I am trying to get someone to explain what tankie means. People call me tankie from time to time, but I have no love for the iranian goverment.
Comment on ..?
AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 1 month ago
Now watch all the tankies praise him as a honorary socialist
WereHacker@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Pat_Riot@lemmy.today 1 month ago
Tankies are apologists for “communist” leaders such as Stalin, Mao and Kim. They love Russia, China and North Korea and will swear those countries can do no wrong. “Left” authoritarians… bootlickers.
Greddan@feddit.org 1 month ago
Mostly cringe american kids who confuse authoritarianism for socialism.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
Tankies exist around the world, I don’t know why you’re making it an american thing. It’s not limited to just americans.
zikzak025@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Yeah but closer to the eastern bloc you’re likely to hear the term “vatnik” used instead.
Greddan@feddit.org 1 month ago
Because I sometimes get curious and find out who they are. Either americans are less privacy conscious, or most tankies are american college kids, often with some neuropsychological disability kids like to flaunt nowadays.
Objection@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
The number of Chinese Marxist-Leninists alone vastly outnumbers us Western tankies. The vast majority of “tankies” live in various countries outside of the imperial core.
some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Assuming you’re not a tankie, I would guess it’s your instance, which is the main one where all the tankies hang out lol
WereHacker@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
That’s the thing, how would I know if I am tankie, if I don’t have a clear definition. If it is defined by wether or not I am oppossed to military moving into Budapest 70 years ago. I am probably not a tankie, but I say probably, because everyone writing about seem so biased I find it difficult to see the truth of it. But my moral compass tells me it is always wrong to use military against civilians. Always.
ClamDrinker@lemmy.world 1 month ago
At the end of the day the deeds define the word, not the other way around. Not everyone will use the word correctly or appropriately. It’s why only you yourself can truly categorize as such, but at that point you must come to terms with what that means, positively or negatively.
The bias thing is a real problem, but also sometimes not. It all depends on the context. Some people with unreasonable opinions will absolutely waste your time by never accepting difficult realities and talking around it, so identifying a mindset that’s immune to self reflection can be useful. But similarly if a label is all that’s needed to dismiss an opinion also is not very reasonable.
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Are you in some way pro Putin, Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Kim ? Then you might be a tankie.
If you think they are/were despicable mass-murderous dictators then you’re not.
lps2@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Which is funny because this was just the main instance when I (and many others) learned about Lemmy. I’ve been called a tankie because of my instance when I’m pretty sure tankies would call me MAGA as I’m somewhere between a leftist and a liberal
porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
A “tankie” is just anyone to the left of you
SupraMario@lemmy.world 1 month ago
You guys are easy to spot these days.
porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
You can see from the question that poster asked that, whatever clear definition about authoritarianism or whatever you think it has, that’s just not how people are actually using it. Centrists will use it for Mamdani supporters, DSA-types will use it for Marxist-Leninists, and anarchists will use it for almost literally anyone.
WereHacker@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
I find it very interesting that you get downvotes for this comment. My experience is that this is the way most people use the term and they get so angry, when you point that out.
Fokeu@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Exhibit A:
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
Not even a little bit, but typical tankie rhetoric is to call anyone who isn’t at least as far to the left as them (read: approaching infinity) a fascist, so I’m not surprised to hear this from an .ml account
iamdefinitelyoverthirteen@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Oh, come on now, they’d never call Putin a fascist.
SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
“Tankie” was originally a British slang term from the 50s.
In 1956, when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary, the British Communist movement was split over whether this action was cool, or sucked.
The people who thought it sucked derided their opponents who thought its cool, as “Tankies”, because the images in the newspapers featured lots of photos of Soviet tanks rolling into Budapest.
After this, it stops being used for the most part, until it started being reclaimed by socialists online as a tongue-in-cheeck insult to throw at each other. Because, let’s be real, it’s a silly sounding word that’s fun to say, and silly words are among the UK’s biggest cultural exports.
Eventually though, Tankie breached containment and started to be used by people who had zero connection to any kind of socialist movement or history, and its meaning began to warp.
I’ve seen Marxists, even those think the Soviet invasion of Hungary was bad, called tankies. I’ve seen Anarchists called Tankies, I’ve seen right wing guys who love trad russian Orthodox Christianity called Tankies.
It’s a word that doesn’t mean much anymore. It’s like when your grandpa calls Joe Biden “Pinko Scum”
WereHacker@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Thank you. I had an idea, that it was something like that. It seems that on lemmy it means everyone left of poster (or OP), the poster disagree with.
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
That’s usually how the tankies try to convey it, but otherwise I haven’t seen that argument.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
It’s basically a term people on the left use for people on the extreme outer-reaches of the left, typically unthinking, uncritical, and unreasonable supporters of bolshevism and authoritarian communism, and pretty much any oppressive regime that considers itself “anti-west.”
They love putin, jinping, kim, assad, khamenei, etc.
They stylize themselves as “Marxist-Leninists” and your instance is full of them, so if you signed up unknowingly and aren’t a tankie, people might just assume based on the “.ml”
But yeah, most people on lemmy are tired of arguing in circles with tankies, who typically rely on ad hominems, strawmen, sealioning, and other bad faith or uncharitable arguments to bully you into exhaustion. Some of them have to be bots or russian trolls, cause no one can honestly be so dense. It can feel like arguing with someone from r/conservative, just with the opposite opinions.
