It’s really not though
The term “tankie” was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defence of the Soviet use of tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions.
I’ve never understood why there is any confusion over the word “tankie.” It applies to the pro-cop left. If a leftist believes that it’s necessary for cops to beat minorities and dissidents into submission for their society to function, they’re tankies. If they approach leftism in a way that does not involve state violence against civilians to enforce those ideas, they’re not tankies. To me there isn’t a lot of gray area.
I’ve always thought of them as the communists who think communists are somehow uniquely immune to the “power corrupts” doctrine
I don’t think your second paragraph follows from the first. The cited revolts were largely fascist in origin, for example the Hungarian revolt had the fascists lynching Soviet Officials and freeing Nazis from prison in order to assist with lynching Soviet Officials. Calling them “dissidents” or pretending they were ethnic minorities is ridiculous. Not answering fascists lynchings with violence would be incredibly terrible.
The “rebels” were trained and supplied by MI6, and had marked the doors of Jews and Communists for extermination.
Really curious what a “non-tankie” would recommend doing in such a situation. Giving the Nazis that killed hundreds of people flowers?
What you claimed is very believable to me, and I’m also prepared to believe that the reality of your claims is heavily censored in the English language. That being said I haven’t been able to find evidence to support that the primary drivers of these respective uprisings were fascist or Western. I have only found evidence of other causes. I have no doubt opportunistic fascists and Western governments took advantage of these situations for their own benefit, but the origins of these situations seem to have been genuine domestic issues which were met with state violence causing the situation to escalate. Would you link me to your sources?
This is a decent overview of the background that led up to the events of 1956, and this is a decent overview of the darker side, where the lynchings happened. Content Warning: lynched corpses. Here is a source on MI6 training and arming the counterrevolutionaries. Those 3 articles give only the briefest overview of the events, but don’t do the real buildup to them, their complexities, what the people actually supported, or the real character in any depth. If you want to actually take a deep dive, these are additional sources:
The History of the Working Class Movement in Hungary
1956 Counter-Revolution in Hungary
Others can offer more sources.
Overall, when it comes to geopolitical enemies of the United States in particular, it would not be a bad idea to treat your current understanding with extreme skepticism until you’ve investigated counter-sources as well. That doesn’t mean the US always lies, in fact it frequently tells mostly the truth, but will distory either the quality or quantity of an event.
Thank you for taking my request in good faith; this is what I was looking for. I’ll be taking some time to look through these.
No problem! I try to be good faith, haha. There’s a lot to the events in Hungary, Prague, and so forth, so there’s a lot to dig into beyond what I provided.
Authoritarian communist, essentially
Wikipedia has a good article about the term
If you think Hitler is bad, wait until you hear what he has to say about the soviets!
But seriously this is an argument that has been over since before anyone alive today was ever born
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
authoritarianism = bad is literal baby brain
All it really boils down to is “supports AES,” though. The article even says as much.
I skimmed through the article and I have no clue what does being a tankie have to do with encryption algorithms
Actually Existing Socialism. Cuba, Vietnam, China, Laos, the former USSR, etc.
Whoever taught liberals that word, I hope they have diarrhea forever.
That would probably be some ultras, they are very desperate to be recognized by liberals as “true communists” unlike those “fake authoritarians”. Liberals of course don’t give a shit and immediately labeled ultras as tankies as well.
Its become the boomer equivalent of calling everything bad communist.
Just replace “woke” with “russian”.
True but only for terminally online liberals. I still haven’t heard anyone in real life ever use that word.
It will happen in a few years from now.
Bet is going to be conservatives using it to talk about anyone left to Hitler
“Liberal” is just
Do people genuinely take badempanada seriously?
He starts a lot of shit, but dammit if he isn’t right most of the time.
Shut up, tankie!
Authoritarianism is authoritarianism. Doesnt matter how you paint it.
You wouldn’t make it on the grad
Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?
On authority, by Frederick Engels 1872
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
Not really, no. To a capitalist, all forms of leftism is ‘authoritarian,’ because they consider private property natural and oppose leftists ‘stealing’ in.
