Yes.
Just go ask the 196 mods.
I'm not just a tank, I'm the entire armored division
no i am a girl
i'm tankie and gay and covered in feces (some of which is my own)
YES
I think it's just mostly teen drama from Lemmy.world users. :)
No
To clear definitions, at least for me"tankies" are a subset of communists, who praises/defends the actions of all/most communist states far more than similar actions from capitalist states. The difference between communists and tankies is a bias in favor of communist states when looking at things like human rights violations. Very few people will self identify as a tankie, since it's hard to see your own bias.
Tankie is an empty signifier
That is to say, it's a label that can be used to describe an array of different and conflicting ideas, values, and identities. Because of this it serves as an obfuscatory device rather than a communicative one. The sub-logic becomes tankie = bad, so if someone I don't like = tankie, then person I don't like = bad.
Almost none of us were alive when Khrushchev rolled tanks into Hungary. Most MLs aren't particularly fond of Khrushchev.
It's made a resurgence in this new, weird context because most of the terms used during the previous red scares lost their power through similar misuse. It's become unfashionable to hate on leftism in progressive spaces, doing so using old terminology makes you sound like a fox news conservative. But you can do the same thing by calling it this instead.
NO. Not a fan of the current or former CCP or the former Soviet Union
The .world libs just couldn't help themselves but ruin our circlejerk.
Sure fuck it. I'll Tankie. Castro is a hero. Western news knows nothing of glorious DPRK Juche, and comrade Stalin did nothing wrong.
Yes.
YES
No, I think?
I don't actually know what a "Tankie" is. I tend to try to steer away from labels; I consider them a form of intellectual laziness. People will use them to either try to gain a feeling of belonging by adopting a line of thinking shared by their peers, or they will use them to smear those who they have defined as "others" without consideration of why these "others" might hold opinions that they don't. Labels and label-based thinking lead to tribalism and division.
If you want to know what I think about something, ask with specifics. If you want to convince me of something, present an argument with reason and evidence, and be prepared for me to pick it apart and look for flaws. There is nothing I respect more than somebody who takes a comment I make and considers it, researches it and then comes back to me with a response, or presents me with a perspective that compels me to do the same. I find both depressingly rare.
Seriously speaking, YES.
“The modern revisionists and reactionaries call us Tankies, thinking that they insult us and, in fact, that is their aim. On the contrary, however, they glorify us with this epithet: it is an honour for us to be Tankies, because, since we were Tankies, the enemy could not conquer us, and never will conquer us as long as we remain Tankies.”
--Enver Hoxha, paraphrased.
(As far as Hungary is concerned, I don't advocate for anything that Khrushchev did)
no i like watching tanks get blown up
YES
My understanding is that a tankie is defined as someone who seeks to promote global peace, understanding, and equality, with nuanced views that incorporate marginalized and international perspectives, grounded in historical evidence.
That's how I see it used anyway.
No.
Maybe I'm way off the mark here but... I think the reaction to tankies seems very overblown. No one you could describe as a "tankie" is currently in charge of any of the countries/companies/organizations that are busy destroying the world right now, so I don't super understand why everyone's talking about them like they're at all a priority? The authoritarians that tankies are obsessed with are all either long dead, or totally unaware of their existence.
Maybe some people on the left are just trying to look at future dangers here, like tankies are gonna be "Bolsheviks Part 2", somehow come into power, and then purge all the anarchists or something. But didn't Bolsheviks actually have a lot of power and influence prior to the revolution? Tankies don't seem to.
NO
I like having no boots on my neck, not just changing out what demographic is wearing it
I havent figured out yet what a tankie is.
The original definition comes the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 to describe communists who supported the crushing of the uprising.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
A lot of people who use that term to describe other tankies seem to be using it the correct way while people who are tankies seem to want to change it to something else because of the implications of that definition.
it's what people who are literally demanding that the west sends tanks to the proxy war in Ukraine are calling people who want to end the war right now
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