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Tankies on .ml
tankies are everywhere
I honestly never heard the term "tankie" before a few days ago. What is it? Extremist communists?
Tankies are fans of authoritarianism masquerading as communism.
The term comes from the famous Tiananmen Square image.Edit: I was misinformed
The term comes from the famous Tiananmen Square image.
This is wrong. It seems like libs trying to retrofit their sinophobia?
The term comes from the USSR invasion of Hungary.
I appreciate you correcting them (Because otherwise I was going to) but saying its sinophobia is a stretch, its almost certainly just that Tiananmen Square is more famous.
My bad. Now I'm wondering where I picked up that bit of incorrect information.
Thanks!
It's partially false info. The term comes from the invasion of Hungary by USSR.
That's pretty much it, yeah. It's worth noting, there is a lot of animosity on here, particularly from .world, for .ml and .hexbear instances. Both are heavily communist, far left communities, and get a bad rep because they are known for not accommodating liberal or other not as left viewpoints. This was particularly heated around the election with disagreements about voting for liberals vs protest voting.
Fwiw I'm a strong believer if we are to organize against literal fascism we will need the liberal and the farther left to find enough common ground to work together. It's a......work in progress on here.
db0 (my instance and @Ricaz@lemmy.dbzer0.com' ) is a leftist anarchist instance and I'd say the animosity towards tankies is even stronger here.
it's not anything to do with liberals vs leftists it's that they handwave genocide and other atrocities as "western propaganda" and worship lennin and mao and stalin and north korea and so on and so forth.
Huh. Made this account long ago when first API issues started in reddit, and didn't know each instance was divided by political orientation.
Luckily we're all federated so it makes no real difference I guess.
they're not all strictly that way, db0 is one of the few that is (you have to be a leftist to join, it was a part of the application)
.world is known as primarily liberal but I think that's just due to the fact that it's the largest and the majority of users are left in the American sense (center right)
.ml and hexbear are probably explicitly "communist", haven't given them enough attention to be certain but all of their users are tankies
lemmy.blahaj.zone is primarily (strictly?) trans, leans left in the actual sense but that's not the point of the instance
lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, programming.dev don't seem to have official political leanings but I might be wrong about that. haven't looked into it.
id say the biggest concern about the instance you pick is that !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com is blocked to all .world users. that's the main reason I ended up making this account and abandoning the .world account I had been using since apipocalypse
Honestly I didn't think anything of it when I joined back then, I just made a couple of accounts to check them out. Didn't write anything political in my application either, I'm pretty sure.
Thanks for the explanation, though. Nice overview. It's good to know!
Yeah I prefer it be not divided that way TBH because you end up with possible campaigns to de-federalize succeeding in the future. Federation is generally a good idea though.
While I think that's inevitably true for some, I also think that sentiment gets exaggerated/overblown for others. Tankies are definitely prevalent, but there are also a lot of non tankie communists, and communists who will readily admit the failings of the dictators claiming to be communists throughout history. Genocide is an important issue for many of them, and is what pushed them away from Democrats most recently
Either way though, im not trying to argue any of these are morally correct or better than any other viewpoint. But I do think it's undeniable that the left needs more unification globally if there is to be any meaningful resistance against the rise of fascism, and we have more in common with each other than we do with any of the oppressors in government now or the Nazis who support them
oh yeah hard agree that communist != tankie, there are a lot of anarcho-communists here. id say even Marxist doesn't necessarily mark someone as a tankie. Marxist-Lenninist though, Maoist, or anyone that refers to nk as "The DPRK" though, those are all probably tankies.
if you think that sentiment is rare you don't spend much time on .ml or chapo.chat(hexbear) which is good! keep that up :)
I agree that leftists need to work together, nobody hates a leftist more than another leftist but atrocity denialism is a line in the sand that I will not cross. absolutely unacceptable behavior indicative of a fetishization of fascism above all else, just colored as "Communism, comrade."
Didn't realize it had gone so far. I'm guessing most people talking about communism this way are American. Where I'm from, liberalism is more centre-right than left.
that's true of liberalism in the US as well, it's just as far left as our Overton Window goes.
yeah communism is a dirty word here because of the red scare but the youngins are reading Marx and learning it's pretty based, some people drink the flavor-aide of the authoritarian regimes that claim to be communist (but aren't) and that's how tankies came to be.
I would have organized against Harris because that would have been easier. I'm not looking to get shot by brown shirts in the street.