I’m not one to post often. I’m not really one to rant to strangers online often, even. But, after migrating from r*ddit to lemmy, I’ve had this on my mind and this seemed like the place to vent.
I see discourse about tankies constantly on Lemmy. This struck me as odd. Why are these so called tankies such a threat? Why do I see people calling themselves left-wing and attacking tankies more voraciously than neoliberals and, sometimes, even fascists?
I think I know the answer, just as well as most people who will read this. These are the Zizeks of the world: people who do indeed think in a left-wing oriented way, but fail to recognise that they’re also Western to the core and the biases that come with that.
I sincerely care about this much less than the actual reason I’m making this post. That is: why don’t these people notice that their talking points, left-oriented as they may seem, always end up supporting US allies or attacking US enemies? I mean, do these people not see that Ukraine winning the war is a boon to the US, regardless of who is “right” in that conflict? Many other such cases, but I think I’ve made my point, or, rather, my confusion, clear.
That’s it. That’s the post.
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I love saying “tankie and proud” as a response to “anti-tankie” discourse. It really is just a thought-terminating cliché, often used by misguided westerners who truly do not understand class consciousness and materialism, with some of them going as far to paint “tankies” as “reactionaries disguised as leftists,” when in actuality, “anti-tankie” sentiment is actually what seems to be more of a reactionary tendency posing as leftist, especially when you know of the horrors supported by prominent “left” anti-communists like Orwell.
I used to hang around anarchist/demsoc spaces a lot more, and in the past, I fell into this trap of painting AES states as being as “evil” as capitalist propaganda wants you to believe they are, and I tried whatever I could do to distance myself from them, their thinkers, and their ideologies. However, in the grand scheme of my life and the path that my material conditions led me down, three things eventually ended up turning me away from that kind of thinking:
- Joining Hexbear: When I got tired of using Reddit, especially since I was fed up of all the bigotry and discrimination that was seeming unavoidable on that site, I joined Hexbear because I was looking for an alternative that was not only accepting of marginalized peoples but more inclined toward leftism as a whole. Though I was still an anarchist when I first joined Hexbear, I quickly came to understand that the people that are commonly demonized as “tankies” are not this evil group of horrid people that many anti-AES leftists paint them as. It’s actually been the contrary!
- Reading Theory: Reading Lenin especially helped with me overcoming this, but of course, just gaining an actual better understanding of the theory of Marxism in general was a huge plus as well.
- Connecting With Black Radical Thinkers: This is a bit of an extension of the previous point, but as a black person, I noticed that the common leftist tendency of many black radicals, such as the Black Panthers, was more in alignment with Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, etc. I didn’t find black nationalist associations with anarchism to be as common, and I wondered why. Being able to examine the words of thinkers like Kwame Ture, Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon, etc. helped me process the connection of black liberation and how it pertains to radical ideology that I felt like I had a more difficult time grasping when I was mostly hanging around white, western anarchists and demsocs, considering their own ideological understanding of leftism and then tying it to the construct of black liberation. Black liberation was much harder for me to wrap my head around looking at it through a more anarchist lens than it was looking at it through a Marxist lens.
Though I am a former anarchist and a Marxist now, this isn’t meant to be a sectarian dig at anarchists. It’s just more of me being frustrated with how such “anti-tankie” sentiment has painted genuinely effective leftists as monsters and “fascists in disguise” when they have been nothing but the opposite, and ultimately, they have led the greatest and most broadly applicable implementation of tactics that can actually liberate so many oppressed people, both in the context of class and identity.
I’ve gone through a very similar story. I’ve realized that anarchists and tankies are not enemies are really want the same end goals. I’m still an anarchist because I truly do believe that hierarchy is fully avoidable BS but hexbear has worked it’s magic on me. I now call myself an anarcho-tankie.
Hexbear introducing me to the concept of critical support was what fully awakened me to the idea that tankies and communists and everyone else aren’t the bad guys. Anyone who opposes the US Empire deserves my support, because the US empire is responsible for the most oppression worldwide.
Side note: I find that the stereotype that many online anarchist spaces are largely ignorant, white, suburban teenagers to be largely true. (Source: I was one) However, I don’t find this to be a reason to shed the anarchist label because of people like andrewism.
~hope any of this made sense, was just a little brain dump~
I fucking love Andrewism, and I still watch him quite regularly even though I’m now a Marxist.
