The kind that thinks communism is the same as nazism and thinks communism is when the government does things.
I hate liberal brain worms.
They seriously do as much damage to the left as fascists by punching to the left and spreading capitalist anti-left propaganda. They overall weaken leftism and help fascism.
We need more left unity, folks. Fash ain’t gonna bash themselves. 
Depends on the individual. I think for some, it’s just another step of their radicalization.
It took repeated instances of reality being a battering ram against my own liberal delusions until I finally became a “tankie”, until I finally realized that the system is unfixable and “civil debate” will get us nowhere.
This was my evolution as well. From “idk if I should go on r/cth, I hear they’re tankies” to having a remembrance of Stalin during intercourse.
Mostly by not considering them left. They are liberals wearing leftist aesthetics. You can not be a nato supporter without being a western supremacist which is barely one step removed from white supremacism, this is incompatible with leftism, it’s only compatible with liberalism and reactionaries.
never allow them to get away with claiming to be left because they aren’t. These people are liberals and will always try to hurt the left.Some of them may have an individual breakthrough eventually and radicalize, but there’s nothing to be done about them as a group but discredit them
Hexbear scholars have put forth a compelling white paper which dispels all of these anti-tankie arguments
Self identified anti-tankies can find it at https://hexbear.net/PPB
this is the way
Honestly I don’t know. I write them off as liberals laboring under the delusion that they are leftists, which might be true, but ultimately that does nothing to push them further left
It honestly feels like a fed campaign sometimes. Posing as the left, spewing red scare propaganda and then sitting back and letting the libs fight the commies.
I assume that once material conditions worsen, the non-fed libs eating that shit up won’t be able to hold such a privileged view on ‘evil tankies’ as they start to realize where political power comes from.
It honestly feels like a fed campaign sometimes
When you have the level of propaganda thst the US has, and you ensure the population is political illterate through your schools yoy don’t even need campaigns. The people do it for you, for free.
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This is one issue I’m accelerationist on. The sooner we can get Elon to call Kamala a tankie, the sooner this ends.
In that spirit, I call everyone a tankie. It’s a great week to call Hillary a tankie.
Spam them articles of us supplying tanks to
. Rub their noses in it. All projection. We’re not the ones supplying tanks.They’ll counter with “what do you want us to do let Russia take the territories”?
At this point ask them about
bombing their own people after the 2014 Maidan coup…I mean “revolution” going on a decade now. If you say the word “coup” they will instantly shut down as they’ve been INNOCULATED
to deflect any variation of Certainly Not News as “Russian/Chinese propaganda”.Ok Russia pulls out and Ukraine gets their backwards country song. What do they think will happen to the people if they are returned to Ukraine? Do they think Ukraine will leave them alone? Let them speak Russian? Allow them their political parties back? Amnesty? What will happen to the economy there now that Ukraine is indebted to kingdom come? What will be of the schools? The churches Ukraine has banned?
Bet you they haven’t even thought that out yet because they haven’t been told what to think.
The establishment would love to draw it out into Afghanistan 2.0. We don’t fight to win. We fight to draw it out, and thus the military’s budget as high and long as possible, damned what goes on domestically. Juat give the cops more military shit and treat your citizens like combatants.
Do they even acknowledge the bombing since 2014? The lead up? Our elected officials directly provoking arms intervention to use Ukraine as a proxy? Here’s Lindsay Graham and John McCain in 2016 saying it.
Yeah when it comes to Ukraine in particular I like to talk about how the war started in 2014 and Russia was so patient to wait until 2021 to try and put and end to the war happening on their border.
And don’t say it as if it’s new info that contradicts theirs, you say it as if of course they already know the war’s been going since 2014. It makes their heads explode.
This might be a bad take, but when I’ve done real life organizing the “tankie red-fash” stuff almost never comes up. That’s probably because “tankie” tends to describe a western person who has an uncommon level sympathy for non-western socialist movements. And if you live in America and you’re organizing here, China and the DPRK just don’t come up in discussion often. If they do, it’s not really relevant to anything going on. “Tankie” might as well mean something along the lines of “traitor to the west.”
