• Ricaz@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 days ago

    I honestly never heard the term “tankie” before a few days ago. What is it? Extremist communists?

    • danciestlobster@lemm.ee
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      3 days ago

      That’s pretty much it, yeah. It’s worth noting, there is a lot of animosity on here, particularly from .world, for .ml and .hexbear instances. Both are heavily communist, far left communities, and get a bad rep because they are known for not accommodating liberal or other not as left viewpoints. This was particularly heated around the election with disagreements about voting for liberals vs protest voting.

      Fwiw I’m a strong believer if we are to organize against literal fascism we will need the liberal and the farther left to find enough common ground to work together. It’s a…work in progress on here.

      • nylo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 days ago

        db0 (my instance and @Ricaz@lemmy.dbzer0.com’ ) is a leftist anarchist instance and I’d say the animosity towards tankies is even stronger here.

        it’s not anything to do with liberals vs leftists it’s that they handwave genocide and other atrocities as “western propaganda” and worship lennin and mao and stalin and north korea and so on and so forth.

        • danciestlobster@lemm.ee
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          3 days ago

          While I think that’s inevitably true for some, I also think that sentiment gets exaggerated/overblown for others. Tankies are definitely prevalent, but there are also a lot of non tankie communists, and communists who will readily admit the failings of the dictators claiming to be communists throughout history. Genocide is an important issue for many of them, and is what pushed them away from Democrats most recently

          Either way though, im not trying to argue any of these are morally correct or better than any other viewpoint. But I do think it’s undeniable that the left needs more unification globally if there is to be any meaningful resistance against the rise of fascism, and we have more in common with each other than we do with any of the oppressors in government now or the Nazis who support them

          • nylo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            3 days ago

            oh yeah hard agree that communist != tankie, there are a lot of anarcho-communists here. id say even Marxist doesn’t necessarily mark someone as a tankie. Marxist-Lenninist though, Maoist, or anyone that refers to nk as “The DPRK” though, those are all probably tankies.

            if you think that sentiment is rare you don’t spend much time on .ml or chapo.chat(hexbear) which is good! keep that up :)

            I agree that leftists need to work together, nobody hates a leftist more than another leftist but atrocity denialism is a line in the sand that I will not cross. absolutely unacceptable behavior indicative of a fetishization of fascism above all else, just colored as “Communism, comrade.”

            • Ricaz@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              3 days ago

              Didn’t realize it had gone so far. I’m guessing most people talking about communism this way are American. Where I’m from, liberalism is more centre-right than left.

              • nylo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                3 days ago

                that’s true of liberalism in the US as well, it’s just as far left as our Overton Window goes.

                yeah communism is a dirty word here because of the red scare but the youngins are reading Marx and learning it’s pretty based, some people drink the flavor-aide of the authoritarian regimes that claim to be communist (but aren’t) and that’s how tankies came to be.