He’s from Trinidad and Tobago, which is where my family comes from. I feel really connected to lefty content from someone like him as someone born to Trinidadian/Tobagonian immigrants who are quite conservative.
I’d never be sectarian, but I’m definitely over the deeply unserious anarchists that’d rather be “anti-authoritarian” edgelords than push for actual effective leftist action. Thankfully, a good deal of anarchists, especially ones you encounter IRL, are not like that.
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it all goes back to breadtube
I think that last sentence sums it all up.
I think that last sentence sums it all up.
I think that last sentence sums it all up.
Libs: “we have critical support at home.” Critical support at home: “a vote for a 3rd party is a vote for Trump.”
Ironically this gets twisted in the “campist” argument to be like: “tankies are so fixated on hating America they refuse to support the imperial soul harvester even when it’s being careful to pinkwash its crimes”
Yep, that’s the one I see most often. They think that because Leftists nearly always oppose the west, they think that that is the logic behind it. Kinda like gravity, it’s incredibly easy to see that it exists, but to explain it? Very difficult, if you aren’t trained in Physics! It becomes a thought-terminating cliche, consistent views must mean they are simple, and simple views must be wrong.
Literally what not reading theory does to someone.
Also the logic behind “communism no iphone”
Very difficult, if you aren’t trained in Physics
Very difficult to explain even if you are trained in physics tbh 😔
(I’m not trained in enough physics to know, shhhh)
Thing dense = suck, the more denser it is the more suck it does. Barring, i assume, some exceptions.
I didn’t go to college but I’ll take my physics degree now
“Tankie” is anti-discourse. It is a thought-terminating cliche that is trotted out because a liberal saw a left critical analysis of geopolitics that challenges their chauvinism and they would like to end the cognitive dissonance.
If you continue to press them, they will usually start using new insults, usually racist ones. They have given up any pretense of having a discussion, now it is just their petty and raw ego lashing out at the person that hurt it. They reach for their tools that help them feel superior.
Nothing like a good old thought-terminating cliche. When I’m talking to people about politics, it jumps out at me clear as day. It really then requires a shift in approach because it singles to you that the doors are locked, and this isn’t an invitation for conversation but a declaration of intellectual combat.
Tankies remind people that it’s actually possible to be principled in the face of an oppositional status quo. Maybe it’s projection but it has to be pretty embarrassing to see an example of someone who doesn’t compromise on their morals
a tankie is a person who disagrees with the US State Department
I think another factor here, especially considering a certain tendency of Libs who think they’re leftist, is that bourgeois democracy actually works okay for them. Not great, bad enough in fact that it makes anti-capitalism appealing, but they still enjoy a relatively decent amount of social stability and pedestrian civil liberties. Even if we push all the BS propaganda aside, they probably wouldn’t enjoy either of those things as much in a developing world AES state.
A stable, secure, prosperous capitalist state doesn’t really care if you want to engage in some cute grassroots leftist organizing, community gardens and DIY punk spaces aren’t really a serious material threat to them. They enjoy a degree of freedom and even some passing social acceptance because they’re ultimately seen as a well meaning if misguided subculture within the broader bourgeois liberal society. They dislike “Tankies”, partially because they believe (correctly or not) that life in an AES state unpleasant and also a serious ML Party would be an actual threat to the bourgeois liberal state which could in turn result in a crackdown on them.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. This is something I consider myself, seeing as I live a somewhat okay life and things like revolution and civil war would certainly destabilise that. But I don’t know if most people would have this level of self awareness; at least, not on a conscious level. I think the libs you are referring to would not be able to articulate fully that the status quo benefits them and that is enough to warrant their support. No, what bothers me, I think, is that there is no such recognition, only proclamations of submission to greater ideals, such as democracy, freedom and, of course, the very recent and not nearly far-reaching enough LGBTQ rights. In this sense, I almost find fascists more tolerable, because they at least seem self aware and honest about their intentions (when talking to each other, at least).
But I don’t know if most people would have this level of self awareness; at least, not on a conscious level. I think the libs you are referring to would not be able to articulate fully that the status quo benefits them and that is enough to warrant their support.
I see them articulate this sentiment a lot, I’ve seen a lot of “well at least America is a democracy”, “I can go to the White House and hold a sign saying ‘fuck Biden’ unlike with Xi in red fash China”, “at least we don’t eat rats”. Their insistence on believing even the most ludicrous accusations about socialist states is also a demonstration that they want to be convinced the US is better, because it is better for them and the lifestyle they want to lead.
