CommunistCuddlefish [she/her] @hexbear.net

3d ago

Whence cometh all the anti-"tankie" hate all of a sudden?

Fine, I'll admit, I have a problem. I hear obvious bullshit and I sort of automatically filter it out because it's clearly bullshit and nobody will buy into it, and then sometimes it turns out it was actually a Really Big Deal that I probably should have paid some attention to. Made that mistake with Bitcoin, could have been rich but noooo, I ignored it because it was obviously dumb as hell. Another example: I distinctly remember going "What is this Gamergate shit? It'll probably blow over but let me try to see if there's a point to it" and then I got a booty-call from my then-girlfriend that her roommate was heading out to class so I went up to her dorm room, and that was the last I really paid attention to gamergate until years later when it turned out to have become a whole thing. My eyes would just glaze over anytime I saw the word because I basically went "oh yeah its that bullshit that dumbasses were losing their minds over and nobody cares about, I ain't got time to pay attention to that shit" and then it turns out it was actually this major flashpoint for the rise of the particularly bizarre new far right dweebs we get nowadays.

I did the same thing with "tankies". Never heard the term until maybe 2017? and largely ignored it. It just seemed to be a nothingburger, some new term for a few terminally online weirdos who hated Communists, and I assumed they were just fascists because you know who hated the Communists the most? Nazis. But then it spread and more people started using it, and then applying it more broadly (even Bernard Brethren are tankies, apparently?) which meant that it was such a varied term as to have no meaning. And I basically wrote off anyone hating on tankies as some dumbass who wasn't worth listening to because they were too ill informed to have anything of value to say.

It's probably not all of a sudden but it's really dawning on me that this is not some flash in the pan that'll just go away. I've been expecting it to just burn itself out because it's so obviously on its face bullshit. But, fast forward and the term seems to have taken on a whole life of its own. So many people hate on "tankies". Even anarchists I know irl hate on "tankies". Supposedly radical leftists hate on "tankies". I went on a date with an anarchist who started ragging on "tankies" and I just left because what even is that shit? It's become so prevalent I feel I can't ignore it anymore.

Don't support the NATO proxy war that's grinding up Ukrainian lives? Ebil tankie. Don't support genocide in Palestine? Ebil tankie. Wouldn't vote for Genocide Joe or Holocaust Harris? Ebil tankie. Not racist against Chinese people? Ebil tankie. Think Cuba and Venezuela are cool actually? Ebil tankie. Don't like NATO? Ebil tankie. Post on Hexbear? Ebil tankie.

I didn't grow up during the Cold War so idk how AmeriKKKan society was about Communists, but I don't remember any of this level of prevalent rabid anti-Communism from liberals and even people who fancy themselves as so-called radical leftists in like, 2000 - 2015. This is getting absurd and frankly baffling. Not too long ago a bunch of these same people were saying socialism is cool, war is bad, black and brown lives matter. But now all of a sudden it seems like you actually apply those slogans and you're an "ebil tankie".

What makes it seem extra insidious is that basically all of this seems to feed back into supporting USAdian warmongering and imperialism. Like, what is a "tankie"? When you ask people they'll say "Authoritarian Communists" but it really just seems that they call anyone who isn't deepthroating the boot of the AmeriKKKan Empire a "tankie".

How did this happen? What is going on?

92 comments

tankie just means "person to my left whom i disagree with". anyone using it is a moron and should be ignored
- 'Tankie' actually means 'a person who is correct'.
  
  -- correct too soon
  
  Or says facts/anything a person does not want to accept

its happening because china is ascending to hegemon status. You didnt hear it in 2000-2015 because the liberals still lived in the la la land of the end of history. Every time western supremacy gets damaged the more frothing, fascistic and anticommunistic the liberals will become

What makes it seem extra insidious is that basically all of this seems to feed back into supporting USAdian warmongering and imperialism. Like, what is a "tankie"? When you ask people they'll say "Authoritarian Communists" but it really just seems that they call anyone who isn't deepthroating the boot of the AmeriKKKan Empire a "tankie".
Ah yes, dronies.

