edit: this is now closed future comments won’t be counted
I keep seeing this instance is overrun with tankies so hey, lets do an informal survey like I’ve seen on hexbear
respond with YES or NO in the first line of your comment and i’ll tally everything in a couple of days, lets say I’ll try and collect everything on the sunday the 9th (10+gmt sorry)
not sure thisll work, be nice, have fun
<(YES.)Anti-Semitism
January 12, 1931
Reply to an Inquiry of the Jewish News Agency in the United States
In answer to your inquiry :
National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism. Anti-semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.
Anti-semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the blows aimed by the working people at capitalism. Anti-semitism is dangerous for the working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in the jungle. Hence Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-semitism.
In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty.
J. Stalin January 12, 1931
First published in the newspaper Pravda, No. 329, November 30, 1936
ERMM WTF, BASED???
a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in the jungle
Love the direct reference to Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? here.
Removed by mod
Anarchist. I look forward to being kill by tankies moments after the revolution.
No
Yes
I think people would probably call me a tankie
Why
NO
I’ve never even been called one erroneously.
Oh, I’ve been called a communist, just never a tankie.
That’s embarrassing
No
To clear definitions, at least for me"tankies" are a subset of communists, who praises/defends the actions of all/most communist states far more than similar actions from capitalist states. The difference between communists and tankies is a bias in favor of communist states when looking at things like human rights violations. Very few people will self identify as a tankie, since it’s hard to see your own bias.
So Tankies are just Communists sympathetic towards other Communists? What would a non-tankie Communist look like?
Supporting communism’s ideas, while still fairly condemning terrible things done by historical attempts at implementing it.
What constitutes “fairly?” Maybe because I am on Lemmy.ml and thus can see Hexbear and Lemmygrad, I don’t think I’ve seen many people genuinely refusing to condemn horrible or tragic events within Communist countries or by Communists. Perhaps a vast minority, but at that point, why is this even an issue in the first place?
Are there examples of “good” Communists that aren’t tankies that you can point me to?
Tankie is a floating signifier. If you ask twenty liberals what a tankie is you’ll get
- Twenty different answers, and
- Several people upset at being called a liberal because they don’t have even a Wikipedia-level understanding of liberalism or socialism.
100 percent agreed. They’ll group anything too far left of them under the same name. Don’t care anymore. If they want to whine then fuck it, I’ll wear the term.
Like how fascists think liberals are marxists, despite liberals and marxists both knowing how dumb that is
Great synopsis. I may have found a twenty first definition if you want!?:-P
No
I think it’s just mostly teen drama from Lemmy.world users. :)
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NO, I’m also not from this instance for similar reasons
I’m not from this instance, so probably not totally relevant to this poll, that said
NO, I’m not a tankie.
I think, however, it’s worth considering that a lot of people that could be considered tankies probably wouldn’t apply the term to themselves, and that could skew the results of your poll. First of all, tankie is sort of a pejorative term, and many wouldn’t want to apply it to themselves for that reason alone. Secondly a lot of people just may not consider themselves to be a tankie, and genuinely do not recognize their own tankieness.
I don’t think I’m the guy to come up with a definitive checklist of what does or does not make someone a tankie, but for the sake of getting the conversation going (and feel free to disagree with me here, I welcome the discussion) I think two of the biggest hallmarks of being a tankie are
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Communism- not all communists are tankies, but all tankies at least claim to subscribe to some sort of communist ideology.
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Authoritarianism- tankies either are authoritarians themselves, or are willing to support or overlook authoritarians as long as they see them as being in some way opposed to “the west”/capitalism/etc.
I think the authoritarianism aspect is going to trip some people up trying to answer this truthfully. A lot of authoritarians probably wouldn’t consider themselves authoritarians, most people like to think they’re standing for freedom, justice, liberty, equality, etc. even if their actual actions tell another story. Don’t get me wrong, there are people out there who are openly authoritarian and proud of it, but a lot of authoritarians are a little brainwashed to the point they’ve lost sight of what they’re actually supporting (take a look at the MAGA crowd, they think they’re about free speech and anti-censorship but want to keep books they don’t like out of libraries, they think they’re about small government but want to regulate what kind of medical care you can get, they think they stand for law and order but also proudly proclaim that they are all domestic terrorists and have a convicted felon as their poster boy)
And politics are messy, full of moral grey areas and times where you have to choose between the lesser of two evils, make uncomfortable alliances, difficult choices, and kick some cans further down the road to deal with later while you tackle the current crisis. It’s not always easy or feasible to draw a crisp line in the sand and say “we will not ally with/support/turn a blind eye to these authoritarian regimes,” sometimes you have to play a little bit of the “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” game if you want to actually make any progress against that enemy, or you may have to prioritize and deal with something else before you deal with them. There is a whole lot of grey area to explore about when, why, how, how long, and how much you can support or ignore them before you’re advancing their cause as much or more than your own.
I think there’s probably some tankies who have been taken for a ride on the propaganda wagon and don’t truly realize how authoritarian they are, and there’s others who have justified it, thinking that they’re only going to be/support authoritarians temporarily to achieve a specific goal and will pivot away from that later, but have gone too far or keep moving the goalposts.
Couple last thoughts from me.
There can always be bad actors who are falsely claiming to be (or not to be) tankies for their own purposes. Not really much you can do about that.
Personally, a lot of the criticism I’ve seen about tankies here has been directed towards the mods and admins, not necessarily the rank average users.
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i may or may not have a tanksona, but that doesn’t make me a tankie.
