What was your First encounter with a tankie?
What was your First encounter with a tankie?
Mine happened when i first made a reddit account, i got banned from a subreddit with a tankie moderator because i questioned the logic of having lenin as the subreddits profile, for a subreddit devoted to anti conservative memes.
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I was a social liberal and economic conservative. I read The Economist and Ayn Rand. My mother had a copy of Mao's Red Book from her grandfather, but none of it made sense and there was nothing about communism in the media. I even had to seek out anti-communist literature, I read Solzhenitsyn and Orwell.
My evolution to social democrat happened during the Obama administration. I had been railing at GW Bush, flabbergasted he would start two wars, watching the Daily Show, and eager for Obama to get in and stop the wars and close Guantanamo. When Obama did a troop surge in Afghanistan instead, kept Gitmo open, and invaded Libya and Syria, I started to realize that there is no major anti-war party. Obamacare got everyone talking about health care and I started to realize that it makes no sense to deny health care to poor people. I didn't vibe with anyone but I read in a magazine about a Vermont senator that sounded pretty based, and he went on to run for president.
So I gave over a thousand dollars to Bernie Sanders's two presidential campaigns. I was pretty crushed to learn that the DNC is a corporation that will openly work against popular will to suppress any threats to private health care. CNN was handing debate questions in advance to Hillary, the email leaks showed open conspiracy against Sanders in the DNC. The second go-around wasn't much better and ended with a whimper as COVID obscured everything. Warren acted like someone trying to pull the left wing of democratic voters back to the center.
From time to time I would see socialists on Reddit. Bernie was talking about socialism like a good thing and I liked Bernie so I would see what these people were saying. My first impression was two things, firstly that I had no idea what they were talking about and secondly that they had more in-depth discussions about international relations than anyone I've seen.
They were saying that history shows that incremental reform through elections in a country controlled by the wealthy will never bring about lasting socialism, and the elections of Bernie Sanders, Jesse Jackson, Howard Dean, Eugene Debs, Henry Wallace, Jeremy Corbyn and Salvador Allende showed that. These were not people talking about revolution because they like violence and death, they were talking about revolution because it is necessary to stop all the death that comes from capitalist exploitation at home and abroad.
I wanted to have an informed opinion about communism, so I could understand exactly what's wrong or right about it. I read Marx, Lenin, Frantz Fanon and Michael Parenti. The State and Revolution by Lenin explained with historical context why a revolution is necessary to overthrow capitalism, and why a state is needed to protect the revolution from being overthrown by capitalists.
I read The Conquest of Bread by Kropotkin and The Ecology of Freedom by Bookchin to get an idea of the left-libertarian mindset. I went in wanting an answer for how an anarchist revolution would protect itself better than the Paris Commune did, and I left with no answers. It seems to me that libertarian socialism only works if there's so much popular support for anarchism that there is no state suppression necessary, and there are no sufficiently strong foreign influences that will profit from invasion and overthrow.
This whole journey basically came from two questions about my disillusion with the USA Democratic Party, what will it take to get our country to stop supporting unnecessary wars, and what will it take to keep tens of thousands of Americans from dying every year from denial of health care. Most people don't want war, do want everyone to have health care, yet something keeps us from getting it year after year.
I remember feeling smart because I read Solzhenitsyn and The Economist. I understand how pervasive anti-communist propaganda is, and it makes perfect sense that it is so when monopoly media and the CIA have no interest in portraying communism in an honest light, and I've seen how they work, reading "Manufacturing Consent" by Chomsky and "Inventing Reality" by Michael Parenti.
So people generally call Marxist-Leninists "tankies" and now the tankie is me.
your comment will be allowed due to it being civil.
One quick test is if you think the CCP was justified in killing all the Tiananmen Square protesters. If you say “Yes, the government needed to kill those people” then you’re a tankie.
Marxists, Leninists; what-have-you - can be non-violent and non-authoritarians. Tankies (IMO) specifically love the killing and authoritarian aspect.
ok
the DNC is a corporation that will openly work against popular will to suppress any threats to private health care.
you dont even know what the DNC does lmao
OK I'm having trouble replying to meat_popsicle's comment, so I'll do it here
Were the Tiennamen square protestors justified in killing CPC military and police?
https://www.qiaocollective.com/education/tiananmenreadinglist
"Tankies", aka Marxist-Leninists don't love killing at all. In fact, we're talking about how to have as little death as possible. If you look at the history of left-libertarian attempts, you'll see democratic socialist Salvador Allende getting overthrown by fascists and replaced by the violent fascist dictator Pinochet. You'll see the anarchist Paris Commune being slaughtered wholesale by the french. You'll see the Americans trying to overthrow the 1917 revolution in the USSR and failing. You'll see Chiang Kai-shek joining forces with the Japanese to wipe out the Chinese soviets and failing. You'll see the USA trying to invade and coup Cuba and failing.
So you have a protest that was started by leftists in Tienanmen, which got coopted by people trying to turn it into a color revolution. It's in the interest of western monopoly media to portray this as bloody as possible, and to put the CPC in the worst light possible, as it is against the general interest of the west to see the success and worthiness of socialism.
Communism is a classless, stateless, moneyless society. The state in this sense meaning the part of government that hurts people, the military and police. The state exists to protect one class of people and suppress another. In a capitalist country, the state protects capitalism and the capitalist class. In a socialist country, the state protects socialism and the working class. The wider the class divide, the more need there is for a stronger state, to protect the status quo. As the class divide shrinks as socialism progresses, the need for a state withers away, in the transition to a stateless communist society.
This is to say that marxist-leninists, your "tankies", are working towards communism, which is essentially the same goal of anarchists, a society with no state. This is not the desire of people who crave authoritarianism. We are merely saying that history shows that we can't abolish authority the same time we abolish capitalism, as all attempts to do that have ended in the imposition of fascism through bloodshed. All authority is malignant, but it is a necessary evil in light of historical analysis and the threat that capitalists pose.
There are in fact marxist-leninists who believe that China is a capitalist country after the overthrow of the Gang of Four and the advent of Dengism, and that the USSR went capitalist with Khruschev, but the litmus test for them generally isn't Tienanmen and they don't call the people they disagree with tankies.
So you're a full tankie.
The term was coined when the soviets put down the Hungarian revolution of 1956 with tanks. Other communists critical of the brutal suppression of a popular revolution coined the term to describe the authoritarianism of the people who thought it was fine and dandy.
Modern tankies deny that Tiananman Square never happened. They deny that the CCP is committing genocide. They claim that Russia is justified in invading Ukraine.
They tend to think that China or Russia are somehow good since the US is so obviously evil.
Some people can't accept that most countries are run by evil people.
That’s a lot of words to say “I support the usage of tanks against civilians”.
I don’t care for your reasons. You may view it as a necessary sacrifice (or whatever-the-fuck justification du jour exists today) but it’s still supporting a slaughter because it aligns with your political agenda.