Like, I remember as recently as 2016, that term was just used as a mocking term for weird larpers. Now, it's used as a term for people they want to purge from the left (yes, I'm using those words. How they're acting is literally the definition of purging, it doesn't have to include violence).
yeah i used to only hear it used to refer to reverse wehraboos, ie people with an unhealthy obsession about soviet wwii military equipment
now it seems to be anyone who doesnt want to nuke china
people with an unhealthy obsession about soviet wwii military equipment 😶
thank goodness AKs aren't ww2 military equipmend :michael-laugh:
The shifting of that Overton Window is unhinged.
Anyone left of Clinton is a tankie now, apparently
:cia: and Va*sh have been successful pushing their "Uyghurs are being genocided" narrative to the point the point that people equate questioning or debunking that narrative with "supporting genocide". It may sound like an exaggeration, but whenever I see the topic of "tankies" come up in r/SubredditDrama, there's almost always a poster from r/Vaush with a hot take voted to the top of the thread.
On the topic of r/SubredditDrama, it seems like I see a large "tankie"-bashing thread there almost weekly, and they get a lot of attention. Some recent examples:
- NBA player Enes Kanter releases a video criticizing Xi Jinping and the Uyghur genocide. Is Kanter a CIA agent? Is the Uyghur genocide even real? /r/NBA is on the case, again. (1 day ago)
- r/LateStageCapitalism user makes a pro-China post, Uyghur genocide gets brought up, thread gets nuked and users speaking out against the CCP get banned - Secondary Post made, another thread gets nuked, and now an entire spin-off subreddit is made. (14 days ago)
- UPDATE: Authoritarian tankie mods have been [REDACTED] r/Toiletpaperusa's mod team! (18 days ago)
- Tankies return to Toilet Paper USA (19 days ago)
- Tankie in the r/Therightcantmeme posts Tiananmen Square denial leading a a full thread of deleted comments (4 months ago)
- Anti-Tankie subreddit seized by Tankies (Yes, Again) (4 months ago)
Subredditdrama has some alts from top subreddit mods running it. So makes sense.
I know they have politics and neoliberal mods on their roster.
Tankies are usually the ones to break CIA/NED initiatives, like this person.
If our side typically argue at this level, it's no wonder they see a need to stamp us out. Over time there's just too much sense being made that any subreddit that allows tankies a voice will start turning anti-imperialist like the r/cth near the end and worldnews from time to time.
It's fed shit and their process is as follows:
- Cause massive drama in a subreddit where you know some MLs are present.
- Callout those MLs in that subreddit. Invent a fake narrative about a tankie takeover or some shit if you have to.
- Continue this for several days/weeks.
- Now that you've created a dozen different threads about it you've got enough drama to take it to meta subs like SRD.
Then they'll use those meta subs as force multipliers.
They follow this process over and over again. They create the drama, then they take it to againsthatesubreddits and SRD where they spread it to people that spread it to the rest of reddit. The outcome has been a red scare style of tankiephobia on the site.
The whole strat completely falls apart if MLs simply move to different alts for modding new subs, which most of us have done. There's a growing number of reds in default subreddits now too but I won't be naming the subreddits anymore for opsec as tankiejerk are watching this space. Honestly the day that subreddit gets deleted will be a very good one for us.
Told some poster that che is a symbol of liberation worldwide, and he was wholly convinced that he was a “war criminal” who killed queer people by firing squad
They hate acknowledging this, because it might lead them to realize that their :lmayo: opinions about AES aren't shared worldwide and that in places where people are victims of imperialism, the same people they hate (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Fidel, Che, Ho Chi Minh, etc.) are heroes to millions.
in places where people are victims of imperialism, the same people they hate (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Fidel, Che, Ho Chi Minh, etc.) are heroes to millions.
That's when they start going full white savior
NO! White supremacy is watching the wrong movies or playing the wrong Vidya!
:liberalism:
if the character wearing the shirt was an extremely based ML who fully understood dialectical materialism and disagreed with all US military decisions and could justify all related stances/opinions of the above from first-principles, how would they have handed the situation?
Stalinists were anti krushchev, I think most of them would've followed Mao's line on Hungary
Tankie = leftist
Leftist = liberal
That's the conservative lexicon, and liberals take their cues from right wingers, so they have adopted the former.
This has been the trend for years. Liberals get called "commie" "pinko" "Marxist America hater" by the GOP, so they start to think that those are just edgy synonyms for "progressive" (🤮🤮🤮). When someone who's actually a communist shows up, they freak out.
My job has me in other peoples houses, and one customer recently had their TV on something like Newsmax or some weird far right channel I'd never heard of, and the headline at one point was "Obama makes excuses for leftist failures."
Unlikely she'll use it because her whole thing is that she ignores the left instead of attacking the left. Biden, Synema, Trump, MTJ etc. all attack the left daily so its more likely they'd use it.
Now that the libs are starting to pick up "tankie" I fully believe shortly after it becomes a common word for them the reactionaries in the more fringe regions of their media culture will start using it unironically against the libs, and by the time we see the bowtie dipshit on Fox calling Pelosi a tankie for eating ice cream or something stupid the shitibs will turn around and go "yaaas we're tankies!" And coopt tankie much like how they co-opted antifa, blm, che's face, etc.
"Tankie" will mean "liberal hawk" in about 2 years. The tank is because they love our big beautiful US Army tanks!
bigger threat so the rhetoric changed. can't keep a good idea down though :stalin-approval:
I've been called an "anarchist tankie" for trying to explain that pol pot was not a marxist and he did not "come closest to implementing true marxism". The guy was just deadly afraid of the term marxism.
Yeah marxists like pol pot who was funded by the US government and took the non communist country of Vietnam invading to remove them from power.
When the feds started using it as part of a new digital red scare campaign by coopting left wing reactionaries and children.
How they’re acting is literally the definition of purging, it doesn’t have to include violence).
This is a comical overreaction to the behavior of weirdos on the internet who don't matter. Log off for a minute, I'm begging you
My memory isn't the best in general, but while "larper" is for sure a term that'd get thrown around as well by people who dislike those they call tankies, tankies has meant "Someone who doesn't believe imperialist lies about AES countries" by people who believe and perpetuate those lies for as long as I can remember.
I'm sure there are some young folks with more passion than sense who think revolution tomorrow is a possibility, but it's always mostly meant "People who think that the Soviet Union was mostly good," IME.
