this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
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TankieJerk
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Dunking on Tankies from a leftist, anti-capitalist perspective.
Rules:
- No bigotry of any kind.
- No tankies or right-wingers. Liberals are allowed so long as they are aware of this
- No genocide or atrocity denial
We allow posts about tankie behavior, shitposts, and rational, leftist discussion. Please redirect any Fediverse tankie-posts to !MeanwhileOnGrad@sh.itjust.works to avoid bringing drama to Piefed.social
Curious about non-tankie leftism? If you've got a little patience for 19th century academic style, let a little Marx and Kropotkin be your primer!
Marx's Communist Manifesto, short and accessible! Highly recommended if you haven't read it
For a wider variety of leftist memes, see:
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Honestly this is the worst part of Lemmy...
Freaks complaining about imaginary tankies, it's insane.
They aren't imaginary, I'm not sure what world you live in but there are definitely a ton on Lemmy.
I'm new here. What's a tankie?
As I understand it: left leaning (usually extreme left) users who idolise the Chinese government. Tankie is a reference to the Tienanmen Square protests and massacre, and specifically to the “tank man”. I’m not sure how that got associated with pro-CPR users though, as the protests were very much against that government.
Edit: check out the replies to my reply for a different and likely more correct explanation.
No, tankie is a reference to Soviets using tanks to quell uprisings in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968).
Tankies are not leftists, they're authoritarian simps that hate the United States and love China/Russia. If you think Russia is leftist you're insane, doubly so for China.
Edit: I also find it funny that the person I'm responding to has had this explanation given to them already.
Edit 2: Ok that may have been an honest mistake, I'm sorry I'm just like a raw nerve when it comes to this topic.
Maybe that person, whoever they are, has amnesia. Or dementia.
Or were just engaging in the thread not paying attention, I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation.
It was actually the Hungarian student rebellion. Young Hungarians wanted to vote out their Soviet puppet leaders and elect new leadership. It's important to point out the leaders they wanted were still communists. The Soviets sent in tanks to crush the movement.
British communists were disgusted by some of their fellow communists that were cheering on this violent oppression and started calling them tankies.
Tankies are on the side of the tank in the tank-man story.
Ah okay that way it makes sense.
And what instance? Because that the nice thing about the lemmyverse. You can choose to talk to other instances, but you can also not.
I'm at a point of no tolerance for tankies, and I have a strong sense of needing to set the record straight.
Fuck tankies.
I would personally not fuck anyone I don't like, but do what you want.
A person can be fucked with many things, a great deal of them unpleasant.
I don't go to any .ml comms, but .ml bootlickers still come to Piefed and .world comms.
Lemmy was literally made by someone who took the moniker of a genocidal warlord btw
Could you please elaborate a little?
Dessalines is the one who made Lemmy. Jean-Jacques Dessalines was a genocidal maniac. Modern tankies like him because some of the targets of his genocide were slave owners.
Edit: manuallybreathing@lemmy.ml sent me a DM calling me a fascist for liking Rush lmfao
I live not far away from a metro station called "Robespierre", and I don't think you could call him a nice guy. Context matters.
Context matters, but I'll go ahead and be a moral absolutist here and say that there is no context that justifies cutting children's heads off. Never heard of Robespierre, but if he was as bad as Dessalines, then I'd say he probably shouldn't have a metro station named after him
The targets of his genocide were slave owners?
The targets of his genocide were white French, regardless of economic class.
Some of them, yeah
The person you’re replying to is equivocating between the violence of slavery and the violence of a slave revolt, ie the Haitian revolution.
Dessalines was a former slave who became a leader of the revolution. He order the massacres of French colonists out of fear that they, with support from the French government, would overturn the revolution and reimpose slavery. His brutality was a reflection of the incomparably hellish conditions and violence that Haitian slaves endured.
That said, the questionable morality or necessity of his actions are not the reasons why he’s held up today. People don’t see him up as a figure to emulate. Instead, he’s a symbol and reminder to the perpetrators of imperial violence of the consequences that they will inevitably face.
I thought the worst part of Lemmy was genocide denialists, and people like you who try to pretend they aren't a problem.
I have seen some absolutely idiotic "socialist" takes on Lemmy (usually just dumb ass takes based on false premises like "food is free in nature, why isn't it free now?") but yeah the amount of complaining about "tankies" is like 10x the amount of actual "tankie" content I see. Really just blocking lemmy.ml takes care of 99% of the issue if you really hate seeing it.
Any time .ml users get wind of a thread they can bootlick in, they tend to swarm it. Hell, here's one from a user in this very comment section just a few days ago, on a major comm:
And I mean, fuck, man, .ml's memes comm, which is still one of the larger comms on the Fediverse, hardly goes a day without boot-throating tankie shite.
The argument "food is free in nature and should therefore be free" isn't a good argument. There is however one to be made for "with the level of technological advancement we've achieved at present, food shouldn't be as inaccessible as it currently is"
Fascinating study. I'll keep this in my repertoire of anti-capitalist arguments
Yeah, but look, it would make shareholders sad! We can't do that, can we?
It would be impossible under capitalism, good thing there is another way
Right, but I have seen massive arguments on Lemmy over this topic. The argument you made is actually well thought out and makes sense, while the one I mentioned is stupid and doesn't withstand even the smallest amount of basic thought.
my only worry about is that if they are the main developers, what if they start abusing that position?
My main question is: what makes you think they aren't already doing that?
I havent seen any evidence or mentions of it
I have seen post after post on Meanwhile on Grad about Dessalines abusing his power, you probably aren't aware of it because by the time you see it all you end up seeing are users like Cowbee monologuing to the void.
https://ani.social/post/863176
.world and pie preemptively defed from .ml.
ffs, why cant there be anything nice in this world.. everything has to have some downside or looming problem. How can i even recommend lemmy to people if there is a problem of " yea, its main developers are crazy tankies, but maybe its going to be okay?"
Though by now i hope there are enough interested developers in lemmy in general that hopefully it can be branched if things get too bad.
Just recommend piefed to them.
well, except piefed also has some quite bad issues: https://sopuli.xyz/post/40286456 this post discusses them
I'm more inclined to believe in the piefed devs fixing their hardcoded shit over Dessalines suddenly... not being Dessalines.
Right, the one that requires opt in for .ml
have you even used lemmy?
What are tankies?
Because it's a pejorative term it gets applied to all sorts of different people but the basic idea is a leftist who believes the USSR and other communist nations did nothing wrong and that the worst human rights abuses of those regimes were either justified or completely made up. I believe the term "tankie" comes from the idea that they believe the guys in the tanks at Tiananmen Square were in the right. The term is usually levied against certain leftists by other leftists more than by people on the right, because people on the right just think that's how all leftists are.
From the Wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
The tanks they supported were not Tiananmen Square, but actually 30 years earlier when the USSR crushed the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.