I’m sure this is a super common question but why do people (generally liberals or sometimes people on the left) call basically everyone who mildly agree with current more authoritarian leaning socialist states tankies
I wouldn’t nessicarily call myself a tankie but I can also fully understand why people feel that label fits them when so many people call so many perspectives tankie perspectives and just shove them in a corner
Not sure if that makes sense as a question but I hope it does
we’re to their left and that hurts their feelings
For the same reason we were called “pinkos” and “commies” and “reds” during the Cold War. It’s a meaningless epithet only designed to otherize and marginalize anyone opposing imperialism and siding with real socialist and anti-imperialist forces.
You can look at it just like any other perjorative used against someone who poses a threat to the ruling class and the status quo.
When people who ostensibly call themselves leftists start calling you these names, that’s just a way for them to signal to the ruling class that they are not like you, that they are part of the obedient ones, that they do not pose a real threat, that they are a system-compatible opposition that the ruling class can ignore or even reward.
This is very good and I am going to weaponize this idea against liberals.
"You think of me as a Taknie? oh thank you for the complement, Its so nice that there is a word which obedient workers who are not a threat to the exploitation class can use to point out trouble makers like me who are not willing to knuckle under.
It’s essentially a pejorative for “communist.” I recommend the Prolewiki article on “Tankies,” as well as Nia Frome’s essay “Tankies.”
As for authoritarianism, it’s not really something that you lean more or less, but which class controls the state and what conditions the state is in. Socialist states wield authority against capitalists and fascists, and protect against imperialists. They are forced into more extreme measures the more endangered they are, magnified by imperialist aggression.
authoritarian
My response about a year ago: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5459443/4950749
All governance is authoritarian; the question is who are they authoritarian against.
In liberal democracies they are democracies for capital and authoritarian against the proleteriat - especially in the west they will be authoritarian against the workers of the Global South through imperialism. In these capitalist dictatorships they engage in electoralism as a pressure valve of discontent for the masses and claim this political theatre counts as a democracy.
Now consider actual existing socialist states surviving the siege by the West against socialism, under hybrid wars. These socialist states have a deeper understanding of democracy, a whole people’s democracy that goes beyond theatrical electoralism (though if we are counting numbers then China has the largest voting electorate in the world). They are dictatorships of the proleteriat against capital.
In the west you can vote for whichever party you want and critcise whoever you want as long as it is not considered a threat to western capital and hegemony.
Westerners with a straight face will tell you they have more freedom while an Australian journalist was tortured in the UK because he exposed USAmerican war crimes.
These westerners have perceived freedoms because their actions are not considered a threat but if they find themselves on the wrong side of that perceived safety they will quickly be nullified - bank accounts frozen, media character assasination, imprisonment, torture and murder.
Authoritarianism often ends up being meaningless as a term because it is used as a slur for designated western threats.
For further reading I would consider Losurdo’s take on totalitarianism where he tackles the virulently racist Arendt’s concept of it (which was made popular in the west):
https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-totalitarianism/
Also by Losurdo:
https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-china/
(And if you want a direct comparison of a capitalist vs socialist democracy consider India vs China respectively - they have similar timeframes (ie when british formally left India) and population sizes)
Hope that helped
Tankie’ was originally used in context of the Hungarian counter-revolution of 1956, which described the pro-Soviet people living in Hungary as ‘tankies’, because the Soviets brought tanks into Hungary in order to stop the Nazi-led counterrevolutionaries.
Prolewiki: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Tankie
Tankies don’t usually believe that Stalin or Mao “did nothing wrong,” although many do use that phrase for effect (this is the internet, remember). We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the bourgeois politicians who are typically put forward as role models (Washington? Jefferson? JFK? Jimmy Carter?), and that they haven’t been judged according to the same standard as those bourgeois politicians. People call this “whataboutism”, but the claim “Stalin was a monster” is implicitly a comparative claim meaning “Stalin was qualitatively different from and worse than e.g. Churchill,” and I think the opposite is the case. If people are going to make veiled comparisons, us tankies have the right to answer with open ones.
Frome: https://redsails.org/tankies/
Why are there so many trans tankies? What is the beef between trans studies and queer theory? This essay proposes to answer both questions at once by identifying homologies between trans (and other) criticisms of queer theory and Marxist-Leninist criticisms of Western Marxism.
