Fascism is a form of radical authoritarian ultranationalism, characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and control of industry and commerce.
The close similarities between fascism and Marxist-Leninist ideology are hard to ignore. Both Marxism-Leninism and National Socialism masquerade as socialism but in reality have little to do with it and are simply excuses to mount dictatorships.
Tankies are people who make excuses to justify the atrocities committed in the name of communism. Tankies crave power and work to create rigid hierarchies to amass that power. They support a totalitarian one-party state that governs all of society with an iron first. They defend forced labor, polluting mass-industry, population displacement, mass surveillance, genocide and brutal punishment for anyone who would speak out against the state or the new ruling class.
Tankies praise these genocidal population transfers because they “lifted the peasants (that survived) out of poverty”. But they are measuring “poverty” by materialistic, capitalist standards that are simply of no use to the subsistence farmers, hunter-gatherers and nomadic herders that made up much of the pre-industrial world.
most peasants (…) only needed to work a few hours a week [1] to produce all the food they needed to survive. The progression of Soviet state capitalism quickly changed all this, and they now had to labor endlessly in grungy, polluted cities or on industrial battery-farms for the state or face being branded a “kulak” and exiled, imprisoned or killed.
Nomadic herders in Central Asia and Kazakhstan were especially unaccustomed to this new way of life being forced on them, and their resistance was met with brutal force by the Soviet state, who declared them “kulaks” and confiscated their herds. The resulting famine in this region killed between 1.5 million to 2.3 million Kazakhs
Tankies celebrate Lenin and Trotsky’s massacres of socialist revolutionaries, including the Mensheviks, the sailors of Petrograd, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the anarchists, unaffiliated peasants who had their food confiscated and so on.
Lenin successfully hijacked a popular revolution fought by the peasants and workers of Russia, sabotaging communism to install a state capitalist dictatorship with him as its life-long ruler, and then murdered most of the people that actually fought the revolution.
In 1918, Lenin wrote to G. F. Fyodorov, ordering a massacre of sex workers in which hundreds were killed: “Appoint three men with dictatorial powers (yourself, Markin and one other), organise immediately mass terror, shoot and deport the hundreds of prostitutes who are making drunkards of the soldiers, former officers and the like. Not a minute of delay.”
Lenin was an oppressor of the peasants and working classes, a despot, and, by 1918, the victorious enemy of the Russian revolution. A true counter-revolutionary. Which isn’t too surprising, considering his bourgeois background and trade as a lawyer. He perfectly met the Marxist definition of a reactionary, yet tankies hold him up as the father of their “Marxist-Leninist” ideology and praise him as a great communist.
Regardless of the fact that “communism” actually means “a stateless, classless, moneyless society with common ownership of the means of production”, Marxist-Leninists support state-capitalist regimes that use money issued by the state and have a ruling class of party elites that control the means of production and enjoy extreme privileges compared to the average workers. Tankies claim that these hierarchical, oppressive regimes will somehow bring about communism at a later date.
They defend modern-day China’s brutal oppression of its citizens, the use of deadly force to suppress democracy and quash protests, China’s overseas colonialism and territory expansion, its concentration camps for minorities and organized destruction of the environment for short-term profit.
A tankie is anyone that claims communism can be achieved by replacing a state with another state. A tankie is anyone that will swear up and down that state-capitalism, dictator personality cults and ecosystem-destroying mass-industry will eventually lead to communism through the “withering away” of the brutal state that they uphold.
We can’t lose sight of the historical fact that genocide, nationalism, capitalism, bigotry, imperialism, struggle sessions and mass incarceration are some of the central tenets of ML(M) practice, and whether they admit it publicly or not, something all tankies believe is necessary to ensure their vanguard’s dictatorship and cement their own power on the party hierarchy.
If you welcome tankies into your spaces, if you engage tankies in civil discourse, if you entertain their repugnant ideas or buy into their absurd notions of “left unity” and enable their attempts to create divisions between anarchists and sow discord, then they have already succeeded in poisoning your movement and rendering it useless.
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