What's a Tankie?
What's a Tankie?
I keep hearing the term in political discourse, and rather than googling it, I'm asking the people who know better than Google.
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A cute water cistern.
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That is an adorable tankie
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I had no idea this would ignite a shitstorm. I have so many responses now and less idea of what a tankie is now than when I asked.
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Ask with an account federated with Hexbear and Lemmygrad, and you'll get more communist perspectives.
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I am in the same boat. Been on here for about 2 years and I hear the words...but i dunno what it means? Thought it was just me.
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You know that magnifying glass looking icon? You can search terms across instances.
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A lot of these comments reminds me of people posting on conservative chats asking what a socialist is. About the same amount of mouth foaming.
I would like to remind people about vaccinations against rabies
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It's what centrists call anyone to the left of netanyahu.
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I'm losing track too. These policial people keep making up terms for the people they disagree with and they keep disagreeing with their own groups so those groups split into new groups and then more terms are needed for those new groups name.
It's childish.
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It's essentially just the modern day "commie", used to carry out mccarthyite witch-hunting against anyone perceived to be "anti-white".
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It really is adult name calling, and it further polarizes the political spectrum by naming every single fucking mindset and ideology combination you can think of. It's just not constructive at all.
We need to talk about ideas and issues and how we can understand and compromise for one another.
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A slur mainly on the internet against those leftist (usually Marxists-leninist) who oppose western interventions, sanctions, coups and wars against countries and governments labeled as "authoritarian".
originally used by UK communists party trotskyist wing in support of Hungarian -56 crushed uprising against those who opposed it, calling them tankies. Vaguely same as "stalinist", but it pretty much has lost that meaning in modern use.
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And by uprising you mean a CIA sponsored color revolution https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2025/0318/104-10110-10525.pdf
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This
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A size of tank, smaller than normal tank, but bigger than tankette.
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Like most words it can mean different things depending on context. I’ll do my best to cover a few without spoiling it with my own opinions.
The most common usage is as a blanket pejorative aimed at anyone who identifies as leftist but also openly endorses authoritarian means or ends.
There are also those who embrace the term and they are also not all the same. There are Marxist-Leninists who believe the only path to a stateless egalitarian society is through a revolutionary vanguard party. There are also those who argue that egalitarian society can only be achieved and maintained through benevolent authoritarianism.
In any case, the term carries an implication of authoritarianism and/or revolutionary violence, hence “tanks.”
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OP, what have you unleashed.
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I just thought this was where you came to ask questions.
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It is, I'm just kidding around. Your question was innocent enough, it's just that the comments look like a battlefield.
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Wassa tankie?
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Feryerhealth
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nuttin', wassa tankie wit' you?
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It's essentially a pejorative for "communist." I recommend the Prolewiki article on "Tankies," as well as Nia Frome's essay "Tankies."
For those that want an introduction to Marxism-Leninism, I made an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list, check it out!
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The problem with this argument is that you're looking for some idealistic version of communism without any regard as to it's actual feasibility. You want communism with western liberal democratic packaging, a communism that explicitly rejects any kind of violence or force against class enemies, afraid of being accused of repression, and that leaves the door wide open for counterrevolutionary forces to seize back control. You want something that works better as protest than as practical implementation. It's just Eurocommunism for the 21st century. There's a reason why this kind of communism only exists in the developed western world. It clings onto the notion of western superiority, and regards communists of the global south to be barbaric, authoritarian, and oppressive.
There's also a reason why this ideology is not the platform of practically any active and actually existing communist party in the world. It's the communism of idealists who haven't read theory, or understood theory. It borrows heavily from the "marketplace of ideas" where the opponents of the revolution can be defeated purely by a good argument.
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Tankies are authoritarian communists
I’m not exactly optimistic about socialists winning elections in my country, maybe I can ask the billionaires politely?
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All states are "authoritarian," in that all states are means by which one class exerts its authority over the others. Communists support the working class being in charge of that authority, all communists (unless you count anarchists) support the use of the state against capitalists and fascists, and the majority of practicing communists support socialist states.
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When a South Asian calls the British monarchy fascist or Churchill a genocider in my experience.
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Post the video coward
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Are you referring to the like twenty minute video where a guy stands in front of a tank and even jumps on top of it before two other protestors come by and he walks off with them willingly? Not even the US embassy in China claimed there was a "massacre". Was the embassy full of tankies?
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Something funny about posting the question to .ml and seeing the renoved comments at the top hah
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Yeah, I really stepped in it. I honestly didn't know.