‘Authoritarianism’ just isn’t a particularly useful term because nobody who uses is is ever actually categorically opposed to forcefully compelling people to do or not do things. They will always have a build in exception for what ever they consider to be ‘legitimate authority’, and what they consider justified authority will just depend on what political philosophy they ascribe to. So really calling the word just means “someone with a different political theory to me with regards to legitimate authority.”
There are people who are categorically opposed to forcefully compelling people, and many of them use the word ‘authoritarian’.
It can be a useful term, not all systems are equally authoritarian. It’s a spectrum.
So you’re an author apologist. Got it.
Nah, death to the author
Just because some people might not use the term correctly doesn’t mean it isn’t a useful term
I left lemmy.ml because there were too many people defending or denying historical acts of political violence. That’s what we mean when we say tankies are authoritarian.
If you’d actually read my post, you’d know my point wasn’t about it being used “incorrectly”.
people defending or denying historical acts of political violence. That’s what we mean when we say tankies are authoritarian.
Defeating the Nazis was an act of political violence, freeing slaves was an act of political violence, over throwing the feudal system was an act of political believe, driving out colonial empires is an act of political violence, enforcing property rights is an act of political violence, ceasing the means of production is an act of political violence.
See? This is exactly, exactly what I was talking about.
Slaughtering protestors was also an act of political violence, but for some reason the moderators on this instance only like it when you talk about the US doing that
I mean we both know I’m talking about specific acts of political violence, but you are right in that I should have clarified.
To be clear what makes it authoritarian is when it’s the state/government/leadership that is using acts of violence against citizens with political ideas that would threaten their power.
And tankies get the name specifically from either defending or denying that specifically the Soviet Union used violence to suppress attempts to leave their union. When I was on .ml I also frequently saw defense or denial of China using violence that way such as the infamous Tiananmen Square Massacre.
People from lemmy.ml love to shout that people who want them defederated are “capitalist” and hexbear has decided accusing people of being anti-trans is their move, but those are simply strawmen, and really poorly constructed ones at that.
Calling the 1989 incidence in Beijing the Tianenmen Square Massacre is like calling the 2021 incidence in Washington D.C. The Freedom Plaza Killings where the Democratic Party ruthlessly slaughtered innocent civilians after a peaceful protest, with the exception that the protesters in 2021 were more reasonable and less violent than the rioters in Beijing. Especially for the fact that when Washington decided to send the military in, the Jan 6 rioters did not decide to stay and try to block the US military from entering the Capitol or Plaza.
I won’t be surprised to eventually see an actual equivalent type (demands from pro-palestine protesters for educational reforms) of protest happening in the US with far higher causalties as a result.
First, what the protestors in Tianamen didn’t do was break into the government buildings with the intent to kill specific members of the government and to overturn the results of an election to install a leader of their own choice. That happened in 2021.
Also the death toll in 1989 was much much larger.
If you want a better US example, maybe something like the killing of striking mine workers in the US although I’m struggling to find an example of a single event that comes close to the scale of Tianamen.
That’s because at least before any other student group decided to storm government buildings which was rumored to happen despite there already many police and soldiers present, one group of “peaceful” protesters decided to kill over 100 soldiers on the same street and one day before tank man decided to jump on a tank.
The “peaceful protest” was far more violent than the Jan 6 US insurgency was, since the US insurgents did not have such a violent group among them.
That happened in 1989.
It was the Capitol Hill Jan 6 insurgency or the similar Hong Kong 2019 insurgency but got way way more aggressive before any military action or counteraction was taken.
What Jan 6 and Tianenmen square share though is that once the insurgency took place the military was called in, but during the Jan 6 Capitol Hill riots, the rioters Capitol Hill rioters actually all left, not wanting to confront the military, while at least some of the Chinese insurgents on the street stayed and died fighting, while people on the square were peacefully evacuated.
I think the best parallel that could be drawn would be the [Kent State Shootings.] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings) given the similarities between the Kent state students’ goals and the Tiananmen students’ goals.
Though even then there were only four fatalities. No where near Tiananmen. Plus the US government isn’t doing anything to try to hide the murders either.
