I know for a lot of people a tankie is just something that they know it when they see it, however I think that it is important to think about the reason that you define something as being tankie vs just a leftist.
I know for a lot of people a tankie is just something that they know it when they see it, however I think that it is important to think about the reason that you define something as being tankie vs just a leftist.
That’s part of the campism. If you nail them down on the topic of Russia, specifically, they will disavow modern Russia precisely because it isn’t painted red. But for every action on the international stage, they will unfailingly support Russia, because Russia is against the West’s ‘camp’. Same with Iran.
On the other hand, if you nail them down on the USSR and the PRC, actual tankies will almost always outright speak in support of both, if not necessarily unconditionally. Though the conditions they apply are… party-approved. In the spirit of “MAYBE there were SOME excesses and bad choices, but also you have to understand that the bourgeois FORCED us to take most of these measures!” that dedicated Communists who got swept up into the GULAG still parroted to their fellow inmates during the Stalin years.
Regimes with a very thin coat of red paint, like Assad’s Syria, still often receive this bootlicking treatment from actual tankies.
I don’t disagree. I especially enjoy it when they start talking about how Stalin was a great leader. I’ve also seen “everyone sent to the Gulags deserved it” being bandied about lately.
The best one was definitely that time that a hexbear user joined in to lemm.ee’s “do we defederate from hexbear?” thread to tell the admin that “your kulak great grandparents deserved it” apparently on the basis that he’s Estonian and doesn’t like the Soviet Union
I got a better one than that one. I was told by one of them that Stalin put thousands of Jews in the gulags for the same reason Nazis put them in concentration camps (apparently deservedly both times)- “they were radical Marxists.”
Like, WTF? Isn’t that a good thing to you?
Is the distinction being drawn between Marxist and Marxist-Leninist, or is “radical Marxism” referring to radicalism as in Jeremy Bentham? Or is there some third thing going on?
I decided not to delve into the topic because I can only stomach so much bigotry.
That was probably a sensible decision