this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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These "tankies" are conservative right-wing shitbag trolls trying to convince the normal people that supporting oppression and dictators is somehow "left-wing". Do not fall for their conservative bullshit.
Just like any other conservative, every word they utter is deception or manipulation. Tankies are conservative trolls through and through.
That's a no true Scotsman argument.
There are plenty of actual tankies here. In fact, the Lemmy software is created by tankies and one of the larger Lemmy instances is run by them.
From what I've seen, there's a big divide amongst the tankies. There are those who are basically Stalin MAGA, base their political opinions on Soviet aesthetics and don't consider much the practical implications of their actions. Some simply lash out against mainstream liberal ideology and others are just trolls.
Ane the other camp is made of people who read a lot of communist philosophy and are absolutely convinced the only way to achieve an equal society is by forcing everyone into it. This has its own problems, but they at least have an internally coherent ideology.
That's not to say I agree with either camp. Their ideology promotes a vanguard party which can quickly spiral into "some are more equal than others". Absolute power corrupts absolutely and all that. But I do understand where the second camp is coming from. I think the path to a better world lies in trade unions and people coming together to defend common interests.
When they are actively censoring and banning people who make critical comments about the PRC, the USSR, or even present day Russia, I don't care where they come from.
I was banned from lemmy.ml myself for saying something about the Tiananmen Square massacre.
How did this even happened? How can anyone not right-wing ban for opposing Putin's oligarchs like Usmanov, Roldugin, Rotenberg, Yakunin and Putin himself?
West bad, not-West good
That's literally all they care about.
If you push them they yell "just joking bro" or ban you immediately.
I was just banned from leftymemes because I was having a conversation about Democrats. They essentially said that the Democrats suck because they don't want to sink the levels of depravity of the Alt-Right. I pretty much said, whatever happened to "Be the Change you want to see?" They want a government that works together. You can't do that be being savage, raving, lying lunatics like the Alt-Right.
Apparently that's enough to get you banned by the Alt-Left. Fuck them
When a term becomes an insult, it's very difficult to use it as anything other than an insult.
I more often see "tankie" used to decribe anti-war liberals than pro-war leftists.
There are two useful tests when evaluating the value of words like this:
Do people use it as a form of self-identification? If they do, that's probably the real definition. If they don't it's probably just an insult.
Does the word have a consistent definition? If the definition frequently shifts to suit the needs of the speaker, it's probably not a real definition.
I really like your first point! Second one is a little tricky. It's not just a fluctuation with an individual, but rather the difference between groups. Bottom line, the consistent definition depends on your own exposure to it, if you're not going by what others claim to be "is the most frequent."
The second one is definitely a bit trickier.
I think there are two major forms of inconsistency that matter most.
When the parties in a conversation use different definitions for a word, they will just argue in circles. They may both have good points but neither party will understand the other. That's often fairly easy to resolve, "I can understand your point if we use your definition of X. We can also see how my point stands if we use my definition of X. How about we call them X1 and X2 so we don't get confused?"
When one party uses different definitions of the word it's fair to ask them to pick one or to be explicit about when they're shifting definitions. When someone says, "I believe Y because X is TRUE and I believe Z because X is NOT TRUE," they've introduced a huge logical hole which needs to be addressed.
Both r/conservative and lemmy.ml are equally frightened of facts.
In my own experience with actual Communists (I do live in a country which has them), they're some of the most conservative people around.
I mean, these people are holding on really hard to political slogans which often are a century old or near it and they genuinelly an uncritically think all that stuff is Leftwing even in the face of all evidence that such forms invariably led to the creating of new Elites and to lesser or greater extent Dystopian Societies, never the promised Equalitarian Utopia.
Plenty of Lefties around who trully believe in Leftwing Principles without the insane tribalism of following the dictats of The Party.
Personally I just saw this meme as referencing such traditionalist unthinking muppets who think of themselves as Lefties all the while defending the well installed and entrenched establishment and elites of a few specific countries.
Russia was and is a culturally conservative country. The USSR made some early progress towards equality for women and LGBT folk, and turned it right back around a bit later. Russification under the Czar--trying to get all the diverse ethnic minorities to just be Russian--was simply turned into a Stalinist version of the same thing. The fundamental authoritarianism of the Czar never left, but it was given a Marxist coat of paint.
Not even completely true. After the civil war and prior to the crackdowns of the 30s, gay marriage was legalized, and there were soviet scientists already proclaiming that gender was more akin to a spectrum than to a binary. Sadly, that progress was lost forever after Stalinism.
Well a lot of that can be explained by the fact that conservatives co-opted the left wing movements for communism and largely turned them into dictatorships. These governments endured several decades before collapsing, which allows newer conservatives to think of them as "the good ol days."
It doesn't mean they ever were communists. They just stole the name and ruined its reputation.
A simpler explanation is that the people who seek power are the worst of the bunch and they'll say whatever it takes to get there and keep it - it's a pretty well know thing since Ancient times that the best rulers are the ones who do NOT want to rule.
Sociopaths will just as easilly sing praises to Marxism-Leninism as they will to the Free Market, so don't confuse whatever bullshit they spout to get to and stay at the top of the pile in an the power structures created by a specific ideology with their actual beliefs and don't excuse the failures of the structures created by that ideology that allow such people to get to the top.
Even if the "Revolution" isn't led by assholes, any power structure which centralizes power and doesn't have hard to subvert mechanisms for constant change of who is in power, attract the worst vermin and they're the one who will knifes as many backs as it takes to get it and keep it so they're far more likely to get it than "good people". This is true even in Power Duopoly systems like the US, and much worse in power monopolies like the Soviet Union and even Modern Russia.
That blaming of "others" for one's own failures is just you having internalised the typical propaganda from the power hungry assholes (just as much from the ones portraying themselves as Fascists or from the ones portraying themselves as Communists) to deflect the blame for their own actions away from themselves.
Back to the specifics of your point, the inherent weakness of Socialism and Communism as opposed to more Democratic systems like Social Democracy, is that the former require a Dictatorship Of The Proletariat to reach the final utopia which was Equality For All, and invariably that supposedly temporary step were power and the Means Of Production are centralized becomes permanent, and they're exactly the kind of structure that pulls is the worst assholes: Lenin was probably somebody who, at least to begin with, had his hearth in the right place (though with him too, the Power Corrupts dictum applies), whilst Stalin was a pure Sociopath.
I'd bet that most of them aren't trolls. I have friends who were liberal as you could be, but they let cynicism turn them into tankies.
Well there's basically two kinds of tankie:
The grifters who run the cult and sell the rhetoric in exchange for clout, authority, arrogant self-importance, and the extraction of material support through abuse and exploitation,
And the cope-starved simps who are desperate to feel like they are doing something practical about their material conditions but have been too enervated after being fucked raw by corporate liberalism to actually do anything.
Remember Caleb Maupin? Exposed as a coercive sex pest? Ran a "commune" that was little more than a shoddy knockoff of a human trafficking operation? Yeah. That's tankie "leadership" for you.
The association with the left-wing is the point. Otherwise it would just be calling right wing trolls conservatives and fascists, and there's a resistance to that for some reason.