Are you seriously comparing the Tiananmen square massacre where at least 300 peaceful protesters/students were killed by the Chinese military to the Jan 6 riots where there were only two people killed? (Technically there were 5 deaths but three of them were either overdoses or natural causes). One was a cop killed by the rioters and another was a lady warned several times that she was going to be shot if she continued to break into the capital building.
These are not even remotely similar situations.
One group of students or “students” killed at least 100 soldiers before any violent counteractions or actions were taken by the military and that’s part of the 300 killed. The situation is very similar since such scenario could have happened if part of the Jan 6 rioters organized to inflict more violence and decided to stay after the storming and convinced part of the rioters to stay as well.
Wow that’s quite the revisionism there
Calling an insurgency a peaceful protest is indeed revisionist if one were to do so.
And calling a revolt an insurgency and calling insurgency where rioters kill over 100 soldiers a peaceful protest with counteraction against such insurgency a massacre is also quite the revisionism.
The timeline of Tianenmen 1989 is
- large continuing peaceful protests for US-controlled school education
- groups of students or “students” killing soldiers on the street
- evacuating peaceful protesters from the square + soldiers killing insurgents still active on the street
- train station incident, unrelated protesters block soldiers with strict orders from entering train
- tanks arrive on square and start patrolling the streets
- Man with shopping bags stops tank on the same street the soldiers and insurgents were killed, then jumps on it, other students drag him off the tank and away.
I mean we both know I’m talking about specific acts of political violence
Yes, which was my point. These definitions always have some implicit carve out exception to allow the kind of political violence that the person giving them agrees with to “not count”.
To be clear what makes it authoritarian is when it’s the state/government/leadership that is using acts of violence against citizens with political ideas that would threaten their power.
This would include collecting taxes, enforcing national borders, enforcing private property, all gun control measures, suppressing domestic terrorists and militias, implementing a particular voting system and then enforcing the result, conscription, and indeed, enforcing the concept of “citizen” vs “non-citizens” in the first place. But, again, you’ve cut out an expectation for political violence you agree with already.
And tankies get the name specifically from either defending or denying that specifically the Soviet Union used violence to suppress attempts to leave their union.
And here’s yet another post-hoc definition of tankie that does not actually line up with how anybody uses the term. Or are you willing for me to ping you to chime in every time someone calls me a tankie for something that has nothing to do with the USSR keeping Soviets in the union (incidently, there isn’t a country on earth that will willing let parts of it leave.)
and hexbear has decided accusing people of being anti-trans is their move, but those are simply strawmen, and really poorly constructed ones at that.
Sounds like you’re a transphobe who got called out.
This would include collecting taxes, enforcing national borders, enforcing private property, all gun control measures, suppressing domestic terrorists and militias, implementing a particular voting system and then enforcing the result, conscription, and indeed, enforcing the concept of “citizen” vs “non-citizens” in the first place. But, again, you’ve cut out an expectation for political violence you agree with already.
Yes, which was my point. These definitions always have some implicit carve out exception to allow the kind of political violence that the person giving them agrees with to “not count”.
Sure, at some point it’s a spectrum. From the perspective of anarchism, any government is “authoritarian”.
And here’s yet another post-hoc definition of tankie that does not actually line up with how anybody uses the term. Or are you willing for me to ping you to chime in every time someone calls me a tankie for something that has nothing to do with the USSR keeping Soviets in the union (incidently, there isn’t a country on earth that will willing let parts of it leave.)
I got that from Wikipedia. What I saw more recently on .ml was more often about China, North Korea, or Russia’s attack on Ukraine.
when it’s the state/government/leadership that is using acts of violence
So when a corporation uses or sponsors acts of violence it’s not authoritarianism? I guess Coca-Cola-funded fascist death squads are just smol bean libertarians fighting the oppressive tankie socialists!
You can’t even get your talking points in order. The main people on lemmy.ml are anti-capitalist, they would accuse those who would censor them of being anti-communist.
So when a corporation uses or sponsors acts of violence it’s not authoritarianism? I guess Coca-Cola-funded fascist death squads are just smol bean libertarians fighting the oppressive tankie socialists!
