepal
Nicaragua
Angola
Kerala district of India (governed by the Communist Party of India)
It’s ok to not know one way or another too btw, I’m just interested in a “tankie” “not tankie” “never heard of them” response on each of them.
People aren’t shouting “tankie” at you. You people are self identifying as tankies.
The shouting came before the self identifying.
Saying tankie is tongue-in-cheek, or simply to upset the people that scream it constantly. I’m a marxist-leninist, formerly an anarchist. I would still be an anarchist if climate change weren’t putting a time limit on the need to get something done too. I decided that I could not sit by knowing hundreds of millions of people were going to die in 30 years (closer now tbh but it was a few years ago that I moved to a leninist toolkit now) while also knowing that anarchism was not equipped to generate the needed revolutions required to save any of those lives. Marxism-leninism and dem-cent parties on the other hand have a proven track record of creating revolution within that kind of timeframe.
I will probably return to anarchism when such timelimits are not in effect. It’s just not morally justifiable for me to sit around using a toolkit that’s not equipped for the time limit when we know what we know.
Just a thought, maybe it came with the fawning over of Putin and the CCP?
God this is so boring mate. It didn’t. Nobody likes Russia. Russia is a capitalist shit hole. The only takes that the left has which is used to claim we support Russia is that the war was caused by nato and that pouring weapons into does nothing to save any lives, on the contrary it just enriches the billionaires to the military industrial complex and vastly increases the number of deaths on both sides.
China on the other hand we have some nuanced takes on but because you all know absolutely nothing about it and behave like they’re animals incapable of independent thought and self-governance discussing anything with you ends up a case of bashing our heads against a wall because you don’t have real conversations about it. You don’t listen and don’t learn anything. You don’t even say the name of the party correctly (it’s cpc not ccp). If I told you 95% of Chinese citizens are happy with and support their government you’d claim I’m wrong and when I provide evidence for that you’d claim it’s only because of propaganda/information control and when I provide evidence that it’s not because of that you’d find some new deflection or topic to divert to. So what’s the point?
On the offchance you actually want that nuanced discussion we can have it but you need to start behaving more academic and stop talking like a terminally online reddit teenager. Come on.
as a woke leftist, i hate tankies because y’all aren’t leftists in any meaningful sense. the only difference between you and libs is which countries whose atrocities you justify.
“Name two social housing projects built by the Democrats in the past ten years.”- A lemmygrad user who replied to you but you cannot see.
Hey, would you mind telling me how many homeless people there are in, Sweden raw number or pecentage of population your choice. When we are done, I will post Cuba’s rate and we can compare
Weird meme this one. I’m 100% against tankies, or at least the type of communist here who seems hellbent on defending regimes like the Chinese communist party or (especially weird) Putin’s Russia. There’s plenty of stuff wrong about western nations, but that is no excuse for defending dictators and authoritarian regimes. And I’m definitely not the angry pepe in the image, because by all classifications I would be part of the “woke left”.
I think communism is a fantastic idea but don’t think it’s truly workable in practice, regrettably. True democratic socialism seems more realistic, but also has problems. But being a communist and then just defending all communists regardless of what they’re doing is problematic.
Wait until you find out capitalism doesn’t work in practice
What’s your opinion of Nelson Mandela? The man wrote a book(although a revision of another book) called “How to be a good communist” and the very first line of that book is:
A Communist is a member of the Communist Party who understands and accepts the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism as explained by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin , and who subjects himself to the discipline of the Party. (See notes 1, 2, 3 & 4)
I never said I was 100% against the idea of communism, nor against people who think it’s a good idea. I’m simply against the subset of commies that seems to blindly defend horrible regimes like the Chinese communist party. And sadly the latter seems well represented here, which is the group I’d refer to as tankies.