In my opinion it was pushed by the USAID crowd who are now defunded.
I'll repost what I've said last time about it.
It means whatever it needs to mean in the context in which it is deployed.
It's a tool deployed by liberals against people to the left of them in exactly the same way that woke is a tool deployed by reactionaries against people to the left of them.
It gets deployed against everything from ML to anarchist to even socdems, depending on whether you say something that goes against the US' imperial core goals.
The purpose of the tool is thought-termination. To prevent people from listening to the person that it is deployed against. Reactionaries use woke to prevent people among their ranks from listening to anything reasonable the ""woke"" person might say, and liberals use tankie to prevent people among their ranks from listening to anything reasonable the left might say.
It is an adaptation of mccarthyite behaviour.
It's just used by everyone to attack everyone to the left of them. And any time you try to raise the issue with this they're like "no i only mean the people who defend authoritarian regimes" and then if you really dig into that it still means Trots, MLs and Maoists are all included, so basically almost all communists.
- This is a helpful explanation, thanks

History has been happening, and the people who banked on history not happening when they formed their worldviews are having a difficult time adjusting
- It does seem to have an element of seething and coping to it.

It's a symptom of one of the primary contradictions of reactionary thought: they cannot come up with new stuff, mostly ideas but even words evade them. So they glom onto some new word, twist the meaning to serve their stunted purposes, and say it often and loudly that (quite regrettably) it becomes the first time many people hear it.
Tankie was originally a left-on-left pejorative stemming from (mostly) Western left critics of supporters of a Soviet armed takeover of Hungary where there was lots of pictures of crowds facing soldiers and tanks. As that context faded from popular memory the word got picked up by anarchists as a slang for "authoritarian" left movements and, primarily, their supporters. In addition, for a long time during the cold war the propaganda of Soviet military was depicted as columns of tanks streaming across Europe. The West had the fancier planes and missiles. The West had the spy satellites and the wunderwaffe geegaws. The Soviets had tanks and rows of conscripts. The new horse for the modern asiatic horde was the tank. What's the most famous anti-CPC picture on Earth? Tank man in Tienanmen Square.
To be totally honest I am both extremely annoyed at anarchists for doing this but I can't blame them. The right was going to steal a word anyway because, as I mentioned before, they can't come up with fuck all on their own. So the anarchists could have called supporters of the Soviets "candy marshmallow sunshine bunnies" and the right would have stolen that.
So here we are, in the ever evolving internet space, where everyone is trying to come up with new words to describe things so they can seem like their argument is on the leading edge because it has the newest jargon. The word tankie makes a comeback. It's not new but it's new to most people. The right grabs it, spins it, and uses it as a broad brush. Those anarchists? Oh they're tankies now. Just like the librarians, the gay baristas, the democrats, anything that isn't a conservative nationalist chauvinistic conservative is tankie. Women divorcing men? Tankie. Trans people? Starts with a T just like Tankie does. On and on until they find the next word. Before DEI it was CRT. Before CRT it was Affirmative Action. (And so on and so forth
)
- Also remember "SJW" that was a fun one. Turning the very concept of fighting for social justice into an insult.
  
  I forgot about SJW. It's tough to keep track of their perpetual outrage manufacturing. It's like when you have a dog that barks at everything. Shit is annoying.
- This is the most interesting and insightful thing I've read on the internet for a very long time. Strong upvote.
- Before DEI it was CRT. Before CRT it was Affirmative Action. (And so on and so forth )
  As a disabled person (facial paralysis and TBI) my instinct is to feel offended that it seems like people only think DEI is about race. I get what you're trying to say, but Affirmative Action and CRT are not the same thing as DEI. CRT and Affirmative Action are fads that people come up with to make them feel good about themselves while they continue to be racist everywhere else in their life. DEI is about respect of all humans regardless of any differences and should be a basic part of being a decent human being. Yes, there is a racial component to it, but it's so much more.
  DEI is why I supported Target (until they showed their true colors) because they embraced it and I could walk in the store and feel like I was seen by them as a human being.
  I challenge anyone to walk alone into a new restaurant that you need to wait to be seated and see how long it takes for an employee to acknowledge you. I've had several times where I was alone and waited 15 minutes or longer to be acknowledged and we both knew we saw each other. Once I even waited 15 minutes, ended up getting seated and I waited another 15 minutes for someone to come and take my order before I left angry, frustrated, and feeling a great deal of shame. I never got to order and the place was empty with a few exceptions. DEI might have helped to prevent that or not 🤷🏻‍♂️
  
  I supported Target (until they showed their true colors)
  Target is a massive corporation that never hid its true colours. Its true colours: a massive forensics lab in a private-public partnership with the police to create a network of surveillance tied to facial recognition, racial profiling, and building enormous databases of biometric data on everyone in the US.
  Supporting them because you thought they saw you as a human being and not a resource to be exploited and a data point to be sold is just proof of how well you fell for the corporate DEI-washing they briefly underwent when it was in vogue and seen as profitable. Corporations, and especially the police lab that is Target, have never cared. They aren't people. They can't care.
  DEI (or IDEA, where I am, for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility) is about more than race, yes, but as a shibboleth for right-wing chuds it is the new AA, PC, CRT. Incantations they utter to summon the spectre of an insidious plot to dethrone white supremacy.
  
