this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2025
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Actually I think this comment unintentionally answers OP's question.
I think a common tankie story is:
Realization that much of western media is propaganda or influenced by propaganda.
Finding that enemies of the American empire (and Europe) with some semblance of power agree that western media is propaganda, and these people are MLM communists.
After they've established credibility with their accurate criticisms of western capitalist society, tell you that, oh, by the way, those propaganda outlets in the west also lie about us, actually almost all of what we do is awesome and people who claim otherwise are automatically suspect.
Number 3 is a mistake, I think, but it's an understandable one. This isn't super fair to tankies but the analogy I'd give is to people who fall under the spell of someone like Jordan Peterson: he sounds smart, and he lulls you into a sense of security with good advice about taking care of yourself, keeping your house clean, etc., and then once he's gotten your trust he gently introduces stuff like "oh by the way evolution proves that men and women shouldn't work together" or whatever, and because he's made sensible points up until then, your guard is down and you don't critique it in your head before accepting it.
Western propaganda outlets absolutely do like about their enemies though. It's verifiable. They lie about them more than anything else.
The primary goal of the empire is maintaining its hegemony. Since the biggest threats to that hegemony are its rival states, it undermines support for them by libeling and slandering them. The empire doesn't much care about how great you think it is. As long as you hate every alternative more, they're not threatened. The reason Stalin and Mao were demonized more than anyone else in modern history is because they scared the living shit out of the capitalists.
Example of their lies
My "tankie story", so to speak, began in 2019 just before the Hong Kong protests kicked off. I followed the progression of that story through Marxist news sources like Proles Pod:
A Chinese man murdered and dismembered his girlfriend, stashed her body parts in a suitcase, and fled to Hong Kong. China couldn't extradite him back to the mainland, so the Chinese authorities in Hong Kong crafted an extradition law. Hong Kong capitalists opposed it, fearing extradition for their financial crimes.
For a long time, I heard nothing about the story from mainstream American news sources. Then one day, NPR broached the subject. I thought "oh boy, someone is finally covering this story!"
All that NPR had to say about it was "There are protests in Hong Kong. The protesters want more democracy. China is against them because they hate democracy." I was flabbergasted! There was no substance at all to the reporting. Absolutely none of the inciting background was covered. I was introduced in real time to the way that even "good" liberal, Western news sources like NPR flatten all stories about enemy countries into simple good vs. evil narratives.
This is just a straw man. The reason the concept of "critical support" is so common in Marxist anti-imperialist spaces is because we acknowledge nuance and limit our support to productive actions.
I'm going to throw back once more to my experience with Proles Pod, a podcast that was widely criticized as being one of the most "Stalinist" media in existence. I was introduced to them through an interview with the hosts conducted by Breht O'Shea on Revolutionary Left Radio. They spent the first twenty minutes enumerating all their criticisms of the mistakes that Stalin made.
That almost works, except critics of western propaganda exist everywhere especially in academia & intelligentsia. The west doesn't try to suppress them. So why out of everyone, those guys with a salient agenda over the critics without a discernable one?
Campism, aka team sports. Critizism from academic figures is (not entirely incorrectly) identified as managed opposition, and for sure they are not a team you can simp for with the hope of them "winning".