No. They’re really not. Tankies are Marxist. These people are Vatnik and 50 cent party types. Specifically, “Tankie” was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defense of the Soviet use of tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring uprising. The USSR has been replaced by a hyper capitalist right wing failed empire. It’s simply not accurate to call them tankies, and in doing so you’re doing them a service. It fails to bring attention to their hypocrisy, their lack of consistency, and all out lack of discernible values. This isn’t semantics. It’s basic history, and it’s only helping them to use shitty internet lingo with alternative meme definitions instead of being accurate. These people have no ideology. Marxists would never support the current state of Russia. They’re worse than tankies.
Your distinction is entirely pointless, because this has been the main critique of tankies since the term originated. Tankies are precisely not marxists, they are “tankies”, ie. in favour of authoritarianism over all else.
And it is mainly just pure chance that they settled on pretending to be marxists because they could easily just have become fascists (which a non-surprising amount of them later actually become).
That’s how it always seems to me. They would support mafia rule or middle ages church rule, they aren’t really tied to ideals of Marxism but more to the idea of authority solving problems.
They most definitely are tankies. That is their cardinal trait.
No. They’re really not. Tankies are Marxist. These people are Vatnik and 50 cent party types. Specifically, “Tankie” was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defense of the Soviet use of tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring uprising. The USSR has been replaced by a hyper capitalist right wing failed empire. It’s simply not accurate to call them tankies, and in doing so you’re doing them a service. It fails to bring attention to their hypocrisy, their lack of consistency, and all out lack of discernible values. This isn’t semantics. It’s basic history, and it’s only helping them to use shitty internet lingo with alternative meme definitions instead of being accurate. These people have no ideology. Marxists would never support the current state of Russia. They’re worse than tankies.
Your distinction is entirely pointless, because this has been the main critique of tankies since the term originated. Tankies are precisely not marxists, they are “tankies”, ie. in favour of authoritarianism over all else.
And it is mainly just pure chance that they settled on pretending to be marxists because they could easily just have become fascists (which a non-surprising amount of them later actually become).
That’s how it always seems to me. They would support mafia rule or middle ages church rule, they aren’t really tied to ideals of Marxism but more to the idea of authority solving problems.