A stable, secure, prosperous capitalist state doesn’t really care if you want to engage in some cute grassroots leftist organizing, community gardens and DIY punk spaces aren’t really a serious material threat to them.
and adding on to this with in my mind a more critical point, said capitalist state not only doesn’t care, but actively benefits from it and has its own arms (both capitalist and intelligence/state) to push it and manipulate it. Anti-capitalism can be sold as a product, made into a consumer identity, alienated from and scrubbed of its content where needed, and reify itself back into capitalist consumerism. An obvious example is the Che shirt phenomenon. Or all those hot topic type shops that sell anarchist or ACAB shirts.
The internet is great at doing this, through funneling anti-capitalist trends into and making and consuming ‘anti-capitalist content’ and engaging in ‘anti-capitalist communities’ hosted on ad-supported data-mining social media sites and apps, etc. It railroads expression of “anti-capitalism” into impactless entertainment and cathartic sloganeering which still generates private profit and continues the cycling of capital; all while being able to track and contain and siphon off anti-capitalists and adjacent into status-quo reinforcing pools; and in cases isolate and crush those who differ from these trends, both on a macro scale and on a narrower and even individual scale when “known quantities” change or go dark or what have you (google was originally funded by the CIA to help them identify and track mass informational trends of humanity).
It happens online and in the real world — an extremely sharp example of this contradiction around the subsumption and reification of anti-establishment politics in the real world is that the original Black Lives Matter protestors in Ferguson were extremely radical and explicitly movement-building for larger structural change. Then rose a Liberal Black Lives Matter Organization as an institution completely separate from the original movement, and financed by all kinds of sketchy donations and billionaire and state dept NGO support, while being explicitly less militant, more liberal and reformist and palatable in its actions and goals, while maintaining some rhetoric around topics that instigated protests but alienated from and scrubbed of the root causes and their solutions. The original protest leaders were vehemently critical of this, and while the media shifted into drumming up facades-of-empty-support and hand-wringing rage and terror on either ‘wing’ of the corporate-party media landscape of this newly-centered Liberal institutional organization BLM; the original protest leaders were disappeared and murdered including being found shot to death in a burning car with no suspects named by the police to this day.
It’s part of the long legacy of the “Agreeable Left” campaigns that the CIA and FBI worked tirelessly on during the original red scare era; including them financing and publishing anarchist anti-communist literature to disrupt communists among the well known COINTELPRO programs and their ilk.
and adding on to this with in my mind a more critical point, said capitalist state not only doesn’t care, but actively benefits from it and has its own arms (both capitalist and intelligence/state) to push it and manipulate it. Anti-capitalism can be sold as a product, made into a consumer identity, alienated from and scrubbed of its content where needed, and reify itself back into capitalist consumerism
The only reason life in AES is difficult historically is due to imperialist war and sanctions, and those revolutions happening in already poor countries.
If there were a revolution in the imperial core, there would be nobody to wage sanction wars against them and they would start with all of the world’s wealth at their fingertips.
A communist revolution wouldn’t even be bad for them, but they can’t see it because of their chauvinism. They deep down believe that developing poor AES are that way because communism made them poor, which is ahistorical and really just an excuse to obfuscate their own nation’s colonialism and wealth extraction.
GOOD post, comrade
I do appreciate the growing awareness that the crux of being anti-tankie is being pro-western. It’s a nationalist brainworm at its core. It’s a claim that only white westerners know what socialism is and how to accomplish it.
It’s quite literally a claim that every socialist movement throughout history did everything incorrect and all they really needed was someone with a big white brain. Ask any of these folks if they truly believe hundreds of millions of Chinese people truly don’t know what socialism is. They’ll always say the Chinese are brainwashed or can’t actually voice their opinions out of fear. Yeah, ok.
Yes these radlibs also supported overthrowing Assad and US occupation forces in Syria stealing oil. They supported destroying Libya. They supported the Hong Kong colonialist tantrums. Every single time the rubber meets the road they are on the side of imperialism. Only decades later to they ever admit they were wrong, if we are lucky, and that never seems to change their current day chauvinism
A bit unrelated, but this made me laugh out loud. Maybe this won’t make sense to you, but there’s this game called Victoria 2 (seems somewhat popular on hexbear) where the people can manifest different ideologies, and then there’s the more radical equivalent for each. Like, communists for the socialists, reactionaries for the conservatives etc. They made up what they called anarcho-liberals for balance reasons, in order to make the liberals have their radical versions in-game, and your comment made me think of categorising these so-called anarcho-liberals as radlibs.
