What is exactly is a "tankie"?

TheTrumanShow said:
Just like many words, it has different meanings depending on who you ask and most tankies seem to simp for Stalin or Mao or other megalomaniacs like this.

Others like in part Slavoj Zizek are partly ironic/trolling but also partly sympathize with certain elements of collectivist authoritarianism. This does include some aspects of communist aesthetic and idealism.


And the guy was a persecuted dissident. As someone who loves freedom but could see myself lining up some people in a line to shoot them, I think I fall in here with Zizek.


Here is a good intro to him, but he's very much playing to the audience.
In other interviews he's much more direct. I know he's said something like "I fear If I had power. Because I know how to use power".
Essentially a platonist type of "philosopher king" , I'm sure he would murder quite a lot of people but from his perspective for the greater good.

For the same reason I've become more and more politically inactive as the years go on. I've realized that most people barely deserve democracy and can't handle something like collective responsibility very well. I don't want to force these people to live in a system that they might first accept due to its promises but then detest due to its practical implications, resulting in violent oppression. Despite what some rightoids might contest, communism requires an extreme amount of participation in all factettes of political life by the ordinary citizen for the system not to completely spiral out of control.

I've realized that most "commiest", "lefties" , etc are hypocrites, they are just as selfish if not more than their opponents and that there is some truth in Margaret Thatchers idea that "soon you'll run out of everyone elses money", but only because people for most part are this way, not because the system otherwise couldn't work if people were largely different. For the same reasons I don't really like the idea of a supposedly altruistic elite managing the world together with a bunch of technocrats.

So I guess I'm a consciously closeted tankie in part and those that aren't like me haven't come to these realizations or do not care and simply want to impose their collectivist communist views on others without regard to their psychology and ultimately their will.


Interestingly enough the tankies as such are the most oppressed faction of Chiense society. Maoist forums and radical student groups in China are routinely shut down and people are jailed en masse. But this shouldn't surprise people too much. Stalin killed more communists as a percentage of the population than anyone else and Robespierre during his reign of terror turned the guillotine on more revolutionaries than on nobles in the end.




TLDR mostly this.
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You know, at least you're honest about it
 
A tankie is a more violent version of a bootlicker. Simply, an advanced bootlicker. They're almost always leftoids.

Instead of denying the atrocities committed in the name of socialism and communism or under those regimes, they support it and think it's a good thing. They don't want to be poets of intersectional critical race theory after the revolution... they want to work as the prison executioner like Che Guevara.
 
A tankie is a communist who's willing to admit that they have authoritarian fantasies. Pretty much all commies do, it's just that most of them try to disguise it as "re-education" or "fighting capitalism/fascism/liberalism/[insert boogeyman here]". A tankie is willing to admit that he'd happily use force against people that dissented against the communist regime, and probably be sustaining a full erection during it to boot.

The name itself derives from Stalin's habit of using the military, aka "sending in the tanks", whenever large groups of people openly dissented against the Soviet regime.
 
MarvinTheParanoidAndroid said:
A Communist that doesn't deny that the atrocities of the USSR and such were indeed part of Communism and that Communism did indeed happen, and it was somehow good. Basically the opposite of your regular commie that wants to hide that the USSR was real Communism to get people to try doing it again.
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I feel I'm basically this way with the west/capitalism.
"Lol we fucked up vietnam, ah well we'll get em next time"

I
 
Tankies are essentially like black guys defending hitler: they don't realize that in the regimes they want they would be put against a wall and shot.
 
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It originally specifically referred to western communists who supported the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Then it expanded to mean any communist who simps for authoritarian Marxist-Leninist regimes, usually denying or justifying genocide in the process. That's the definition I usually hear, but sometimes people like Vaush will basically use it to refer to any leftist who disagrees with them. Think voting for Democrats isn't the way to socialism? Tankie. Think anarchism is slightly unrealistic? Tankie.