Until Coca-Cola is its a government, no, that’s not authoritarianism. That doesn’t mean it’s good. Things can be bad without being authoritarianism.
You can’t even get your talking points in order. The main people on lemmy.ml are anti-capitalist, they would accuse those who would censor them of being anti-communist.
Yeah you’re right I was caught between two phrasings and I mixed them up. I edited it to fix it. Thanks for pointing out my mistake!
Until Coca-Cola is its a government, no, that’s not authoritarianism.
Which was more authoritarian: slavery or freeing the slaves? Slaveowners were not the government, therefore, according to you, nothing they did could be considered authoritarian, right?
It seems pretty arbitrary to single out one single heirarchy and say that only that heirarchy is capable of being authoritarian.
And tankies get the name specifically from either defending or denying that specifically the Soviet Union used violence to suppress attempts to leave their union.
I fucking knew it, Lincoln was a soviet plant all along, fucking tankies.
Tankie doesn’t really mean anything to me anymore. Even self-proclaimed tankies often have trouble defining it in a way that is consistent among leftist groups.
I always just thought it meant leftists who are actively advocating violence.
No marxist does this, and the painting of communists as inherently violent is pure capitalist projection. But we do disagree with pacifism.
https://redphoenixnews.com/2011/08/11/pacifism-how-to-do-the-enemys-job-for-them/
Tankie = derogatory term for Marxist. It’s that easy
No, and never was.
Yes, and always was
I believe in reclaiming “tankie” in the same way as “queer.” Schoolyard bullies don’t really care to distinguish between the many different labels encompassed by LGBT+, and so they inadvertently invented a term that could be very inclusive and all encompassing, even if you’re still figuring out who you are, you call always fall back on “queer” to give the general idea.
In the same way, the term “tankie” gets applied to people of all sorts of different left ideologies. There are significant differences between different leftist ideologies, but our critics don’t care to understand or distinguish between them, so I consider tankie to be a similarly inclusive term. Do you support anything that any socialist government has ever done? Do you think Cuba had an effective literacy program? Congratulations, you’re a tankie, welcome to the club.
Note that my identifying with the term isn’t really an invitation for people to use it. But, you know, if people want to keep using it as this broad, meaningless term that lumps a bunch of people together, as I see it, it only works to our advantage as “tankies,” it pushes people towards us and helps us remember what we have in common instead of fighting over our differences. So I’m not exactly going to fight the label particularly hard.
Tankie always meant a fan of authoritarianism but not of the nazi variety. And hand to hand with that goes hate for America, but hate for America isn’t enough on it’s own, it should be paired with love of Strong Hand Of The East.
Tankie thinks China, Russia, North Korea are just swell, and not because of some underlying ideology, but because they have an authoritarian model of governance and generally in opposition to the west to some degree.
And that’s the reason why it’s so hard to define for some people, boiled down to it’s definition, it’s very hard to spin into something universally good, so talking to a general public they have to do what authoritarian lovers from the other side of the spectrum call “hiding the power lever”, which muddies the water.America is the most authoritarian nation in human history
They have the highest incarceration rate of all time, and have destroyed the sovereignty of billions of people
China, Russia, North Korea
Conveniently all enemies of the US State Department. Don’t those tankies know that these countries are bad because checks notes they do the authoritarianisms.
Countries that do authitarianism become bad, yes. That’s exactly how it works, glad you’re getting it.
I can’t believe anyone would enforce class interests with violence, instead of debating tenants out of houses they’re in arrears for. Smh
On some level when you’re doing sophistry like this do you understand you’re acting real stupid?
What’s authoritarianism, and how does a country do it?
Seriously?
Yes, seriously. Liberals love vaguely coded moralisms and ideals, but they never specify what they mean systematically. America is more “authoritarian” by any definition I can conceive due to its hundreds year history of slavery, imperialist war and mass incarceration than any other country on earth
Seriously.
its the one with the… and they have ttank, with… the one with ehe tan, you takn. rhe tanker. tabker is the with the
generally it vaguely means “communists” as well as “anti-imperialists”, with the caveat that left communists are excluded as a separate thing
I thought it had to include the pro authoritarian and often pro war aspect of it. So a Marxist/communist or what not wouldn’t fall into tankies without the call for an authoritarian leader like Stalin.