  There's a reason that when the right seized upon "DEI" they left the A behind from the original "DEIA." They are a perpetual outrage machine but even they realized that ranting about accessibility for the disabled would make them look more reprehensible than even they were comfortable with, which is already a lot because bigotry is their bread and butter. Or, maybe better but somehow worse, they didn't even bother to consider that because they care so little about the disabled that it never even crossed their minds. Hell it's probably a mix of both. And both suck.

It's just people programmed by anti-communist propaganda red-scare stuff. It's been cultivated for decades and switches on every time the empires thin layer of glitz starts to flake off.

The past few years my only standing prediction is that
will call someone a tankie and it will complete its transformation into meaning absolutely nothing
- I'm skeptical this will happen unless The Economist decides that "tankie" is posh and proper enough for them.
  Search engines claim it's been used once by the publication with a capital T in 2017, but I can't independently verify that

In my view, it has to do with the popularization of socialist as an identity following the movements around Bernie Sanders. This has happened with many other movements, too.
The problem with this kind of identity-first approach is that it does not actually disrupt oppression that much. A situation where the oppressor is against oppression in the abstract but also against liberation in the concrete is perfectly stable, some could argue the stablest form of oppressor ideology.
But there is a contradiction in this new identity: there are people with the same identity who are actually radical. This is resolved by creating this caricature of a fundamentally irrational fanatic (or slightly modifying an already existing one), equating it to a small fringe that is irrelevant in the larger movement. And then, when you come across any radicalism that you are supposedly for, you have a way to explain it as irrational without having to engage with it.

I feel like 2000 - 2015 represented an atypical lull in the overtly frothing anticommunism that has dominated US culture for the past hundred years. We’re just returning to the historical average level of red scare jingoism. I’d speculate that the 2000-2015 period was different for two reasons:
the imperial consensus at the time was that the US had comprehensively “defeated global communism”, that any current or former socialist state had been permanently reduced to resource extraction nodes for the imperial marketplace, and that the US was the undisputed global military hegemon for the rest of time
the pivot to the terror war refocused the imperial hate machine onto Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism, and the need to destabilize any noncompliant state in West Asia that stood between the US and free resource extraction. Fixating on dated Cold War jingoism was seen an old fashioned distraction from the New Threat of “the terrorists” and an impediment to imperial businesses reaping the spoils from a submissive and liberalized Russia and China.
By 2016 there weren’t many functioning anti-imperialist states left intact in West Asia and the broad cultural appeal of the eternal terror-war had mostly worn off. Russia and China were beginning to look less like submissive imperial resource nodes and more like independent states that could potentially one day contest the presumed eternal US military and economic hegemony. Russiagate and the Clinton campaign’s shocking self-sabotage created a once in a generation opportunity to get contemporary Democrats fully reinvested in the 1980s style red scare anticommunism and orientalism that Republicans had never really let go. Putin became the new Bin Laden, Xi became the new Saddam Hussein, “tankies” became the new “terrorist sympathizers” and the rest is history.
- By 2016 there weren’t many functioning anti-imperialist states left intact in West Asia and the broad cultural appeal of the eternal terror-war had mostly worn off. Russia and China were beginning to look less like submissive imperial resource nodes and more like independent states that could potentially one day contest the presumed eternal US military and economic hegemony. Russiagate and the Clinton campaign’s shocking self-sabotage created a once in a generation opportunity to get contemporary Democrats fully reinvested in the 1980s style red scare anticommunism and orientalism that Republicans had never really let go. Putin became the new Bin Laden, Xi became the new Saddam Hussein, “tankies” became the new “terrorist sympathizers” and the rest is history.
  Fascinating. The War on Terror years were formative for my development of political consciousness so this is a helpful comparison.

Shit is getting worse, more people (mostly online) get radicalized into far-left (sometimes vulgar) politics, becomes more noticeable to centrists and liberals, they pick up the old-school anti-ussr term and vulgarize it into meaninglessness to use against their opponents

I remember being called a pinko quite a few times until 2023 which is when I became a tank.