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It's funny but also if nothing else at least you get different sort of perspective here than in other places
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I need my Tankie siblings to look at these comments and tell me it's worth conversing with any of these people lmao, let them play in their own shit. If they'll ever be convinced, the material failures of their worldview will do it for us, if not- the future's ash and fertilizer welcome them.
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There are far too many comments that just got removed by the moderator! I asked the question, and while I might not agree with all the replies, I was glad that people felt like it was okay to do so.
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If you want to know about any subject, ask a person that is a proponent of said subject first and then get the harshest criticism second and see how the first holds up. You will find an answer eventually in this hegelian dialectic. E.g. You don't want an anti-feminists explaining feminism to you, without hearing from a feminist first.
you asked what a "tankie" is in one of the very few places on the internet that is a tankie space/instance. Let them explain to you first. The removed comments are "dronies" (politically confused people that hold the same views as western imperialists and are subject to their hegemony) are outsiders that come from other parts of the fediverse repeating the same talking points you read about everywhere else on the (western) internet. (To stay with the analogy: similar to an anti-feminist saying that feminists hate men, when its not true). Comments get removed here when they are factually wrong
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"Factually wrong" might be a bit slippery when it comes to this issue. I get the impression that the term is going through some changes in use (as words tend to do) and some groups might legitimately disagree with each other on the definition. Some of the comments that got removed were not in any way helpful to the conversation, but others seemed to have their own definitions. Now they are deleted, who can say? The last definition standing wins?
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Notice how all that is left are comments that support authoritarian communism and defend totalitarian states they identify with¹ including crimes against humanity and historical revisionism. That is a prime example of what other leftists call tankies. Censorship, brigading and other bad behaviours because only their reality tunnel is acceptable. Even reasonable and nuanced comments explaining a different point of view have been downvoted and removed.
¹ interestingly a lot of them support Russia today despite it's a prime capitalist oligarchy since the fall of CCCP over thirty years ago and China that too has strayed closer to a corrupt capitalist kleptocracy than communism in anything than name. Obviously they support North Korea too, adopting the state ideology that no criticism is allowed. Hence the common assumption is that the tankie hive is a mix of ideological hardliners, paid trolls of said states and random contrarians that are in it for the ego.
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OP I am glad you asked this because I don’t know. Also based on the horseshit answers you have gotten in this post it seems like no one else does either.
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worth checking the modlog, seems there were answers that have since disappeared for mysterious reasons.
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The whole notion of dictatorship in a sense of a single person running things is deeply infantile. As Anna Louise Strong puts it in This Soviet World:
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Here's an EPUB of This Soviet World, another good book is Soviet Democracy by Pat Sloan
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The last line is a fascinating contrast to socialism and UBI. Almost capitalist again in nature
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Anyone ideologically left of Richard Nixon according to our local blue conservatives.
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This term goes back to the 1968 Prague spring.
It was an uprising, an attempt by the Czechoslovak communist party at reformation towards more democracy and freedom of the press. Then troops from other members of the Warsaw pact marched in and subdued it.
From then on, communists who supported more democracy and freedom called the pro-quelling communists "tankies" as they marched in with tanks.
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It was actually the 1956 fascist counter-revolution in Hungary, not the 1968 fascist counter-revolution in Prague, where "tankie" originated in the Communist Party of Great Britain. The term was coined because of the British tendency towards silly-sounding insults, and because the Soviet Union sent in the Red Army to stop the western-backed fascist insurrection. This caused a split in the party (as it always does in western orgs).
The Hungarian revolt in 1956 was infested with anti-semetic pograms. MI6 funded, supplied, and trained the Hungarian counter-revolutionaries. These counter-revolutionaries were allied with fascists who were lynching Jewish people and Communists.
"The special correspondent of the Yugoslav paper, Politika, (Nov. 13, 1956) describing the events of those days, said that the homes of Communists were marked with a white cross and those of Jews with a black cross, to serve as signs for the extermination squads. “There is no longer any room for doubt,” said the Yugoslav reporter, “it is an example of classic Hungarian fascism and of White Terror. The information,” continued this writer, "coming from the provinces tells how in certain places Communists were having their eyes put out, their ears cut off, and that they were being killed in the most terrible ways."
"But the forces of reaction were rapidly consolidating their power and pushing forward on the top levels, while in the streets the blood of scores of massacred Communists, Jews, and progressives was flowing."
"Some of the reports reaching Warsaw from Budapest today caused considerable concern. These reports told of massacres of Communists and Jews by what were described as 'Fascist elements' ...." (N.Y. Times, Nov. 1. 1956)
"The evidence is conclusive that the entry of Soviet troops into Budapest stopped the execution of scores, perhaps thousands of Jews, for by the end of October and early November, anti-Semtic pogroms - hallmark of unbridled fascistic terror - were making their appearance, after an absence of some ten years, within Hungary."