In my experience, western tankies are either lolcows or edgy teenagers who will grow out of it. Far-leftists who are otherwise well-adjusted (at least to the extent they can be) usually have no interest in recreating historical atrocities. Sincere tankies are mostly a thing in the third world, where Marxism-Leninism is still a genuine movement and "Reds killed 100 million people" isn't a significant part of their collective consciousness like in the west.
 
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If you go on twitter and see somebody who unironically calls themselves a "Leninist" and then has nothing but posts about the lack of brown people in kids tv, you're getting a good snapshot.
 
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Iceland Heavy said:
Tankie is just a buzzword for generically authoritarian leftist at this point. The difference you're probably seeing is that tankies at least have nations to be dubiously proud of, none of which really had 'fuck white people' as one of their core values while the average non-tankie radical leftist these days does.
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So, tankies don't hate white people?
 
MugolEx said:
So, tankies don't hate white people?
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Not really. They glorify the Soviet Union, which was internally nationalistic, socially conservative, and racist. They usually are at least closet believers of some of those principles. Some tankies are borderline Nazbols and insist that nationalism or social conservatism are inherent to socialism.
 
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Linkola's IT Guy said:
In my experience, western tankies are either lolcows or edgy teenagers who will grow out of it. Far-leftists who are otherwise well-adjusted (at least to the extent they can be) usually have no interest in recreating historical atrocities. Sincere tankies are mostly a thing in the third world, where Marxism-Leninism is still a genuine movement and "Reds killed 100 million people" isn't a significant part of their collective consciousness like in the west.
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I think that people who want to recreate the historical atrocities (tm) don't really exist / never have existed. I mean barely anyone knew Stalin was killing or imprisoning hundreds of thousands of people, later in the millions. People knew some people were getting killed and probably thought they were "criminals" , "terrorists" etc. It was a time of strife and conspiracies were ripe. But even today a large majority of say americans have told themselves that the 6th of Jan people were domestic terrorists. Seeing some imprisoned in GB, Cuba would probably not be too hard of a pill to swallow.

Those either high ranked nationally or in positions of authority locally often spoke against the killings. Tons of people got other people to intervene for them. But slowly and steadily anyone with a conscious and some balls in the communist hierarchy either got removed, killed, exiled or bent the knee.

Today, those that defend Stalin can't stomach these facts, the same way Nazi's of today can't deal with the holocaust.

That doesn't mean that there aren't hundreds of millions if not billions of people who would want to to employ violence to reach their political goals if shit hit the fan. And shits despite everything obviously generally going to hit the fan more in third world countries.

"Sending in the tanks" is different from condoning the atrocities. The system was corrupt and the rot started penetrating all of society but the people who believed in the idea ate up the kool-aid of the propaganda and so became tankies during the Hungary revolt.
The retards, that despite the evidence from the showtrials and from exiles, even leftists, just kept at it. Like any "true believer" I guess.

The problem is that there was a sort of re-awakening in the mid to late 80's in communist societies that through the reforms of glasnost could have salvaged the good things and turned it into a sort of "socialism with a human face", the very thing that the people actually wanted in both Prague and Paris 67-68, as well as in Hungary in the 50's never materialized.

Obviously that never happened, as the soup was already spoiled, ( there's a better idiom ). Everyone who lived through communism were sick of communism. So when the tanks rolled out in 1991 during the August Coup in Russia nobody supported them, not even the majority of communist party members.

But of course, here was a tragedy, here's where the tankies if there had been any left in the early 90s would have had their time to shine. For what followed was the absolute total plundering of Russias national wealth, the coup against the democratic government of 1993, the destruction of pensions and savings, the concentration of power and wealth into a small oligarchy and a decade of economic decline.

People realised this in 1993 and a coalition of nationalists, communists, labour unionists, even some liberals tried to fight Jeltsin. But as always, people realise too late who is screwing them and do not participate enough in political life to make sure it doesn't happen to begin with.





So being a tankie is not necessarily bad, but most tankies who have existed were gullible fools or arrogant assholes. And today in the west they are mostly edgy teens, I agree.