Radical Liberals is exactly what they are, it’s a decent way of framing it. More accurate than the radlibs self perception that they are “as left as it gets” and tankies are right wing actually
I think it makes sense in their head that there exists a dichotomy between left and right (restricted to liberal/conservative in a very US-centric way) and that they are on the left of that spectrum. Then, being “as left as can be” is a matter of being more what they consider left, which, indeed, they are.
God, I forgot how annoying I find this phrasing they adopt, especially when you know they haven’t done the least bit of reading to inform their opinions.
They only change their minds decades after the fact when its safe to be correct. See the Iraq and Afghan wars.
why don’t these people notice that their talking points, left-oriented as they may seem, always end up supporting US allies or attacking US enemies?
A combination of the american civic religion, american exceptionalism, their own material conditions, recognition of their position as the secondary (or perhaps tertiary) benefactors of imperialism, and a century of anti-communist propaganda have left them believing the following:
- The US may SOMETIMES do evil, but that is either by mistake or the cost of doing business, and it is ultimately a net progressive force for “democracy” and “freedom” aka “good”
- No matter how bad the US is, every AES is/was worse
- Every enemy of the US cannot be trusted, so they can only consume
propagandamedia produced by the US and its allies - The US is actually a democracy, and policy can be influenced by voters
Whenever you bring up things that force them to address the dissonance between one of these and reality, they use the the other three to deflect. If you continue to press further, they either disengage, call you a tankie, or start the long slow path to tankiedom themselves.
I used to believe in all 4 of those things. It is painful when the illusion is shattered, so many avoid it.
At most, I can gently suggest that we’re actually the bad guys, not the good guys, and people are starting to agree with me.
Tankies refuse to support the holocaust even though we’re laughing maniacally and talking about how joyful we are while advocating for a more lethal military.
Tankies refuse to give tanks to Ukrainian Nazis.
Tankies don’t have an internal map of
racescountries capable of self-determination with all of the non-white countries listed as bad unless they’re militarily occupied by a good white country.Tankies read books written about non-white self-determination that I equate with Mein Kampf instead of books written for children and US State Department propaganda.
They’re digusting. Just as bad as the non-white leader I’m going to depict with a 1910s racial stereotype.
why don’t these people notice that their talking points, left-oriented as they may seem, always end up supporting US allies or attacking US enemies?
There’s no doubt they recognize this. What’s happening is they still truly believe the US is a lesser evil vis a vis it’s enemies (namely China, Russia, Iran, DPRK, Venezuela, Cuba). They think that while the US is a “flawed democracy,” its enemies are hopeless authoritarian dystopias, and if they push back too hard against the US, “authoritarianism” will spread across the globe like barbarian hordes. These are the same people who will argue “real communism has never been tried.”
They are illiterate chauvanists, basically. Unreformed idealists who cast judgment based on what would be right in principle instead of material reality.
I read the title and saw an outside handle and rubbed my hands together for a feast of bad opinions, but then I noticed that it was posted here and your opinions are good, actually. So I’m at a bit of a loss now
I usually “hang out” (lurk) more on hexbear than on my home instance, but the folks at lemmy.eco.br are usually cool as well
I’m actually not familiar, I’ll check em out!
Feel free to, but be aware that it’s much smaller than hexbear and you’ll have to speak Portuguese lol
Ragebait except good
@ShimmeringKoi @Emanuel The difference is that lemmy.eco.br is not a western instance, but Brazilian instead.
transforming oneself is difficult. The default mode we all have is what’s raised into us. Tradition inherited via parents, and schooling. It’s often trauma or something as un-anchoring as psychedelic experience that makes people crack and change themselves, and this process is so uneven and often incomplete because change is random and unsupported except by the whims of the altered ego.
There are very few unchallenging ways to honestly reject framing you’ve been trained to see as your only window to reality, and because of this it’s easy for westerners to find themselves unable to fully break from the frames that define their understanding of their relationship to their society, government, the world, whatever.
