this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2024
725 points (100.0% liked)
Political Memes
7436 readers
3750 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Tankies are not fascist, they are just willing to do whatever it takes to defend the socialist revolution.
If you're willing to do "whatever it takes" including instituting fascism, you're a fascist.
A socialist revolution by definition cannot be fascist, fascism is a far right movement and a socialist revolution is far left movement they both have authoritarian aspects, but are polar opposites as far as the goals of each movement. Socialism is for the benefit of all, fascism is for the benefit of the few.
Also I'm not an accelerationist and am voting for Biden, there is no where near enough class conciousness in the States for a Prolitariat Revolution to occur, but once that critical tipping point is reached I think Landlords and Billionaires should get the wall if they refuse to peacefully give up their hordes of wealth and property for the common good and that the revolution should be defended by any means necessary.
Fine, I will grant you, you aren't fascists. Fascists hate people and want to kill them.
Tankies love "the revolution" more than the people they want to benefit. You may not see it as breaking a few eggs to make an omelette, but when you sit out an election where the fascists have a better than coin flip odds of seizing power, you are effectively letting them do that. And if you're willing to let trans people die in camps for... what was it? "Enough class consciousness to build" then... well, fuck you and your revolution.
Like, also this reveals your total all encompassing privilege. Because look dude, if the fascists are putting trans people and immigrants into camps, do you really think they will spare you? Or do you just think you're white enough that you'll go under the radar until your "revolution" happens?
Also, fuck any revolution that involves taking up the tools and institutions of power. Those need to be ground to dust
Tankies are like NRA lunatics that dream with the chance to shoot somebody, but are scared to try alone.
I'm not sure about that; I think a lot of radicalizing discourse of late comes from the same place. Life under late stage capitalism is hard, and people are not sure why, nor can they articulate it. And they can tell it's getting worse. Its a rife breeding ground for fascists, but when you hit leftist spaces, the tankies have the biggest net. You'll be greeted by r/socialism, and find yourself in its web of subs. You might get pulled in by a Gravel Institute video (especially since you might be aware of Prager U and are interested in a video from the other end). It might be Chapo Trap House. And a lot of entry points into Tankie spaces are extremely compelling. For a lot of people, it will be the first anti Imperial talking points they will ever hear, with no liberal "but this is the greatest nation" filter.
I think this content is actually good and useful. The USA is guilty of myriad atrocities that its citizenry doesn't know about, or the full depth, or doesn't think about in order to get through their daily life.
But then after you get past that, the Tankie reveals himself to be "Anti Nato" without an cohesive political or moral position, in a very "politics as a team sport" kind of way. Russia is a moderately sized challenger to NATO, so they love it. It is also a successor state to a Red Empire. Ukraine is NATO making overtures to NATO, so they don't like it. Israel is an imperialist NATO outpost, and they are committing a genocide, so of course they don't like it, but so many tankies have shown their whole ass diving into Antisemitism, making fun of Jewish names, or Jewish influence on policy, that Ive exited most of the tankie spaces I was still in. Antizionism is not antisemitism, and they are antisemites.
But compare that to China, where they deny a genocide because it is being perpetrated by the largest challenger to NATO and still nominally communist state in the world, and you have your answer.
Opposition to NATO is a cohesive political position. We're happy to explain our views when people are willing to hear us out, generally though, people just want to put nonsense into our mouths and then call us nonsensical.
As usual about accusations towards tankies, there's no link. Show your receipts or stop making stuff up.
Why are you opposed to NATO?
Because NATO defends a system of neocolonialism that's responsible for the bulk of global poverty.
In fairness most people deny the genocide claims made by the anti=China think-tanks.
I'm not going to try to read on your ideology, but I think you're missing why people dislike tankies.
It's not that they are against NATO, Israel, US, Ukraine... Or that they support Russia, China...
The problems are two:
Absolute belief that the world is black and white, and that their side is a paragon of virtue and quality of life, and human rights... Any and all criticism is "western propaganda". This means anything they can't deny is the others side fault "Zelensky is to blame for defending" and "Israel is to blame for attacking".
Beyond just "excusing" the atrocities, they love them. Anybody who opposes them is a valid target. They might rationalize it in some cases, but in the end there are no innocent civilians unless they support them.
Edit: I've seem to have hurt some tankies feelings. Good.
1 is just your lack of reading/knowledge. 2 is simply describing war/conflict in general (e.g. dronies don't see innocent civilians among their enemies)
Lol what? Please tell me what exactly i said that implies im ok with trans folks and immigrants being rounded up in camps?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-communist_mass_killings
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade#:~:text=The%20Atlantic%20slave%20trade%20or,16th%20to%20the%2019th%20centuries.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_Indies#:~:text=The%20colonial%20wars%20in%20the,due%20to%20famine%20and%20disease.
Them being bad. Does not make you good. It just makes you a hypocrite.
Such as justifying capitalist oligarchs that pretend to be socialists like Putin and Xi.
Actually, Putin doesn't even pretend to be socialist. He's pretty unashamedly capitalist. Tankies love the guy anyway.
Funny how the self-proclaimed vanguard of the radical left are just incoherent anti-western reactionaries wearing Marxism like a fig leaf, isn't it? Like, I'm all for breaking down the current neoliberal capitalist hegemony, but you've gotta have a hole in your head to want to replace it with a literal crime syndicate masquerading as a government or an oppressive hyper-capitalist dictatorship with imperialistic ambitions.
Tankies don't give a fuck about socialism.