"A correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Maariv (Tel Aviv) reported:
During the uprising a number of former Nazis were released from prison and other former Nazis came to Hungary from Salzburg . . . I met them at the border . . . I saw anti-Semitic posters in Budapest . . . On the walls, street lights, streetcars, you saw inscriptions reading: “Down with Jew Gero!” “Down with Jew Rakosi!” or just simply “down with the Jews!”
Leading rabbinical circles in New York received a cable early in November from corresponding circles in Vienna that “Jewish blood is being shed by the rebels in Hungary.” Very much later-in February, 1957-the World Jewish Congress reported that “anti-Semitic excesses occurred in more than twenty villages and smaller provincial towns during the October-November revolt.” This occurred, according to this very conservative body, because “fascist and anti-Semitic groups had apparently seized the opportunity, presented by the absence of a central authority, to come to the surface.” Many among the Jewish refugees from Hungary, the report continued, had fled from this anti-Semitic pogrom-like atmosphere (N.Y. Times, Feb. 15, 1957). This confirmed the earlier report made by the British Rabbi, R. Pozner, who, after touring refugee camps, declared that “the majority of Jews who left Hungary did so for fear of the Hungarians and not the Russians.” The Paris Jewish newspaper, Naye Presse, asserted that Jewish refugees in France claimed quite generally that Soviet soldiers had saved their lives."
Further, the CIA also backed Hungarian resistance forces:
Prague in 1968 was a similar fascist uprising in both cases there were some elements of progressive protest, but these were greatly overshadowed by the fascist movements. Dubcek wanted to sell out to the IMF, and restore capitalism. The idea that any of this was about "democracy" or "freedom" is silly, it was always about Cold War tactics to destabilize socialism.
TL;DR imagine if the January 6th rioters were armed and trained by foreign governments, started lynching officials and Jewish people, and the US sent in the army to put down the insurrection. The MAGA chuds would claim that it was about "freedom" and "democracy," but we all know that they just wanted Trump in office.
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Wasn't it recently declassified that the velvet revolution was indeed a CIA plot?
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It's people who defend Tienanmen square massacre and other atrocities of authoritarian governments in the east. Kinda like wankies who defend, distort and deflect the atrocities of the west.
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Libs take information at face value and don't consider it's context.
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You'll hear a lot of shit, but I'll humanise the tankies. OK. So you're a human being and you see an imperialist power doing horrendous things in the name of capitalism, patriarchy, and racial dominance. That's bad. So bad that you begin to think that anyone against that must inherently be good. You're so committed to that ideal that you will justify, defend, or dismiss every evil that they commit in turn.
You do see horrible shit happen in America, or in the world in America's name. But oftentimes international conflict is just a few bad removed racing to the bottom, and you have to be willing to stand by principles, not just "America bad."
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This is what happens when you refuse to actually engage with Marxism, or the points we make, then try to come up with your own reasoning for why we support who we do. I encourage you to actually try to understand communists in our own words.
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lost redditors always come out of the woodwork in these threads
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Mccarthyite redditors out in force today.
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I'm betting the guy without an original thought is a fed, along with his buddy.
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A tankie is a fascist who wants everyone in the concentration camp to share a toothbrush. They're typically rejects from their own community that crave revenge against people who want a truly better world, such as Barack Obama and Keir Starmer.
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Please use /s tags, because its impossible to tell sarcasm otherwise. There are unfortunately a large number of ppl who believe your statement unironically.
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Well I would prefer a clean game anyways, so I can manage that for sure
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I don't know that Kier Starmer wants anything concrete in particular, but tankies are certainly people who simp for dictatorships like Russia or China while claiming that the capitalist abusive governments of them are 'communist'.
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No communist "simps" for the Russian Federation, support for the RF extends to the fact that it does a lot of trade with socialist countries like China and Cuba, opposes western imperialism, and has a populace increasingly in support of a return to socialism. Communists do tend to support China, as China is a socialist country. Public ownership is the principle aspect of their economy.
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Please point to a single person on Lemmy who calls the Russian government communist and supports it
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Glad we pulled you out of your shell after a day of not commenting. This is a very low-quality reply. Try to make more high-quality replies to contribute to discussions on Lemmy. Thanks.
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No communist calls the ROK an "occupier," it's the US Empire that is occupying Korea, with the ROK's government set up directly by them. This whole comment is really bad, to be honest. In practice, "tankie" is essentially a pejorative for "communist." I recommend the Prolewiki article on "Tankies," as well as Nia Frome's essay "Tankies."
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