Frome, again: https://redsails.org/the-problem-of-recognition-in-transitional-states/
Though I have included snippets here, all the articles in those links are well worth a read (and Frome is an excellent source).
If the third link is a bit too dense, then I would go through George Politzer’s Elementary Principles of Philosophy first to better understand dialectical materialism (DM) though I have recently been recommended Adoratsky’s Dialectical Materialism (an online search for pdfs should net you a copy):
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Elementary_principles_of_philosophy
A potential fuller reading list on DM is (I have included my personal summary understanding of DM below, which I may update over time):
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9962669/7401956
Dialectical materialism = a way of analysis that focuses on contradictions as engines driving change in a given direction to produce a deeper science. Dialectics allows us to understand relationships and materialism grounds it in reality. The material always come before the idea. It is teleological, not positivist and is the enemy of idealism.
Our affinity for science, even as an aesthetic, helps distance trans people from the techno-pessimism evident in much of Western Marxism
Awesome
Rabid anticommunism. There is really isn’t more to it than people calling you a dirty commie. People just come up with new insults since the contradictions of capitalism are so appearant.
On Lemmy it’s a lot easier to clock people as communists since you only need to check what instance they are from instead of digging through their posting history.
The best response is: damn I wish we had tanks.
Empty signifiers are an easy way to obscure reality.
This comment is to clear up some miscommunication I believe I may have not stated clearly in my post that I am now noticing
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I dont have a problem with the more “authoritarian” communists
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I was just curious how the term expanded from it’s original meaning
3.I don’t have a problem being called a tankie but I was curious why I kept having the term be used when I was not referring to something that seemed like fit the older versions of the term and did not involve the USSR at all
You’re all good. It’s good to ask and clarify. Sometimes responses are often also for those who maybe lurking but too afraid to ask. Hope my walls of text weren’t too much. I too am learning.
Not too much, I just felt the need to clarify because I realized it could be misinterpreted as me being against something I in no way am against
For 3: Words are not allowed to have complex meanings and still be used in a widespread fashion
Fair enough
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We tankies
As I stated I have no problem with the label it just seems to be used on alot
Hakim explains it in this video
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I keep being surprised that people on here seem to have an issue with that nickname. Have a look at the lemmygrad logo.
I think tanks as a visual symbol of authoritarianism kinda make sense. No idea where the link to socialism comes from though.
We don’t actually have an issue with the label, just the strawman version of a Red Scare nightmare the label entails. Lots of us call ourselves tankies, but when it’s used as an insult and a caricature to terminate discussion it becomes a problem.
“Tankie” was a pejorative for Marxists that support socialism in real life then as well as now. It originated in the Communist Party of Great Britain. The term was coined because of the British tendency towards silly-sounding insults, and because the Soviet Union sent in the Red Army to stop the western-backed fascist insurrection. This caused a split in the party (as it always does in western orgs).
The Hungarian revolt in 1956 was infested with anti-semitic pograms. MI6 funded, supplied, and trained the Hungarian counter-revolutionaries. These counter-revolutionaries were allied with fascists who were lynching Jewish people and Communists. The Truth About Hungary by Herbert Aptheker heavily relies on citing western sources like the New York Times. Aptheker backs up his claims heavily.
"The special correspondent of the Yugoslav paper, Politika, (Nov. 13, 1956) describing the events of those days, said that the homes of Communists were marked with a white cross and those of Jews with a black cross, to serve as signs for the extermination squads. “There is no longer any room for doubt,” said the Yugoslav reporter, “it is an example of classic Hungarian fascism and of White Terror. The information,” continued this writer, “coming from the provinces tells how in certain places Communists were having their eyes put out, their ears cut off, and that they were being killed in the most terrible ways.”
“But the forces of reaction were rapidly consolidating their power and pushing forward on the top levels, while in the streets the blood of scores of massacred Communists, Jews, and progressives was flowing.”
“Some of the reports reaching Warsaw from Budapest today caused considerable concern. These reports told of massacres of Communists and Jews by what were described as 'Fascist elements’ …” (N.Y. Times, Nov. 1. 1956)
“The evidence is conclusive that the entry of Soviet troops into Budapest stopped the execution of scores, perhaps thousands of Jews, for by the end of October and early November, anti-Semtic pogroms - hallmark of unbridled fascistic terror - were making their appearance, after an absence of some ten years, within Hungary.”
