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The term Tankie has a clear definition that Cowbee likes to ignore:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those > who support or defend acts of repression by such regimes, their allies, or deny the > occurrence of the events thereof.
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Liberals believe in a hypothetical good communist that would not qualify as a tankie. This imaginary communist was cooked up by liberals out of first principles for how they believe a communist should act and behave, because the core instinct of the liberal is to accuse their enemies of being secret right-wingers who are lying about their intentions. The hypothetical good communist would have ideals that we would say are similar to an ultra-leftist, or the completely fictional "patriotic communist" thing. As in:
So under their metric for a non-tankie leftist, Che Guevara would be a bad communist because he seized state power and used violent means. Whereas a good communist would be someone like Vaush, an internet streamer who advocates for the election of Democrats to public office.
Right and Vaush is just Destiny dressed up in red and black. Not a leftist but a liberal claiming to be a leftist but everything they advocate people do is just liberalism.
Their non-tankie is just a liberal pretending to be a communist. Every communist that actually poses any argument to liberals and opposes action that reinforces liberalism is a tankie.
Therefore every communist is a tankie. Therefore tankie just means, communist.
That's not even getting into the fact that the very definition itself applies to all communists. Let's go through each group:
MLs: Support all AES. Tankies
Trots: Support Cuba. Authoritarian state. Tankies
Maoists: Don't support China. Support USSR. Tankies.
DemSocs: Support Cuba. Some support USSR (jeremy corbyn and all Euro DemSocs for example). Tankies
This effectively amounts to 95% of all people that call themselves communists. Going into increasingly more niche sects of communist is pointless.
They're hypothetical non-tankie communist is Bernie Sanders
So, a liberal...