chat

its happening because china is ascending to hegemon status. You didnt hear it in 2000-2015 because the liberals still lived in the la la land of the end of history. Every time western supremacy gets damaged the more frothing, fascistic and anticommunistic the liberals will become

tankie just means "person to my left whom i disagree with". anyone using it is a moron and should be ignored

In my opinion it was pushed by the USAID crowd who are now defunded.

I'll repost what I've said last time about it.

It means whatever it needs to mean in the context in which it is deployed.

It's a tool deployed by liberals against people to the left of them in exactly the same way that woke is a tool deployed by reactionaries against people to the left of them.

It gets deployed against everything from ML to anarchist to even socdems, depending on whether you say something that goes against the US' imperial core goals.

The purpose of the tool is thought-termination. To prevent people from listening to the person that it is deployed against. Reactionaries use woke to prevent people among their ranks from listening to anything reasonable the ""woke"" person might say, and liberals use tankie to prevent people among their ranks from listening to anything reasonable the left might say.

It is an adaptation of mccarthyite behaviour.

It's just used by everyone to attack everyone to the left of them. And any time you try to raise the issue with this they're like "no i only mean the people who defend authoritarian regimes" and then if you really dig into that it still means Trots, MLs and Maoists are all included, so basically almost all communists.

What makes it seem extra insidious is that basically all of this seems to feed back into supporting USAdian warmongering and imperialism. Like, what is a "tankie"? When you ask people they'll say "Authoritarian Communists" but it really just seems that they call anyone who isn't deepthroating the boot of the AmeriKKKan Empire a "tankie".

Ah yes, dronies.

It's a symptom of one of the primary contradictions of reactionary thought: they cannot come up with new stuff, mostly ideas but even words evade them. So they glom onto some new word, twist the meaning to serve their stunted purposes, and say it often and loudly that (quite regrettably) it becomes the first time many people hear it.

Tankie was originally a left-on-left pejorative stemming from (mostly) Western left critics of supporters of a Soviet armed takeover of Hungary where there was lots of pictures of crowds facing soldiers and tanks. As that context faded from popular memory the word got picked up by anarchists as a slang for "authoritarian" left movements and, primarily, their supporters. In addition, for a long time during the cold war the propaganda of Soviet military was depicted as columns of tanks streaming across Europe. The West had the fancier planes and missiles. The West had the spy satellites and the wunderwaffe geegaws. The Soviets had tanks and rows of conscripts. The new horse for the modern asiatic horde was the tank. What's the most famous anti-CPC picture on Earth? Tank man in Tienanmen Square.

To be totally honest I am both extremely annoyed at anarchists for doing this but I can't blame them. The right was going to steal a word anyway because, as I mentioned before, they can't come up with fuck all on their own. So the anarchists could have called supporters of the Soviets "candy marshmallow sunshine bunnies" and the right would have stolen that.

So here we are, in the ever evolving internet space, where everyone is trying to come up with new words to describe things so they can seem like their argument is on the leading edge because it has the newest jargon. The word tankie makes a comeback. It's not new but it's new to most people. The right grabs it, spins it, and uses it as a broad brush. Those anarchists? Oh they're tankies now. Just like the librarians, the gay baristas, the democrats, anything that isn't a conservative nationalist chauvinistic conservative is tankie. Women divorcing men? Tankie. Trans people? Starts with a T just like Tankie does. On and on until they find the next word. Before DEI it was CRT. Before CRT it was Affirmative Action. (And so on and so forth )

I remember being called a pinko quite a few times until 2023 which is when I became a tank.

In my view, it has to do with the popularization of socialist as an identity following the movements around Bernie Sanders. This has happened with many other movements, too.

The problem with this kind of identity-first approach is that it does not actually disrupt oppression that much. A situation where the oppressor is against oppression in the abstract but also against liberation in the concrete is perfectly stable, some could argue the stablest form of oppressor ideology.

But there is a contradiction in this new identity: there are people with the same identity who are actually radical. This is resolved by creating this caricature of a fundamentally irrational fanatic (or slightly modifying an already existing one), equating it to a small fringe that is irrelevant in the larger movement. And then, when you come across any radicalism that you are supposedly for, you have a way to explain it as irrational without having to engage with it.

USAID ops found alternate funding

The past few years my only standing prediction is that will call someone a tankie and it will complete its transformation into meaning absolutely nothing

Shit is getting worse, more people (mostly online) get radicalized into far-left (sometimes vulgar) politics, becomes more noticeable to centrists and liberals, they pick up the old-school anti-ussr term and vulgarize it into meaninglessness to use against their opponents

Does anyone actually use the term "tankie" outside of Lemmy/fediverse?

To liberals, it just means "anybody to my left that I disagree with."

To anarchists, it's any statist tendencies, which I think was the original use.

It picked up in popularity with liberals when leftism started to trend after the 2016 dem primary

It's another propagandist red scare campaign.

With the rate of cultural turnover these days it's impossible to stay on top of it all and figure out which one of the plethora of batshit things are important. And if you do try then 99% of your mental capacity gets wasted.

If you can tolerate the plot it might be best to just see it all as an entertaining story about humanity that you can tune into when you're not focussed on immediate and real things like being present with the people you love, your health and your home.

From an outside perspective, it's overuse of the term tankie. If someone is getting called a tankie for supporting Palestine over Israel due to the genocide of Palestinians thats just inaccurate.

From when people are being reasonable, I primarily see the term tankie associated with people who are pro China and Russia to the point where they ignore all the horrible shit going on, basically the exact opposite of a super patriotic American who ignores all the horrible shit that America does.

It should definitely just cover authorarian communist countries but it's drastic overuse when it doesn't apply. I don't think being generally fine with Cuba or whatever should be an issue, what little I've heard about Cuba recently it seems to be pretty nice.

Dawg for real, I don't even know what a tankie is but I guess your last paragraph described what it could be. I feel the bitcoin thing, I was in 9th grade and one coin was ~$30. I wanted to buy some but didn't bother wasting my allowance on it. Ops, guess I should have