WereHacker@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
That is a pretty vague definition, and that is probably what irks me about the term. It can be used as a slur for anything you don’t like. Like “woke” for conservatives. I switched home when I found out .world blocks instances they don’t like. Lemmy.ml seemed the to be the broadest, left accepting instance and they block out porn by default, win-win in my book. Infact I like the fact that I can be an anti-imperialist in places like hexbear, without being called a tankie. Being against killing school children does not mean I support the iranian goverment. I hope you take this answer in good faith. It is written in honesty.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
It’s not that vague if you’ve ever encountered one in the wild. You would know exactly what it’s referring to. And it’s nothing like conservatives using “woke.” They use “woke” to describe anything mildly progressive. Tankies aren’t progressives, they’re accelerationist armchair militants. They call democratic socialists fascists.
Even if your opinion aligns with them on most things, it doesn’t automatically make you a tankie. If you’re not an auth-comm intent on bullying everyone who disagrees with you the slightest bit and labeling all nuance and critical reasoning as capitalist imperialist propaganda, then you’re probably not a tankie.
That’s also different from critiquing actual imperialism and capitalism. But tankies’ overuse of those terms and others like “fascist” waters down the meanings and obfuscates the terms, making it harder for good-faith communicators to actually discuss these topics critically.
You can be anti-imperialist all you want, but tankies use western imperialism as an excuse to justify supporting imperialist regimes like Russia. They’re full of cognitive dissonance.
Go ahead and disagree with someone slightly on .ml or hexbear and see what kind of response you get.
gmtom@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Tankies are basically maga but for “socialism”
They don’t have any actual values or morals and will happily support the most disgusting and heinous people that opress people, are racists wexist homophobic, that murder civilians and even commit genocide as long as they say they hate capitalism, and western imperialism.
teslekova@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Supporting Putin in the name of communism is the funniest thing tankies do, imo.
teslekova@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Tankie means someone who sometimes defends socialist authoritarian governments because they oppose the capitalist authoritarian governments.
They(we, sometimes, it’s complicated) have a tendency to forgive the crimes of those socialist governments. Sometimes this is justified, because the accusations are false, invented by capitalist media as propaganda.
However, sometimes it’s because we want to believe that the opposition to capitalism is always good and decent, when the truth is muddy and rather unpleasant: both sides suck in their own special ways, and you shouldn’t put anyone on a pedestal.
Here in the fediverse, anarchist leftists or left-libs are the norm, so we tankies get dogpiled pretty often. A pox on all hierarchical governments seems to be the way here.
WereHacker@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
A nuanced answer. Thank you. Those are rare.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 month ago
WereHacker@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Thank you for sharing the wikipedia article. I hadn’t read it. A lot of people find Wikipedia controversial for various reasons. But it is one of the most precise encyclopedias on the planet. And you can check out editing history etc. What I am most interested in, is the use here ofcourse. Because it seems to me people use it as a vaguely defined slur to slander people they deem to leftist.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Yeah, there’s all sorts of crazy political purity tests on Lemmy, and associated misuse of slurs.
And on Wikipedia:
-
On one side, my MAGA-adjacent family is starting to question it as “liberal biased”… as they leave Fox News blasting in the background.
-
On the other, tankies and some different leftist extremist leftists dismiss it as propaganda.
That’s a good sign, to me. Its never been perfect and has problems, but extremists trying to tear its credibility down is a sign of just how valuable it is.
-
Simulation6@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
Doesn’t the term come from the Tiananmen Square massacre when the army drove tanks over students?
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
Laughing at all the tankies getting butthurt in the comments
flamingleg@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
this isn’t 1995 man, you can just watch the full video of that not happening anytime you like
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
Oh, because we all know that the entire event was caught on video and it was so easy to smuggle film out of china at the time.
(Context: the video of tank man was hidden in a toilet while the authorities searched the man’s apartment after he was spotted filming from his window).
But denying massacres of civilians is so in character for someone from .ml, so nobody is surprised, really…
WereHacker@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Somebody shared this link. It helped me: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
calmblue75@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Tankie is now used as a derogatory term to refer communists. But you’re probably being called a tankie because you’re from lemmy.ml
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Which is idiotic. I’m an anarchist for example.
MrSmith@lemmy.world 1 month ago
They do already. “Respected leader” one post over there said.
hamid@crazypeople.online 1 month ago
He literally was respected by people in Iran, not everyone there is against the government and the biggest problems with the government were not him specifically it is the sprawling layers of republican bureaucracy that runs Iran and does a bad job. The Supreme Leader there isn’t really like an absolutist dictator, the Ayatollahs are like the Supreme Court of the Islamic Republic and he was like the Chief Justice.
It is wild seeing USAmericans with no information talking about a topic they only received messaging about from their government.
SupraMario@lemmy.world 1 month ago
All dictators have support, otherwise they wouldn’t exist. The majority of Iranians did not/do not like the current regime.
SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world 1 month ago
Was he respected by the up to thirty thousand protesters he had massacred?