I’ve worked with some folk in a wide amount of organizations who would sometimes go on rants about tankies. We had one guy in Food not Bombs who would always complain about the library we worked at being full of “tankies” (he meant there were books by Marx on the shelf). And one guy I worked with was very adamant that any socialist movement must be intrinsically Christian, meaning the USSR/China etc were all doomed to fail. But those were clearly cranks and their crankishness didn’t distract much from the work that needed to get done.
That’s the real antidote to all of this, it’s getting off the internet. Tankie as it’s used online just means someone who doesn’t ruthlessly despise communists in non-white countries. If you don’t have sufficient hatred for China/DPRK/wherever, then you’re just a tankie. I’ve been called a tankie for saying America committed atrocities against Korea. It’s just meaningless national chauvinism by people who aren’t doing much work in the first place and if they are doing work they’re probably capitulating to liberals. The one thing that’s going to have to get through their heads is that the EU and the USA are evil and the greatest source of evil worldwide, instead they’re stuck seeing foreign communist movements as equally evil. They’ll say “two wrongs don’t make a right” or “whataboutism.” They say that stuff because they cannot see the west as a greater evil, which means they’re carrying water for western imperialism.
It reminds me of the double-genocide theory that trivializes the holocaust. There should be a term for people who trivialize western imperialism. I guess they’re just liberals.
That’s been my experience with organizing IRL. Occasionally you’ll get some baby adventure seeker, but for the most part we have shit to actually do instead of bicker about WWII
Yeah, you got it. It just doesn’t come up in real life much at all. Surprisingly it seems stuff that happened 100 years ago on another continent don’t have much relevance to scattered socialists in America in 2023. The theory yeah that’s still relevant, but the intricacies of what to denounce or who did what war crime? Dude we’re trying to get 5 car wash employees to strike to get a $2 raise. Let’s focus on tasks. There just aren’t enough of us to bicker.
The most relevance it might have is when we’re deciding what to put on signs at a protest. Should we use a sickle and hammer? Should we use a portrait of Lenin? Depends on why we’re there and who we’re dealing with.
Whataboutism? What about deez nuts?
o7 o7
I went on a date once with someone who seemed really cool.
Then put of nowhere they went on a little rant about “tankies” and I realized they weren’t the cool kind of anarchist.
There was not a 2nd date.
It’s almost impossible, their narrative that the tankies are all genocidal is almost a universal, unshakeable truth to them. There is the rare occasion that when they’re given the facts on a very specific instance they change their mind, but it’s not easy.
There is the rare occasion that when they’re given the facts on a very specific instance they change their mind
Yeah i think with these kinds, it takes something very specific in order to have a breakthrough. Best case that leads them to a wider understanding and radicalizing, but frustratingly for many of those libs that’s where it stops.
Its insteresting to see NATO supporting western “leftists” have like maybe one or two AES they support and know the propaganda is wrong about (usually Cuba or Vietnam, probably because of the US involvement in obstructing both countries)
Ask them if they’re an anarchist, when they say no them tell them to ‘Only leftists get to call me that’
Every radlib thinks they’re an anarchist.
I usually call them infantile and ignore them, because they are babies. An anti-imperialist anarchist is a tankie to them.
I throw a bit of their arrogance back in their face if theyre real active in threads, get them to focus on me for awhile instead of derailing multiple threads. My goal is to get them so frustrated they go do something else for awhile. It even works sometimes!
I take solace in knowing that if I’m sent to the concentration camps, they will be alongside me, and I can cave their skulls in before I’m executed by the fascists.
I crush them beneath my tank treads
They’ll come around eventually as conditions worsen
Realistically, Westerners are far too comfortable to hold revolutionary views and distrust their state against their enemy’s
Same. These libs have not abandoned their deology, they just want free healthcare and legal weed. They jave no problem with imperialism, they just want concessions
You’re probably right, though i wonder how much of the planet will be hospitable for the rest of humanity by then.
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If you’re safe and comfortable to do, call their asses out. It’s a lot harder to do in-person, but I think it’s still worth it. You’re probably not going to change their minds but you’ll likely make their cognitive dissonance deepen a little more, and anyone else within earshot will hear a good opinion for once
