I love saying "tankie and proud" as a response to "anti-tankie" discourse. It really is just a thought-terminating cliché, often used by misguided westerners who truly do not understand class consciousness and materialism, with some of them going as far to paint "tankies" as "reactionaries disguised as leftists," when in actuality, "anti-tankie" sentiment is actually what seems to be more of a reactionary tendency posing as leftist, especially when you know of the horrors supported by prominent "left" anti-communists like Orwell.

I used to hang around anarchist/demsoc spaces a lot more, and in the past, I fell into this trap of painting AES states as being as "evil" as capitalist propaganda wants you to believe they are, and I tried whatever I could do to distance myself from them, their thinkers, and their ideologies. However, in the grand scheme of my life and the path that my material conditions led me down, three things eventually ended up turning me away from that kind of thinking:

1. Joining Hexbear: When I got tired of using Reddit, especially since I was fed up of all the bigotry and discrimination that was seeming unavoidable on that site, I joined Hexbear because I was looking for an alternative that was not only accepting of marginalized peoples but more inclined toward leftism as a whole. Though I was still an anarchist when I first joined Hexbear, I quickly came to understand that the people that are commonly demonized as "tankies" are not this evil group of horrid people that many anti-AES leftists paint them as. It's actually been the contrary!
2. Reading Theory: Reading Lenin especially helped with me overcoming this, but of course, just gaining an actual better understanding of the theory of Marxism in general was a huge plus as well.
3. Connecting With Black Radical Thinkers: This is a bit of an extension of the previous point, but as a black person, I noticed that the common leftist tendency of many black radicals, such as the Black Panthers, was more in alignment with Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, etc. I didn't find black nationalist associations with anarchism to be as common, and I wondered why. Being able to examine the words of thinkers like Kwame Ture, Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon, etc. helped me process the connection of black liberation and how it pertains to radical ideology that I felt like I had a more difficult time grasping when I was mostly hanging around white, western anarchists and demsocs, considering their own ideological understanding of leftism and then tying it to the construct of black liberation. Black liberation was much harder for me to wrap my head around looking at it through a more anarchist lens than it was looking at it through a Marxist lens.

Though I am a former anarchist and a Marxist now, this isn't meant to be a sectarian dig at anarchists. It's just more of me being frustrated with how such "anti-tankie" sentiment has painted genuinely effective leftists as monsters and "fascists in disguise" when they have been nothing but the opposite, and ultimately, they have led the greatest and most broadly applicable implementation of tactics that can actually liberate so many oppressed people, both in the context of class and identity.

Ironically this gets twisted in the "campist" argument to be like: "tankies are so fixated on hating America they refuse to support the imperial soul harvester even when it's being careful to pinkwash its crimes"

"Tankie" is anti-discourse. It is a thought-terminating cliche that is trotted out because a liberal saw a left critical analysis of geopolitics that challenges their chauvinism and they would like to end the cognitive dissonance.

If you continue to press them, they will usually start using new insults, usually racist ones. They have given up any pretense of having a discussion, now it is just their petty and raw ego lashing out at the person that hurt it. They reach for their tools that help them feel superior.

Tankies remind people that it's actually possible to be principled in the face of an oppositional status quo. Maybe it's projection but it has to be pretty embarrassing to see an example of someone who doesn't compromise on their morals

a tankie is a person who disagrees with the US State Department

I think another factor here, especially considering a certain tendency of Libs who think they're leftist, is that bourgeois democracy actually works okay for them. Not great, bad enough in fact that it makes anti-capitalism appealing, but they still enjoy a relatively decent amount of social stability and pedestrian civil liberties. Even if we push all the BS propaganda aside, they probably wouldn't enjoy either of those things as much in a developing world AES state.

A stable, secure, prosperous capitalist state doesn't really care if you want to engage in some cute grassroots leftist organizing, community gardens and DIY punk spaces aren't really a serious material threat to them. They enjoy a degree of freedom and even some passing social acceptance because they're ultimately seen as a well meaning if misguided subculture within the broader bourgeois liberal society. They dislike "Tankies", partially because they believe (correctly or not) that life in an AES state unpleasant and also a serious ML Party would be an actual threat to the bourgeois liberal state which could in turn result in a crackdown on them.

I do appreciate the growing awareness that the crux of being anti-tankie is being pro-western. It's a nationalist brainworm at its core. It's a claim that only white westerners know what socialism is and how to accomplish it.

It's quite literally a claim that every socialist movement throughout history did everything incorrect and all they really needed was someone with a big white brain. Ask any of these folks if they truly believe hundreds of millions of Chinese people truly don't know what socialism is. They'll always say the Chinese are brainwashed or can't actually voice their opinions out of fear. Yeah, ok.