"A correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Maariv (Tel Aviv) reported:
During the uprising a number of former Nazis were released from prison and other former Nazis came to Hungary from Salzburg . . . I met them at the border . . . I saw anti-Semitic posters in Budapest . . . On the walls, street lights, streetcars, you saw inscriptions reading: “Down with Jew Gero!” “Down with Jew Rakosi!” or just simply “down with the Jews!”
Leading rabbinical circles in New York received a cable early in November from corresponding circles in Vienna that “Jewish blood is being shed by the rebels in Hungary.” Very much later-in February, 1957-the World Jewish Congress reported that “anti-Semitic excesses occurred in more than twenty villages and smaller provincial towns during the October-November revolt.” This occurred, according to this very conservative body, because “fascist and anti-Semitic groups had apparently seized the opportunity, presented by the absence of a central authority, to come to the surface.” Many among the Jewish refugees from Hungary, the report continued, had fled from this anti-Semitic pogrom-like atmosphere (N.Y. Times, Feb. 15, 1957). This confirmed the earlier report made by the British Rabbi, R. Pozner, who, after touring refugee camps, declared that “the majority of Jews who left Hungary did so for fear of the Hungarians and not the Russians.” The Paris Jewish newspaper, Naye Presse, asserted that Jewish refugees in France claimed quite generally that Soviet soldiers had saved their lives."
Further, the CIA also backed Hungarian resistance forces:
Prague in 1968 was a similar fascist uprising in both cases there were some elements of progressive protest, but these were greatly overshadowed by the fascist movements. Dubcek wanted to sell out to the IMF, and restore capitalism. The idea that any of this was about “democracy” or “freedom” is silly, it was always about Cold War tactics to destabilize socialism.
TL;DR imagine if the January 6th rioters were armed and trained by foreign governments, started lynching officials and Jewish people, and the US sent in the army to put down the insurrection. The MAGA chuds would claim that it was about “freedom” and “democracy,” but we all know that they just wanted Trump in office.
Nowadays, it’s used by any random anti-communist to refer to anyone that supports socialist states or doesn’t buy into the imperialist narrative about global south countries. It was the ones they call “tankies” that knew the stories of WMD and Saddam’s forces leaving babies outside of incubators were both bullshit to manufacture consent for war, but now that its decades later the anti-communists all suddenly have collective amnesia about their willing participation in spreading the lies of empire to murder hundreds of thousands of people.
I recommend the Prolewiki article on “Tankies,” as well as Nia Frome’s essay “Tankies.” That should give you a more well-rounded view.
Great sources! Thank you, comrade!
No, thank you! I always learn from your comments, comrade.
Starred! (Thanks for taking the time)
No problem!
Top notch comment.
I also want to add I too really like Frome’s articles on tankies; I think they’re generally an excellent essayist and their twitter/xcancel are quite thought provoking too; really helped me understand marxism better.
I feature Nia Frome’s work quite prominently in my ML reading list, I agree!
never knew that story, I’m gonna wear the insult with pride
and of course, like most radlibs, they probably don’t/didn’t read or don’t care and continue gurgling State Department truth like it’s the sweet, sweet nectar of life.
Maybe they did, but I can’t help but feel like this beautifully written passage fell on deaf ears.
I share this somewhat frequently over on Lemmy.ml, sometimes it seems to actually break through a bit.
That’s good. I have had a lot of experience with talking to red maga and blue maga and genuinely radlibs are the hardest to break-through to. I really don’t know what it is that makes some radlibs go hardcore on the U.S state department garbage. I had a talk with one this morning about China and even if you just ram statistics and sources into their face they’re full-tilt on the “perfidious asians” even if they don’t say it like that.
Shit is frustrating, thanks for you service Cowbee!
Generally, radlibs materially benefit from the system enough for it to actually work for them, thus they license themselves into believing “DNC good.” Without reading theory and without feeling like the DNC isn’t working, they kinda stick around there. Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of “Brainwashing” is essential reading IMO.
And thanks!
We wear the name with pride as we understand socialism is a science, not the empty idealism of racist Westerners who are more than happy to echo the imperialist talking points and look down their nose on the systems of socialist governance of the Global South that attempt to withstand the ongoing brutal siege by the West.
If you actually want to learn:
No idea where the link to socialism comes from though.
From actually existing socialist nations and not from LARP newspaper orgs or chauvinistic anarchists who have yet to form an actual socialist project that is both successful and lasting.