Nope, you will get called a tankie if you support Palestine. Tankies are generally anti imperialist war while the squishier social Democrat types are pro-war. Tankie authoritarians were against WW1 while the “lib left” all voted along nationalist lines
This is why I don’t think this term will ever really leave usage on the internet moving forward.(not talking about historical use in GB and such). It seems many people believe it means something different. Not that I want it to be a mainstream media term.
Not that stack exchange users are the end all be all of what one should believe is correct, but this was what they showed as their agreed definition.
The parts about supporting the aggressive putting down of a rebellion with tanks is what usually has people tie in the supporting authoritarian violence. If you look at it from the other side one would would argue the ends justified the means which was to stop an escalation and thus a possible war as well. So really all sides of the term were going to be tied to aggression and supporting one mindedness ruling over another.
I don’t see anyone using it as a compliment for anyone anytime soon
That “authoritarian putting down of a revolution” was the squashing of anti-Semitic rightwing pogroms and mobs. Good riddance.
Every nation state in existence is authoritarian, the different is towards who. You are still deep in Liberal dogma
I didn’t say what I believed, I was discussing the usage of the term tankie in mainstream media. If it were used, I would assume western media would voice it with the red scare propaganda that is always pushed. With the media conglomerates jostling to find a way to fall in line with Trump’s administration I figure they’d label anything left of them a violent communistic extremest group.
The average lib who uses tankie has no idea of its origins, and it’s origins are now so irrelevant as it has nothing to do with the groups that are labeled. Only liberals bring up the Hungary thing instead of discussing how the term is used in modern context
I have some news about Stalin courtesy of, no shit, the CIA
I was under the impression it was the intersection of the venn diagram of communists and imperialists, as long as imperialist means imperialist (defined as using economic, military, diplomatic and cultural power to influence countries around you in a way that is beneficial to you, and may be either beneficial, inconsequential or detrimental to them) and not just “western and capitalist”
to influence countries around you in a way that is beneficial to you, and may be either beneficial, inconsequential or detrimental to them
What an amazing definition. Hand crafted to be as all encompassing as possible so you can label anyone as an imperialist.
That’s generally a disagreement over what “Imperialism” even means. “Anti-Imperialists” are talking about Lenin’s identification of modern Monopoly Capitalism as it brutally expropriates wealth from the Global South through outsourcing and debt traps with the IMF, like Coke and the Columbian death squads.
A tankie is anyone to the left of whoever is using the pejorative. Usually because they expressed a critique of imperialism or aren’t sufficiently racist towards the Chinese.
This seems to be how I see it used most. I usually stick to calling people tankies when they walk around explicitly talking about how proud they are to be one.
Yeah I’m a tankie
Anyone you see self identifying as a tankie is just fucking around because of how meaningless the term is. If you want to insult a Marxist try directly engaging with whatever it is they’re saying that annoys you. You might even learn something along the way.
If you want to insult a Marxist
try directly engagingcall them a lib.Knowing Marxists, we also will never shut up lol
Tank you very much
The conversation around “tankies” reminds me heavily of “neolibs” - loosely defined in the minds of the folks discussing them. Basically a catch-all term for your own idea of what a liberal outgroup should be.
[Referring to the Tiananmen Square Massacre] We (at least many of us) have read the sources that have been linked. What is described there, particularly the accounts of people who were there, is what we assert is what happened. In the few instances where there may be contradictory first hand accounts (and mostly, the accounts are not contradictory but rather corroborate each other) there may be some ambiguity. But even taking that into account, it is ridiculous and downright ahistorical to say “Chinese authorities massacred people.”
This is from a conversation with the kind of people I would consider “tankies”. It’s from a community I think has since been deleted, but the general vibe of the comments in the post was that the Tiananmen Square massacre isn’t a real thing and any civilian deaths were actually justified.
You consider tankies to be people who have actually dug into the sources and done enough research to come to their own conclusion rather than just accepting the cold war narrative without question?
