this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2026
103 points (99.0% liked)
Slop.
783 readers
514 users here now
For posting all the anonymous reactionary bullshit that you can't post anywhere else.
Rule 1: All posts must include links to the subject matter, and no identifying information should be redacted.
Rule 2: If your source is a reactionary website, please use archive.is instead of linking directly.
Rule 3: No sectarianism.
Rule 4: TERF/SWERFs Not Welcome
Rule 5: No bigotry of any kind, including ironic bigotry.
Rule 6: Do not post fellow hexbears.
Rule 7: Do not individually target federated instances' admins or moderators.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The Panthers were pretty explicitly pro-China, pro-Vietnam, and pro-DPRK. That alone is enough for them to be smeared as "tankies" by Western so-called leftists.
It's almost like their early fund raising was selling Mao's little red book to college students.
Black Panthers supported community defense, being a community defense group themselves, and that's not exactly on brand for Tankies.
Marxism-Leninism absolutely supports community defense.
The MLs you meet at the local community college support community defense. The MLs that once ran the Soviet Union were what the community needed to be defended against.
Nope, the MLs that ran the soviet union liberated the working classes.
As always, what these western, "anti-tankie" "communists" actually have a problem with is any communist actually being successful.
It's almost like it's a snarl word that doesn't actually mean anything and so can be deployed and retracted as required. Eldridge Cleaver explicitly described the Panthers as a vanguard in "on the ideology of the black panther party", and I put it to you that if you read that, or any of the other literature written by highly ranked members of the BPP, it would never occur to you that they are anything but "tankies". Unless of course you already knew it was by the BPP, who unfortunately now fall into Lenin's category of great revolutionaries who were slandered in their lifetime but who are now canonized and their ideas bastardised to mollify the masses.
Well, I heard them advocate alot for people defending their own communities and didn't hear them advocate at all for invading neighboring communities and forcing them to accept their form of socialism at gun point. Thus they have not met the definition of Tankie
They explicitly called themselves vanguardist. That is the specific aspect of Marxism-Leninism that people who complain about "tankies" describe as
Again, if I gave you a bunch of anonymized quotes, one from a principled member of the BPP and the other from "tankies", you would not in a million years be able to pick out the panther, because they are exactly the kind of people who get smeared as "tankies". It's also very telling that you talk about a "definition of tankie" but didn't actually give one, despite the lack of a definition being explicitly what we are talking about.
But didn't they wholeheartedly endorse those AES countries that did exactly the stuff you're criticizing?
And Eldridge Cleaver, a prominent Black Panther Party leader and its "information minister," publicly defended the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He literally visited Moscow after it happened in 1968, endorsed the tanks, and criticized the Soviets for even letting Czechoslavakia start liberalizing and de-communism-izing in the first place. Other Black Panthers didn't really say much about Hungary or Czechoslavakia, since it largely wasn't relevant to the things they were doing.
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/bulletin/v05n02-w091-sept-16-1968-Bulletin.pdf Here's an anti-Stalinist "socialist" newspaper from the time, scroll down a bit and you'll find the stuff about the Black Panther Party and Eldridge Cleaver.
Literally the first thing the Black Panthers would do if they managed to seize control of Oakland, Chicago, or any of the other cities they were gaining a lot of support in would be to build up forces and invade neighboring population centers to liberate prisons, de-occupy Black communities, and bring industry into their control to eventually sustain a full scale civil war effort. You understand that, right? Just because their revolution didn't happen doesn't mean that they weren't ready to go and kill a lot of people to make these things happen.