Yes these radlibs also supported overthrowing Assad and US occupation forces in Syria stealing oil. They supported destroying Libya. They supported the Hong Kong colonialist tantrums. Every single time the rubber meets the road they are on the side of imperialism. Only decades later to they ever admit they were wrong, if we are lucky, and that never seems to change their current day chauvinism

why don't these people notice that their talking points, left-oriented as they may seem, always end up supporting US allies or attacking US enemies?

A combination of the american civic religion, american exceptionalism, their own material conditions, recognition of their position as the secondary (or perhaps tertiary) benefactors of imperialism, and a century of anti-communist propaganda have left them believing the following:

• The US may SOMETIMES do evil, but that is either by mistake or the cost of doing business, and it is ultimately a net progressive force for "democracy" and "freedom" aka "good"
• No matter how bad the US is, every AES is/was worse
• Every enemy of the US cannot be trusted, so they can only consume ~~propaganda~~ media produced by the US and its allies
• The US is actually a democracy, and policy can be influenced by voters

Whenever you bring up things that force them to address the dissonance between one of these and reality, they use the the other three to deflect. If you continue to press further, they either disengage, call you a tankie, or start the long slow path to tankiedom themselves.

Tankies refuse to support the holocaust even though we're laughing maniacally and talking about how joyful we are while advocating for a more lethal military.

Tankies refuse to give tanks to Ukrainian Nazis.

Tankies don't have an internal map of ~~races~~ countries capable of self-determination with all of the non-white countries listed as bad unless they're militarily occupied by a good white country.

Tankies read books written about non-white self-determination that I equate with Mein Kampf instead of books written for children and US State Department propaganda.

They're digusting. Just as bad as the non-white leader I'm going to depict with a 1910s racial stereotype.

why don't these people notice that their talking points, left-oriented as they may seem, always end up supporting US allies or attacking US enemies?

There's no doubt they recognize this. What's happening is they still truly believe the US is a lesser evil vis a vis it's enemies (namely China, Russia, Iran, DPRK, Venezuela, Cuba). They think that while the US is a "flawed democracy," its enemies are hopeless authoritarian dystopias, and if they push back too hard against the US, "authoritarianism" will spread across the globe like barbarian hordes. These are the same people who will argue "real communism has never been tried."

They are illiterate chauvanists, basically. Unreformed idealists who cast judgment based on what would be right in principle instead of material reality.

I read the title and saw an outside handle and rubbed my hands together for a feast of bad opinions, but then I noticed that it was posted here and your opinions are good, actually. So I'm at a bit of a loss now

transforming oneself is difficult. The default mode we all have is what's raised into us. Tradition inherited via parents, and schooling. It's often trauma or something as un-anchoring as psychedelic experience that makes people crack and change themselves, and this process is so uneven and often incomplete because change is random and unsupported except by the whims of the altered ego.

There are very few unchallenging ways to honestly reject framing you've been trained to see as your only window to reality, and because of this it's easy for westerners to find themselves unable to fully break from the frames that define their understanding of their relationship to their society, government, the world, whatever.

I remember the day after I tripped for the first time because it really was that meme of like "wow so all of this is a fucking lie". I had to go to school and I was laughing at the things a teacher said [they were dealing with political material] because it was just fucking wrong. Presumptions about the way things are that the average liberal or conservative takes as sacrosanct, just all fucking nonsense. But I lacked the context and knowlege to develop this further at the time. A break was made, and it would take almost two decades to widen things further properly. An early lesson was that it didn't feel safe to fully leave the frame we're trained to accept as authoritative reality, because those frames determine social pecking order, they determine the jobs you can get. If you can't at least fake the faith in the dominant frames society lets you have, you'll be quickly ousted for being too weird. It's not even conscious for most folks, these mechanisms operate subconsciously to exclude difference of thinking and approach.

Even a good education is unlikely to, by itself, let you break free. Especially if you're educated in a prestige or elite context, you're being shaped to be the next generation of demonic overlord - the education you get is structured so that you're invested in the existing power structure - these places strictly do NOT educate in a manner that lets you go your own way intellectually.

So everyone from Qualified Experts to the average person on the street is operating on a framework that directly serves the interest of the country and the ruling elite.

I think people get fucked up because they take this to be conspiratorial, when social engineering is a field that's been in the process of being born for centuries now, a lot of the key players don't even know what they're doing, and that's by design. The structure is designed to maintain and propagate itself.

It's easy to break from it when you're the frontier of empire- you live with the politics of empire as a victim, as a deeply exploited resource.

People in the core are just as exploited, on the whole, but as beneficiaries with narrow education and limited interest and ability to educate themselves (on the whole) - they will not understand just what's happening.

I'm 34, and I have a love of learning. I literally get dopamine from study and acquiring new knowledge. How many freaks like me are there, really? Most people have trauma around education, or fully accepted it as a means to an end: there is rarely ever any love for the process of discovery and the requisite change that comes with it. Most people my age are figuring out how to live with themselves as they are, they're not trying to shake shit loose. My experience as a trans woman probably has more to do with my plasticity compared to my peers, but at no point are any of the individual circumstances that made me able to, finally, accept a more fundamental reality about my relationship to the world, to empire; things that are automatically salvific.

