6d ago

Context Rule

27 comments

Na, this shit annoys me so much..
Tankies AREN'T communists.
The core of communism is having a stateless, classless, moneyless society.
None of them want that, nor did any of the states they support achieve it.
What they are is authoritarian bootlickers (which by definition is a concept that cannot coexist with communism) LARPING as communists to try and gain support and with it power for themselves and their authoritarian ways.
Tankies love to whine about how calling them that gives communism a bad name, but it isn't us calling them what they are which does that, it's their insistence of co-opting and hiding behind communism in the same way Xi does, and in the same way Hitler did with socialism (and even in the same way western nations co-opt the idea of democracy, or worse socialised democracy, to hide the fact that they are oligarchies) that is what gives communism its bad name (along with McCarthyism of course, but at least they're not trying to claim they are the thing they behave antithetically to)
- amen. Socialism by definition requires the workers to own the means of production, and yet all the states they support again and again suppress unions and democracy. Rather tired of being associated with them just because people are confused about most political terms
  
  Yup.
  I've had piles of tankies try to convince me that the workers in China are in fact the ones in control of the government (no mention of the means of production though 🤔), and that shit like there being over 90 million members of the party is evidence of that (rather than of oh, I donno, a dictatorship?)..
  It's the oldest trick in the fascist book, hell, the father of fascism himself made the exact same move - started on the left, then co-opted and distorted its ideas to gain power for himself and his in group, and it's their favourite trick because it fucking works, because as a society we have been indoctrinated by those in power for a good couple of thousands of years that we NEED someone in power to survive, which again, is completely antithetical to actual leftist ideas (and human nature).
  It would be funny if it wasn't so dangerously effective.
  
  They got the idea that unions don't exist under communism, but they glossed over the fact that that is because you don't need workers to form a block against capital when there is no capital.
- The core of communism is having a stateless, classless, moneyless society.
  None of them want that, nor did any of the states they support achieve it.
  PREACH.
  I've had to explain this one to some friends and family.
  North Korea calls themselves a democracy. But we can all agree that when there's only one motherfucker on the ballot, what you have is NOT a democracy, right? Calling yourself something doesn't make it true.
  So when a country calls themselves communist but has suicide nets on their fucking factories, the same shit applies. Communism has a definition, and a society can fail to meet that definition while still claiming to be communist.
- These are cults of personality which revolve around dead men and their supposed successors, ripe for manipulation.
  I think it was Frank Herbert who stated that he wrote the Dune series as a cautionary tale against charismatic leaders.
  
  I agree with you about the cult of personality, but they definitely don't just stick to dead men (I've seen not only defence of Xi, but of the Kims, too, it's obscene).
  I'm not actually in to Dune, never watched any of it, but good to know it has that message, and also explains why it gets a lot of love on lemmy lol
- Fuck yes. All of this.

Yeah I have a feeling not being on twitter made me miss a transformation in the definition used in popular discourse. This one aligns with the more traditional definition and I’m not sure it’s useful to have it being used in a totally different way without any signal to differentiate the two.
- let’s invent a signal
  tankies (traditional sense) versus tankies (“i just want to use insults against people to the left of me” sense)
  196 and i have literally always used the traditional sense.
  
  For some reason I don’t think that will be catchy enough to spur adoption
- I have almost never seen anyone use it in a nontraditional sense. What I have seen are people on hexbear and other ML instances try to muddy the water and imply that people will call anyone tankies.
  This behavior is very similar to when neonazis accuse others of misusing the terms fascist or Nazi when they are rightly called such.
  If you have examples of people using tankie incorrectly, please link. If you don't have examples, please document the next time you see it happen and correct the person's misuse.
  EDIT: I've gone ahead and done some cursory searching in this comment. Please share that comment if this claim is brought up again by someone else. This claim needs to be proven or falsified, as it keeps being brought up over and over without any receipts being shown.
  
  I unblocked.world temporarily for you, searched “tankie,” and sorted by all time.
  Second post is someone equivocating not supporting biden with being a tankie.
  So is all time top post number 10 and 12
  16 is a a highly selective (lots of … to piece it together) mlk quote with a title that seems to imply tankies don’t want a change in the system???
  So 4/20 (20% also hehe blaze it) of the all time top posts mentioning “tankie” in the title seem to misuse it. I do think it was more common during election season but that may be because I filtered out .world posts awhile back. Come to think of it my post search count above may be off because I have some words and users blocked, but that would likely make it an underestimate not an over-estimate.

27 comments