this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2026
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I fucking love this graphic
What the fuck is a tankie?
Someone who doesn't consider atrocities committed by dictatorships or totalitarians in the name of "communism" as real or a problem.
So, holocaust deniers too.
According to .world anyone to the left of Reagan.
Tankies think that anyone trying to fix the system instead of burning it down is a fascist.
"trying to fix" = voting for genocidal imperialist capitalist political parties
I mean the system does need to be burned down. You can't fix a machine that's doing exactly what it was designed to do. You tear it down, maybe repurpose some of the parts, and build a different machine that doesn't do what the previous one did.
Despite how relatively rough it is now it's not anywhere near as bad as it was in the "golden age" of the 50's or any of the times monarchs have lost their heads. If the "burn it down" crowd can't work with others then they're not the people you want building a new nation.
We literally have worse wealth inequality than in 1700s France.
Would you rather live now or in 1700s France?
Because for me personally I enjoy living with the benefits of the various progressive eras that enable me to do things like buy meat that wasn't sitting on the floor being eaten by rats and coughed on by a worker with tuberculosis.
Give it another few hundred years and we'll look back at practices from 2026 that seem equally appalling.
Good for you?
I work with others just fine. I do several different community volunteer projects every weekend, educate anyone willing to listen on how fucked everything is and how supporting any part of the uniparty will only continue to make things worse, join book clubs run by socialists, and help spread the word of actually good candidates at every level of government that run on third party platforms. This is how you begin the work to destroy and repurpose the machine.
I'm glad you're able to do those things. A lot of people talk the talk online without actually living it offline.
That being said, I think "the uniparty" is just another way of saying "both sides bad," a phrase uttered by right-wingers and right-wingers who fancy themselves fence-sitters while exclusively attacking left-wing candidates.
It's a term that sanitizes apalling right-wing behavior while downplaying the work of progressives who take beatings, from "friend" and foe, while trying to accomplish anything that actually helps people.
I've no doubt that I just angered a few tankies by even calling members of "the uniparty" progressives, but as I said they'll call them "genocidal imperialist capitalists" regardless.
I call them that because I've seen them time and again compromise with right wingers and many of them side with them on bills they didn't even need the votes for. Even the "progressive" stuff they try to put forward isn't progressive. People love to praise Obama's ACA forgetting it was Romney's health care act. People call Biden "one of the most progressive presidents we've ever had" forgetting that he gave massive amounts of funding to ICE and made lives harder for marginalized groups on his way out (I won't bring up Gaza cause that's just a given). He went on about raising the minimum wage....over the course of several years after he would be out of office anyway and not to any amount that would actually help people.
I don't care if this comes off as "making perfect the enemy of good". I care about standing up for what I believe in and so far the only candidates that run on what I believe in are third party candidates which is why I spend time helping them and voting for them. I live in a state that's been deep red since the 90s and has only gotten more and more red with every election both big and small, so helping a party that makes friends with right wingers is pointless to me.
What's the difference in foreign policy between the GOP and the Dems? All we see from outside the empire is fascism and bombs, regardless of who's in charge.
The system that killed a hundred million Native Americans, did hundreds of years of African slavery, initiated countless illegal wars of aggression which resulted in tens of millions of civilian deaths, and is now actively burning the planet to a crisp? That's the system you're gonna fix?
Yeah, because when the "burn it all down" crowd tried forming their own government to keep their slaves we had a war over it and they lost.
I'm sure you're very proud that you only did slavery for the majority of your country's existence, and not all of it.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Yeah, I'm very proud people fought and died to change a system for the better. Maybe if you tankies weren't so cynical you'd be able see some of the good instead of only the bad.
I mean, to be fair, your country still does slavery. It's not awful chattel slavery, but you do still lock people up for non violent crimes and then use em for slave labor. Hard country to defend.
To be fair, the US is like a patchwork of small countries wearing a trenchcoat and in some states they have amended their constitution to rid themselves of the kind of forced labor you are referring to. Others are trying. It's not where it should be, but getting so many people to agree on something without killing each other can be a slow process.
It's not even a trait unique to the US. If you look at any region of the world close enough and you'll find evidence of some kind of Gulag or Gulag-like system. Does that excuse it? No, it's still an awful practice. But within the context of our conversation it is a negative part of a system that has positively changed over time without having to burn the whole thing down.
Unless the system™ resides in a country that historically opposes the USA
No. That is inaccurate.
Forgive me for using AI to make a summary but I don't have the energy to write up a long winded explanation on it
A tankie is usually a slang term for someone on the far left who defends or excuses authoritarian communist governments, especially the Soviet Union, Maoist China, or similar states.
The name comes from people in Western communist parties who supported the Soviet Union sending tanks into places like Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush uprisings. "Tankie" started as an insult from other leftists who thought that support was indefensible.
The meme is joking about how some tankies can end up with political positions that don't fit neatly on the normal left-right spectrum. For example, they might:
Oppose capitalism (far left).
Defend highly centralized states and strongman rulers.
Support nationalism in certain countries.
Excuse military invasions if done by states they like.
Agree with parts of the far right on issues such as anti-Westernism or hostility toward liberal democracy.
So the "stethoscope" shape is saying:
It's a joke, not a serious political model, but it resonates because many people feel that hardline authoritarian communists often end up taking positions that seem disconnected from the usual left-right divide.
No, I won't forgive that, and I certainly ain't reading it.
You could have saved us all the use of AI and the paragraph answering the moron. Behold:
https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=what+is+a+tankie
tankies are the original left wing
Is it because you can't read?
netanyahu approves this