Tankies, just like other fascists, are willing to do whatever it takes to gain and keep power, including pretending to support socialism
If I was to give this point of the benefit of the doubt (which, to be clear, I don't) what you're saying is that tankies are accelerationists. And I get it, to an extent -- a comfortable middle class isn't going to be concerned about the depredations of the right until they start to find themselves in the crosshairs -- but the last time fascists got their way in the world, more than 73 million people died. Arguing, in effect, that the aftermath of another world war will be better for the survivors is a... challenging point to defend when it requires you to dismiss the deaths of a significant percentage of the world's population, especially when those most in danger from a rising right wing are those that a supposed left-winger should most want to protect. Sacrificing religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities on the altar of a better future for religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities doesn't sit well with me.
Defending a revolution is not accelerationism. I have no idea how you got that from what they said, or generally where this idea of tankies being accelerationists comes from, it seems to be mostly something people make up about us. Accelerationism is stupid and reactionary.
So is Donald Trump.
Yes, he is. Not sure what that has to do with the incorrect claim that tankies are accelerationists.
Most tankies on lemmy spend a lot of time arguing for people to do things that lead to Trump bringing much of fascism to America. Not sure if you'd noticed.
I haven't noticed any tankies supporting Trump, no.
Oh, weird. In my feed, they're always trying to convince left leaning folk not to vote for Biden so that Trump wins.
Yes, we do believe in participating in bourgeois elections in the form of our own party, the reasons for which were laid out by Lenin ages ago. It has nothing to do with the modern concept of "accelerationism," or wanting Trump to win. If I were an accelerationist, I'd be spoiled for choice, conditions will continue to decline under either candidate. Unfortunately, accelerationism doesn't work, and declining conditions are the reason we got Trump in the first place.
In a race between Trump and a person who created the conditions that make people like Trump inevitable, I support neither, instead, I support a position of fixing the conditions that led to Trump's emergence, which is the only possible strategy of stopping facism in the long run.
The conditions that led to Trump's rise to power were a deep-seated underlying racism that persists in several American subcultures, coupled with a failure to address wage suppression by allowing the minimum wage to fall behind the cost of living for decades and decades.
You're still both-sides-ing a clear-cut choice between lawless capitalism and the status quo with fringe improvements. Here I thought you were a left wing person who prefers the poor to suffer less. I was wrong, you're a classic tankie, I'm afraid, who draws no distinction. You could use your vote to prevent the clear and present danger of a much worse situation in America, but you've become convinced that letting Trump win is the nobler, purer action. Save me from "leftist" hard-right enablers!
Of course I'm a tankie, I never claimed not to be. I even used the word "us" when referring to tankies in my original comment. Tankies prefer the poor to suffer less, in fact, tankies are responsible for three quarters of worldwide poverty reduction since the 1980's.
Again, you assign stances to me that have nothing to do with what I said. It's not about "nobility" or "purity," it's about establishing a political platform capable of addressing the root causes of the problems faced today. The status quo cannot last indefinitely. 4 years from now, things will have gotten worse and you'll still be saying that we have to vote blue no matter who to preserve the status quo, as the status quo stops working for more and more people. It's a doomed strategy.
By the way, I didn't call you tankie to call you names, it was the label you used for yourself. If you recall, early on I was surprised that you were a tankie who actually seemed to want to stop Trump. Now that I see you're advocating not voting for the only person who can stop him, I see that you're a typical lemmy tankie. The insult was in the word typical.
I initially thought you wanted to stop the far right. You clearly don't even care enough to put a mark in a box.
Of course, I don't take any offense to the term tankie, or being called a "typical" lemmy tankie.
What I said initially had nothing to do with the US election. Then, I correctly responded to you that I haven't seen any tankies supporting Trump. I'm sorry you got confused about my positions, I guess.
So vote for progressive candidates in primaries, but given the chance to postpone the advent of a self-declared right wing dictatorship for 4 years, with as complete state capture as he can manage, and now with the SCOTUS nothing's-illegal ruling, that's a lot, and you're sitting on your hands? That's the crazy to me. That's the deluded hypocrisy of the typical tankie.
So why would you sit by impotently and allow trump to make the poor suffer more?
I literally just explained the reasoning for my position. The strategy of preserving the status quo is a doomed, defeatist strategy. Even if it means starting from square 1, it's better to push for a solution that actually has the potential to work.
Whatever it takes including sending tanks after people because they don't agree with your rule or am I missing something? Tankies is literally authoritarian or do you mean that your ideology is different and you want people to stop calling you that?
You have a choice between 1) capitalism that's free for all, fuck the earth, fuck the workers, fuck the consumer, disband the EPA, OSHA, FTC, or 2) capitalism that's regulated, with environmental protection, worker protections, minimum wages, workplace standards, product regulations, etc. The choice should be obvious.
Such as allying with the fascists so hard that Stalin was in talks to join the axis before Barbarossa.
If they're voting for Biden then why are they saying they won't vote for Biden and are encouraging others not to vote for Biden? 🤔
I mean some might be fascists from like 8chan RPing as tankies. If I recall like a white republican congressman had a sockpuppet where he pretended to be a black guy.
You have to assume a certain amount of pro-trump stuff is straight up BS
Stalinism wasn't counter-revolutionary?
Is that in the meme? In my opinion, Stalin was counter-revolutionary to Marxism:
But I don’t reject what he was trying to achieve, as I don’t reject what Xi is trying in China. Don’t let Perfect be the enemy of Good.
You're implying that more capitalism is progress.
Lol, which is why historically they have coalitioned with the right to murder the socialists before the socialists could take power.
project 2025 is not a socialist revolution