USAID ops found alternate funding

Does anyone actually use the term "tankie" outside of Lemmy/fediverse?
- you see it in soft left spaces on twitter and reddit
- It was one of the main insults used in Leftbook a decade ago. I've heard it used in person by the most stereotypical redditors as well.
- I used to be in an online group with a lot of radlibs and they used it a lot
- Shows up sometimes on reddit when they're punching left

With the rate of cultural turnover these days it's impossible to stay on top of it all and figure out which one of the plethora of batshit things are important. And if you do try then 99% of your mental capacity gets wasted.
If you can tolerate the plot it might be best to just see it all as an entertaining story about humanity that you can tune into when you're not focussed on immediate and real things like being present with the people you love, your health and your home.

To liberals, it just means "anybody to my left that I disagree with."
To anarchists, it's any statist tendencies, which I think was the original use.
It picked up in popularity with liberals when leftism started to trend after the 2016 dem primary
- The original use was almost painfully specific - supported the deployment of tanks in response to the Hungarian revolution. It's been around for a while.
- As Blakey said, the original use was coined by UK trots as a slur against anybody that supported the USSR's response to the Hungarian uprising in the 70's
  
  the CIA-backed uprising and it was the 50s wasn't it?

It's another propagandist red scare campaign.

Dawg for real, I don't even know what a tankie is but I guess your last paragraph described what it could be. I feel the bitcoin thing, I was in 9th grade and one coin was ~$30. I wanted to buy some but didn't bother wasting my allowance on it. Ops, guess I should have

From an outside perspective, it's overuse of the term tankie. If someone is getting called a tankie for supporting Palestine over Israel due to the genocide of Palestinians thats just inaccurate.
From when people are being reasonable, I primarily see the term tankie associated with people who are pro China and Russia to the point where they ignore all the horrible shit going on, basically the exact opposite of a super patriotic American who ignores all the horrible shit that America does.
It should definitely just cover authorarian communist countries but it's drastic overuse when it doesn't apply. I don't think being generally fine with Cuba or whatever should be an issue, what little I've heard about Cuba recently it seems to be pretty nice.
- If someone is getting called a tankie for supporting Palestine over Israel due to the genocide of Palestinians thats just inaccurate.
  Correct. Good take.
  From when people are being reasonable, I primarily see the term tankie associated with people who are pro China and Russia
  No one that I can think of with any flavour of leftist supports Russia. If anything, it's the exact opposite. Usually it's hard right types that take Russia's side. Unless you're confusing "being against pointless NATO aggression" with "supporting Russia". Like come on, is every critique of the Western military going to met "X [foreign adversary] supporter".
  China
  China isn't invading anyone or starting foreign wars. If you look around Hexbear, you'll see people giving "critical support", ie defense against bullshit but criticism of their mistakes. Literally no one thinks that China is anywhere near perfect communism.
  
  Nah, we don't do "critical support" for China. That's reserved for enemies who are forced into our corner in a larger context (like Russia right now). And even then, what is critical support anyways? Just reserving some future retraction of support? So its support now until conditions change. But that is all support, I think? I support China. They may be slightly too slow/conservative in their approach, but this will only be possible to determine afterwards. Given the context of the world as it is, I can't imagine criticizing China for anything except not being far enough ahead of the rest, which is absurd because they are ahead, just not as much as some western Marxists believe they should be
  
  I would suspect a number of the super left wing people claiming Russia good are perhaps lying about their general political beliefs, and some also probably have been misled. It's very clear that the war was started by Russia, again, and it isn't the first second or I think even third time they've invaded Ukraine.
  China is.. an interesting case. They've certainly done a lot of damage, but I also can't name a major country that hasn't. I don't think China is any worse than America, just different issues. It's probably better than America specifically right now.
  I think a lot of the push back is from people who are unaware of just what the US has done, and the US has done a lot of shit and fucked with a lot of other countries, even their own allies.
  If this seems a bit jumbled, I'm at work and the first half of this reply at least an hour older than the second half.
- I think you'd find this interesting : https://redsails.org/tankies/
  
  That was a good read, thank you!
- I primarily see the term tankie associated with people who are pro China and Russia to the point where they ignore all the horrible shit going on,
  Regarding Russia, there are two groups - (1) a very small number of confused people who unconditionally suppport Russia because they confuse it with the USSR and haven't looked at the economic and political changes that have happened over the last thirty years, and (2) a broader section of the left which sees a Russian victory in Ukraine as the lesser evil compared to a never-ending war that will cause much more death and suffering.
  Regarding China, they have lifted more people out of poverty in the last fifty years, and are doing more to fight climate change now, than the rest of the world combined. It is one thing to criticise specific Chinese policies or actions, but anyone who does not acknowledge the good they have done cannot be taken seriously.

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