The comments are what you expect. All agree that we’re psychopaths who support genocide and just want authority as a goal in itself. All agree we do no leftist praxis, I guess just based on vibes. One user wrote:
let’s be honest, they should be removed from society
which is cool. One-on-one, online or in person, I’m pretty patient with people like this, but when I see a whole thread like this with hundreds of upvotes and no pushback it makes me feel tired.
lemmy.ml link in case any of you have alts and want to wade in: https://lemmy.ml/post/6930975
The democracy thread she commented in right before posting this: https://lemmy.ml/comment/5160468
let’s be honest, they should be removed from society
good luck with that. there’s a reason why socialist states have a military and police.
Calling tankies fascist while I call for the cleansing of tankies
“when they came for communists, I told them exactly where they are to own those authoritarian red fash tankies”
“Then they came for me and I instantly joined their cause”
Read “The Jakarta Method” to know how it was done historically.
Also watch The Act of Killing, a fantastic documentary on the same subject (definitely CW violence though). Vincent Bevins cites it as inspiration to write The Jakarta Method. I read the book first and watched the documentary last week, and it brought me to tears.
I think they mean us
I have a soft spot for 196. I used to frequent it pretty heavily and a lot of the people there are so fucking sweet but unfortunately so misguided. Their anti-tankie rhetoric often comes from a place genuine concern, they truly believe in democracy under capitalism and radically changing the system from capitalism means removing democracy in their heads. Some of them can be depropagandized, I am living proof of that and I hope one day they’ll come to understand.
I don’t see how someone who lived though the 2020 BLM protests and covid and still thinks they live in a democracy can be radicalized.
If watching every city’s police respond to protests against police brutality with more brutality while every dem increased their funding and republican begged for the blood of children, while a million Americans are sacrificed at the alter of capital didn’t wake them up, I can’t conceive of a scenario that would.
The military using live ammo? Famine?
Thar be
in that community.Ironically, the undoctored image is of a Nazi being punched.
And who are the originators and primary beneficiaries of the premise that international socialists and national ‘socialists’ are the same? Liberals try not to stand on the shoulders of Goebbels challenge (impossible)
Tankies, famous for getting SS and swastika tattoos, liking screwdriver and not looking like the girl on the left instead
Was going to say lol, they got those character assignments backwards
I have made myself the Chad punk girl wojak and you, the soy virgin skinhead wojak
Your move, stalinist
Fidel Castro’s son just had a standing ovation for an SS soldier a few weeks ago. Tell me again that tankies aren’t just Nazis.
undermine democracy
oh no, if that happens… then even if 80% of Americans want universal healthcare we wouldn’t get it!
No no, it’s totally normal to ban tankies on sight but debate openly ableist users.
V*ushites making a claim on being the only real communists once again.
😇
badges of honor
Tankie apologist? No sir I’m just a tankie.
never apologise for being a tankie.
Why yes I support using tanks to end pogroms against Jewish Hungarians by Hungarian ethnic nationalists and Nazi collaborators
You’re a powerful poster, one of the best
what if I’m using it scientifically?
you’re not
I used to lurk on r/196 a lot. Doing that actually helped push me further left than I was before and it felt like a safe space by being so pro-LGBT. But after becoming a communist, seeing how “anti-tankie” and liberal they often are, it’s just sad really. I feel like there’s a sizable portion of people there that just want to feel they belong and end up buying into the whole “anti-tankie” narrative without knowing better.
Also, this image in particular is fucking insulting. Equating us to nazis is not only revolting, it shows how little they understand of what they are talking about.
I honestly don’t even remember the anti-tankie stuff was that common early on. It was always around, but at some point it got really thick really fast.
I sometimes wonder if it was during the Keffals/kiwifarms arc, which brought in a lot of vaushites.
The lemmy 196 is even worse than the reddit one. They’re just constantly on, and see themselves as coldwarriors fighting the red menace. Meanwhile, they let weirdass views to their right just slide by.
I thought there was a chance lemmy 196 would be less weird, and opened an account there even, but it’s just all the mods doing redscare all the time. Fuck that place.
I wasn’t there from the beginning, but I remember at least seeing some anti-tankie sentiment, and it definitely got worse over the short time I was lurking there. One time I remember was just after opening again after the reddit protests, where there was this same image posted there with loads of people commenting.
I also almost joined their instance here on Lemmy like you did, but I decided to join Lemmygrad after seeing their anti-tankie banner lol.
Even as an anarchist that place frequently makes me cringe
It’s not ideologically anarchist, it’s aesthetically anarchist. Which is why they latch on to a century old conflict between anarchists and Marxist leninists in Spain instead of actually applying any sort of critical rigor to their interactions with the world.
Sometimes the more well read ones’ll bring up Makhnovshchina, but typically don’t know much more than they fought against the Soviets in the aftermath of the revolution.