I remember the day after I tripped for the first time because it really was that meme of like “wow so all of this is a fucking lie”. I had to go to school and I was laughing at the things a teacher said [they were dealing with political material] because it was just fucking wrong. Presumptions about the way things are that the average liberal or conservative takes as sacrosanct, just all fucking nonsense. But I lacked the context and knowlege to develop this further at the time. A break was made, and it would take almost two decades to widen things further properly. An early lesson was that it didn’t feel safe to fully leave the frame we’re trained to accept as authoritative reality, because those frames determine social pecking order, they determine the jobs you can get. If you can’t at least fake the faith in the dominant frames society lets you have, you’ll be quickly ousted for being too weird. It’s not even conscious for most folks, these mechanisms operate subconsciously to exclude difference of thinking and approach.
Even a good education is unlikely to, by itself, let you break free. Especially if you’re educated in a prestige or elite context, you’re being shaped to be the next generation of demonic overlord - the education you get is structured so that you’re invested in the existing power structure - these places strictly do NOT educate in a manner that lets you go your own way intellectually.
So everyone from Qualified Experts to the average person on the street is operating on a framework that directly serves the interest of the country and the ruling elite.
I think people get fucked up because they take this to be conspiratorial, when social engineering is a field that’s been in the process of being born for centuries now, a lot of the key players don’t even know what they’re doing, and that’s by design. The structure is designed to maintain and propagate itself.
It’s easy to break from it when you’re the frontier of empire- you live with the politics of empire as a victim, as a deeply exploited resource.
People in the core are just as exploited, on the whole, but as beneficiaries with narrow education and limited interest and ability to educate themselves (on the whole) - they will not understand just what’s happening.
I’m 34, and I have a love of learning. I literally get dopamine from study and acquiring new knowledge. How many freaks like me are there, really? Most people have trauma around education, or fully accepted it as a means to an end: there is rarely ever any love for the process of discovery and the requisite change that comes with it. Most people my age are figuring out how to live with themselves as they are, they’re not trying to shake shit loose. My experience as a trans woman probably has more to do with my plasticity compared to my peers, but at no point are any of the individual circumstances that made me able to, finally, accept a more fundamental reality about my relationship to the world, to empire; things that are automatically salvific.
I’m a freakshow. We are freakshow. This is difficult work and most people who have the tools to wake up, never will, because the conditioning is strong, and breaking it requires the awareness and will to do so that the average ego just won’t abide.
Something you said that really resonated with me is, besides the experience with psychedelics, the way that people will treat you as a conspiracy theorist for deviating from the “correct” frame. I think this is a major barrier for escaping the neoliberal narrative, as it is very natural for us to try to fit in, to not be weird, to be accepted. Nobody wants, at face value, to be the loony commie and ostracised.
A “tankie” is a leftist that has actually reads the theory and understands dialectics.
It’s chauvinism. They’ve hit a point where they can’t deny that the West is awful, but it would hurt their white pride to admit that anyone else might be better.
And I do mean white pride. White supremacy is the beating heart of liberalism. Cut open liberalism, and you’ll expose it.
”White supremacy is the black hole at the center of liberal thought: not directly observable, but made apparent by how all of their other ideas orbit around it.”
Oh hey, that’s my quote! Flattering to see it’s gained some traction.
I think it was a sight tagline that I loved and saved!
Oh shit it’s a tagline? That’s amazing.
To accept that your world view has been informed, for the better part of your entire life, by lies and slanderous claims, and that every defense you’ve put up for your world view has also been a defense of the atrocities that have been hidden from you, is likely one of the hardest hills to climb for almost every person looking for answers. I think most people never see that hill. I think for a subsection of people who do see the hill, they were brought there by someone who has seen the other side of it.
The more you have gained from these lies and slander, the better your position in life is, the harder it would be to walk up that hill. All of those material benefits you’ve had since birth drag you backwards, like the chains of Jacob Marley. For most of those people, they become what you describe, chauvinists. They become chauvinists because it would require them to admit they were wrong, It would require them to admit that their gains are ill-gotten, and it would require them to see their fellow citizens as worth saving.
The lies told to us are powerful, intergenerational lies. They are like a curse cast on the whole population. Breaking that curse requires starring into the deepest, darkest pit of horrors. Horrors that would make Hitler blush. The reaction to these horrors changes you, and you either turn away, tightening the grip of the curse, or you break free.
GOOD post
Thanks comrade.