I'm a freakshow. We are freakshow. This is difficult work and most people who have the tools to wake up, never will, because the conditioning is strong, and breaking it requires the awareness and will to do so that the average ego just won't abide.

A "tankie" is a leftist that has actually reads the theory and understands dialectics.

It's chauvinism. They've hit a point where they can't deny that the West is awful, but it would hurt their white pride to admit that anyone else might be better.

And I do mean white pride. White supremacy is the beating heart of liberalism. Cut open liberalism, and you'll expose it.

why don't these people notice that their talking points, left-oriented as they may seem, always end up supporting US allies or attacking US enemies?

Most do realise this. Most are oriented this way. Most are aware of which side they are on. They are liberals who use radical language to appear more left than they actually are. The appearance of leftism you sometimes see in them is worn as a fashion accessory because somewhere deep down they do know their positions are immoral so they wear the left as a fashion to feel more moral than they actually are.

As for the phrase "tankie". It is a tool wielded by different groups against anyone to their left. Anarchists use it against communists. Socdems use it against all revolutionaries, anarchist or communists, and liberals use it against all of these groups. It is a tool used identically to "woke" by reactionaries, which is deployed against everyone to the left of the reactionary clique in order to shut down the brains of everyone that considers themselves part of that clique. Once you deploy the word "woke" everyone is to not listen to anything the woke person says, so as to not actually learn anything or do critical thought. This is the same for the word tankie, it is deployed to prevent people listening to others and thusly to not learn anything. The two factions of liberalism both use the same tactics.

The goal the tool has is to prevent social political development.

I got called a tankie for not supporting PMCs, if you ever figure out an answer lmk.

Good post.

Good post! Generally, these people critique leftists from the perspective of an Ultraleftist, but give the absolute most benefit of the doubt for liberalism. They haven't confronted their internal biases nearly as much as they need to. It's like finding a secret door, but thinking there are no more secret doors beyond it!

People who leave behind terrible world views often don't leave behind the thinking. For example, consider protestant Christianity. A lot of atheists in the US were originally protestants. But we've all seen the internet atheist Islamophobes turn into little Richard Dawkins muppets. They have identified their religious beliefs as being wrong, but they haven't stopped thinking in terms of protestant work ethic, prosperity gospel, homophobia, and so on.

I think the anti-tankie crowd is the same way. They've correctly identified capitalism and the US is wrong, but they still believe in American exceptionalism, Cold War propaganda, white supremacy, misogyny, and all the other ways of thinking. If they had a socialist way of thinking (i.e. being against unjust hierarchies, using material analysis, etc.), they would stop with the anti-tankie rhetoric.

These days liberals say "tankie" to refer to — not the original definition of people who supported sending tanks to crush capitalist rallies in Hungary — but anyone who supports any successful socialist project or past or ongoing armed resistance.

This means they would absolutely call even widely-agreed-upon heroes like Mandela a tankie if he was alive now — because he worked with the USSR and Cuba, bombed railways, etc. If libs aren't calling you a tankie, you need to step up your game.

It always comes back to colonialism.

There's the western supremacists who defend their colonialist project, and their enemy: the anti-colonial movement, who gets labelled as tankie, commies, barbarian hordes, undemocratic, or whatever else because they refuse to be ruled by the racist hegemon.

I think that trying to empathize, even with fools, is a good exercise. In this case, I think their railing makes sense if you understand that, from their perspective, we look like Nazis claiming to be leftists (which is part of why sometimes they just flat-out resort to calling us Nazis), and we support several states that they would also describe in such a way. Imagine if a group like that actually existed! You and I would find it pretty vile and seek to attack it as a perverting, corrupting, discrediting force to the left. In reality, the closest we get are the patsoc/"maga communist" types, who are irrelevant and so are only occasionally talked about.

I do agree that they hold these beliefs because they ultimately have not challenged many of their views that they inherited from the western mainstream. They're ultimately still adopting views that are compatible with neoliberalism, even if they "reject" neoliberalism in favor of what they find to be radical leftism. If those views represented a serious opposition to neoliberalism, they would find such views just as repellent as ours, because they would be just as villified.

I’ll take a slightly different take and argue it’s a coping mechanism. They see an ascendent neo-fascism that they’re powerless to stop, with the liberal institutions discarding any pretense of caring about what their constituents want and are at best indifferent to the neo-fascism, at worst willing to ally with it to protect their interests (see: Macron). So they look for something easy to feel like they’re getting a W and, oh look here’s this loud online but completely powerless in real politics hard left. So they can act like “containing the tankie contagion” is them doing their part to preserve “democracy.”

lemmy puts the fed in federated