Because real, serious anarchists rarely bother with this annoying mindgame shit. (When they do it always fatally fucks them over)
Kinda weird that they hate “red fash” more than regular fash
They’ll claim it is because there arent very many fascists in their space
The white children posted a butthurt meme, we shall not repost it nor reply to it
(David Attenborough voice) In the period following its birth, the Cracker enters what is known as the Childhood phase. For Crackers of the Great Lakes variety, this stage may last anywhere from 18 to 40 years. Progress is often sluggish, frequently delayed by the outside threat posed by prey - an invasive population of Tankies, native to Siberia
Communism is the only political ideology where for some reason it’s acceptable to claim its proponents don’t believe in the things they say and actually secretely believe the opposite. No one is ever “just pretending” to be a liberal, a conservative, a monarchist, a fascist, a social democrat or a libertarian, it’s just communists. They never explain what one gets out of this “pretending” either.
And the worst part is these people are themselves leftists, so they have surely heard the same “you’re just bitter and jealous of rich people
” bullshit from conservatives, but they turn around and repeat it at us.I sometimes peek my head into chud communities and they actually do this too, sometimes with weird funny parallels to what we get. It’s why the term RINO exist. They will frequently accuse conservative figures of secretly being too liberal or too socialist. It was actually frequently mentioned by some who were critical of Trump before he got elected, he was called a New York liberal, etc. Chuds also absolutely accuse liberals of lying and actually being Marxists (don’t laugh!)
Libertarians do this too, frequently accusing their own of being statists or socialists for the smallest violation of ideological purity.
Liberals and conservatives have to accuse us of lying about what we want because we often have political demands that align with theirs, especially if they’re working class, and that causes cognitive dissonance. So the only mental strategy they have is to accuse us of trickery. They’ll make childish analogies like saying socialists want everyone to have a pony, or they’ll say our demands are so extreme there must an equal price to pay. As in, for every gain in rights for the working and poor, there must be an equal loss in rights.
That’s an interesting point I hadn’t considered, but I still think this is different from the ideological purity fights that are common to every ideology.
Like, when we say AOC is a liberal or whatever it’s an expression of disappointment that she’s not as leftist as we’d like. But we’re talking about positions she holds openly, we’re not claiming she secretly doesn’t care about free healthcare, or that it’s a smokescreen for some nefarious purpose. The conservatives fuming about RINOs and the libertarians that booed Gary Johnson for being pro drivers’ licenses (lmao) are operating on a similar principle I think.
The conspiratorial “they’re saying they want good things but it’s a trick to gain power and become evil tyrants” brainworms are very specific to communism I think. The closest thing on our side is when we accuse the reactionary right of knowingly trying to divide the working class by blaming everything wrong with capitalism on X minority, but even then I don’t think they’re “faking” it, necessarily. They really are bigoted and will do bigoted things if given power. It’s not a trick.
Chuds do call everyone a Marxist though, that’s true
I read through most of that thread and christ it is tiring, I agree. Historically illiterate bastards equating China to Nazi Germany left and right with only a couple voices of reason.
Their idea of MLs is completely incoherent. What, do I want to be a dictator? I am actively averse to personally having authority, that shit is too much of a hassle, I get a headache just imagining it for the sake of counterargument.
So what do I actually want? Since these people seem to think being ML is just pure “authoritarianism” with no true beliefs of any kind.
I want people to be fed, clothed, housed, educated, and so on [in short: their needs provided for] and I want the entity doing that to defend itself from the capitalists seeking to undermine that process. It’s a very simple desire and something that, for all the valid criticism you can make of the CPC, something it does, as does the DPRK.
You really described it the best, it’s just tiring.
Edit: I wonder how many overt neoliberals are there chanting hand-in-hand with those so-called “anarchists”
They think you’re either lying about wanting liberation for marginalized people, or that you’d entrust the task of liberation to a bunch of liars who would instead simply recreate capitalism but worse. They also believe you secretly harbor a suite of bigotries like transphobia or Islamophobia and you’d gladly endorse genocide against such groups so long as you had some vague aesthetic of socialist revolution. You’re right that it’s incoherent. None of what they’re saying makes sense.
That’s really the entire accusation. You’re both brainwashed and insidious, you’re dishonest, and you praise countries that are designated as “capitalism but worse somehow.”
There’s also a really serious element of nationalism that can’t be ignored in the word “tankie.” It means a westerner who is regarded as a traitor. You’re praising foreign countries who are enemies of the west and that violates every other western political framework. Principled anarchists and communists get called tankies because we’re the only westerners who wholly reject western hegemony.
These people are a hair’s breadth from posting that Patton “we fought the wrong enemy” quote
It’s always weird seeing trans people hanging out with thinly veiled fascists and chasers yet spending all their energy being mad about ‘tankies.’
Hope it works out for em.
4chan and its consequences
Reminder that anti-communism is a prerequisite of fascism
