I keep hearing the term in political discourse, and rather than googling it, I’m asking the people who know better than Google.
I keep hearing the term in political discourse, and rather than googling it, I’m asking the people who know better than Google.
Notice how all that is left are comments that support authoritarian communism and defend totalitarian states they identify with¹ including crimes against humanity and historical revisionism. That is a prime example of what other leftists call tankies. Censorship, brigading and other bad behaviours because only their reality tunnel is acceptable. Even reasonable and nuanced comments explaining a different point of view have been downvoted and removed.
¹ interestingly a lot of them support Russia today despite it’s a prime capitalist oligarchy since the fall of CCCP over thirty years ago and China that too has strayed closer to a corrupt capitalist kleptocracy than communism in anything than name. Obviously they support North Korea too, adopting the state ideology that no criticism is allowed. Hence the common assumption is that the tankie hive is a mix of ideological hardliners, paid trolls of said states and random contrarians that are in it for the ego.
So much arrogant, condescending chauvinism in this comment.
The problem here is that “tankie” is just a strawman with ready-made characteristics. In the minds of viewers, a tankie is exactly what McCarthy described, yet also someone who believes that the McCarthyian version of a communist is a good thing. The problem is that this doesn’t describe real people. Communists disagree with common western, liberal viewpoints on existing socialist states, and believe them to be unfairly represented in western media. Communists aren’t paid trolls, we aren’t in it for ego. Many of us are members of communist parties, volunteer in our communities, etc.
You say these supposed “tankies” identify with crimes against humanity, but that’s demonstrably false. I can say that, for example, the idea of the 1930s famine in the USSR being intentional is utter mythology. That doesn’t mean I support the famine, it means based on evidence from the opening of the soviet archives, we know that it was a tragedy caused by adverse weather conditions made worse by kulaks destroying grain and livestock as resistance to collectivization, and that food output grew with collectivization. None of that “identifies with” the idea that the famine was intentional and is somehow good.
Even your points on the Russian Federation are wrong. Nobody thinks they are still socialist, critical support for the Russian Federation lies in the fact that it’s forced into trade with socialist countries, resists western imperialism, and has a rising socialist public that wishes to reimplement socialism. The DPRK isn’t the dystopian nightmare the west pitches it to be, and we know this by measuring up defector testimonies and comparing them to reporting both internally and externally. China is socialist, public ownership is the principle aspect of its economy.
All of this is to say, yourself and others are getting downvoted because you’re treating the McCarthyite strawman as if it’s a real thing.