Looking at China today, were the tanks at their own protest a wrong move?
China under Winnie the Poh Xi is turning into an oppressive dictatorship again with censorship and control of art and religion and all sorts of things.
But for a long while it was moving in a decent direction. Considering where China was in 1989 compared to Russia, a decline of a decade would have put it back into the 1950's while its now emerging as a superpower.


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TLDR: Tanks don't kill people, people kill people.
I.e. it depends on what tanks are used for. As any libertarian will tell you, we condone government violence constantly, it's what upholds modern society and its certainly backed by tanks.

(I could add, what they don't tell you is that private property itself only exists cause of government violence.)
 
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Actual "Tankie" here.
Tankies are those of us on the left that generally believe in Marxist-Leninism or some form of it, centralised state, nationalised production, state directed production etc. Generally, most "Tankies" are also strong Anti-Imperialists, this means that in the ML worldview, that the US is the worlds premier Imperialist Capitalist power and that generally, US Capitalist Imperialist power should be resisted.

Now the issue is, you get a lot of Tankies, who take this to mean that the US is the only Imperialist power and that this means you should support every piece of shitty reactionary garbage and violence if it comes from a Non-US aligned country. This is why you see so many Leftists, outright supporting Russia in it's imperialist aggressive endeavour in Ukraine. Ukraine is a US/NATO puppet state, so Russia has a right to self-defence and oppose US imperialism. While there might be a more than a grain of truth in that (I personally believe this war was a trap "planned" by NATO decades ago) it ignores that much of the justification of this war was launched on Russian Imperialist Revanchism and Nationalism. Putin unironically should have just stuck to Realpolitik in his initial speech, instead he gave a rant that looks utterly deranged to anyone not extremely familiar with Eastern European Geopolitical history.

Now this is what Tankie means to me. To Centrists, Redditors, Vaush etc, "Tankie" pretty much means anyone who isn't a pro-US hawk Neoliberal NATO shill. They use it against the left in the same way they use "Putin bot", "Putin shill" against the right. It's a meaningless "nationalistic" insult because Liberals so desperately have wanted to play Neocon flag draper forever and are fucking pissed that flag waving nationalism is associated with the right.

Why am I a tankie? Actually came to this position in my late 20s. 15 years of activism, working within Social Democratic political campaigns etc, basically came to the same position as Zizek. The general population are frankly, fucking fickle, extremely easy to mislead and aren't willing to really make sudden sacrifices for a better tomorrow. Also all political systems are "Authoritarian" or "Totalitarian", that is politics by it's nature, imposing your will on others. Liberal Capitalism just does through far more subtle means in the Imperial Core (Markets, Advertising, Managed Democracy, Workplace Relations) and far more overt means in the Periphery (War, Death Squads, Coups, Assassinations). Also just look at how China dealt with the Uyghur Wahabbi terrorism. Yes, it was a very authoritarian response, but it successfully stamped out Uyghur Wahabbism, saw very little meaningful deaths, and Uyghur wages have risen 5x in the period, Xinjiang is now integrated properly into the rest of China. What was the West's response to Wahabbism? Bomb, kill, assassinate millions of people, throw an entire region into disarray, tens of millions of refugees, use it to assassinate and overthrow secular Baathists for some reason. Yet, it's the Bloodless but overtly "Authoritarian" successful Chinese response to Wahabbism that gets the most ire, what the fuck?
 
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rage against modernity said:
The more socially conservative communists are called nazbols. Tankies definitely overlap with nazbols but not as much as the modern day twitter faggot communists. It's fucking crazy how many trannies support Stalin, like compared to how many support Hitler it's a much much much larger number.
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lmao literally every 19th-20th century communist who's name wasn't Robert Mugabe would be considered "nazbol". The word nazbol is redundant anyway as Fascism succeeded failed Marxist economics in every way, there's a reason Mussolini abandoned that dead-end ideology.
 
The only time I have anyone use the term tankie was in reference to someone who was in a tank unit in the military. When I did hear it being used it was by Europeans. I have never seen an American refer to themselves as tankie.

I have never heard of the term used in any kind of discussion about politics of any kind. I do know of terms like commieboo, Russiaboo and vatnik.
 
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