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"Research" by US university says lemmygrad is the 4th most popular "tankie" website

twitter.com /RodericDay/status/1681686962661470210

The whole article is quite funny, especially the lists of most used tankie words, or the branding of foreignpolicy as a left-wing news source.

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11 comments
  • Whoever the people are that got their comments published on page 33 and 34 deserve a special flair (does Lemmy have those?)

    Also, it's so funny how the authors keep calling the Communist Party of China the CCP instead of the CPC. For table 10 they had to switch between these keywords because the tankies community is the only one that can get the acronym right LMAO

  • i'm thinking about their claim that "the predominant topic of discussion" among tankies is the uyghur "genocide." like bro there's 99 more percentiles of non-uyghur related topics. i see a post about xinjiang on here like once a month.

  • "Thus, tankie is now used to describe much more than the set of communists who supported specific events from the Soviet era. The term tankie now covers communists who support “actually existing socialist countries” (AES); especially those with a Stalinist or authoritarian leaning. Although there is not really a concrete definition, recent work by Petterson [ 94] provides a succinctdescription of tankie:

    Tankies regard past and current socialist systems as legitimate attempts at creating communism, and thus have not distanced themselves from Stalin, China etc. "

    Yes, well recognized, the term is vague and can mean everything or nothing. It does not make sense. There are people who see only the Soviet Union as a successful workers' revolution, but not the rest. For some, China represents revisionism, so does Vietnam, or North Korea, or Cuba, etc. I've met people who are all about Enver Hoxha, everything else is revisionism. That is such an enormous range of different views, yet they are all tankies. I've witnessed Trotskyites beeing called tankies because they are against NATO.

    To work with such a stupid definition is absolute nonsense. I myself have been called a tankie often enough, because I keep pointing out that the term has no substance in historical and political discourse. I even never discussed something political. Pointing out, that this term is stupid is enough to be a tankie - my experience.

  • Can someone please explain "...more Stalinist than Leninist" because from my years of experence being an ML this sentence is absolute gibberish

    Second their citation for the Uyghur genocide, while I cannot read the book to find its sources, is written by someone who worked for 7 years is USAID for the former USSR "managing democracy, governance, and human rights programs" he is known for his "... comments on current events in the media related both to the situation of the Uyghur people in China ..." and is an open critic of the belt and road initive in his open seminars,

    "We perform a set of quantitative analyses that reveal the relationship between tankies, other far-left communities, leftists, feminists, and capitalists." I feel I need no more explination, the bold was added by me

    At this point I am less than a page in and I feel like I am reading too far into this but I am comitted to this and I will read and review this ... and likely reply to here... but this looks to be the dumbest acidemic paper I have ever read, ever, and trust me I have read some really stupid ones

    • Can someone please explain “…more Stalinist than Leninist” because from my years of experence being an ML this sentence is absolute gibberish

      This is trotskyist political view, considering how much time they spent agitating, it was somewhat accepted by the radlib part of mainstream. Btw. it's telling how of entire ton of trotskist propaganda mainstream accepted exactly the anti-AES parts.

11 comments