After seeing a megathread praising Mao Zedong, an actual mass killer, and a post about a guy saying “99% of westerners are 100000000000% sure they know what happened in ‘Tiny Man Square’ […] the reasons for this are complex and involve propaganda […],” I am genuinely curious what leads people to this belief system. Even if propaganda is involved when it comes to Tiananmen Square, it doesn’t change the atrocities that were/are committed everywhere else in China.
I am all for letting people believe what they want but I am lost on why one would deliberately praise any authoritarian system this hard.
Can someone please help me understand why this is such a large and prominent community? How have these ideals garnered such a following outside of China?
EDIT: Thank you to everyone who has responded! This thread has been very insightful :)
First thought: Mattias Desmet’s book The Psychology of Totalitarianism, may offer some insights.
… Oh, I thought I was going to have a long list of thoughts about this. But none better not already covered in that^ are yet springing to mind.
As a couple of poster here are already demonstrating, they discover that western nations have lied about communist nations, but they don’t learn the more fundamental lesson that they shouldn’t trust everything a nation says. So instead of adopting a nuanced view, they just counter believing everything a western nation says with rejecting everything a western nation says and instead believing everything a communist nation says.
Yep.
I’m perhaps older than some here, so I saw something similar after 9/11.
Western media, especially American media, were often blatantly biased in favour of the US government and the so called ‘war on terror’. Especially when stuff leaked out about torture, mass killings and abuses. People turned to alternatives and often found channels like Russia Today. And to be fair, at first glance Russia Today did (certainly at the time) appear to be far more nuanced than mainstream media. It was certainly and often justifiably critical of what the US and its allies was up to around that time. But people who spent a lot of time uncritically watching Russia Today, often ended up believing the Russian government propaganda mixed in with truths.
I think it’s also in large part due to the human tendency to simplify reality. Reality is often complex, but we prefer to thing in categories, like black and white. And so you often see people thinking in or blindly accepting false binaries. Side A bad, so side B
badgood. (e: brain fart)It’s surprisingly common. I mean, look how common it is to think of Germany as the bad guy in WWI, when the reality was far more nuanced. The British empire really wasn’t great.
And in WWII the nazis were obviously evil, but that doesn’t mean the allies were particularly good either. For example, Roosevelt didn’t do that much to stop the deportation of up to 2 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans, putting Japanese Americans in concentration camps wasn’t moral, America was still virulently racist, and contrary to what you may have been led to believe about the Soviets up to 1 in 4 rapes by allied troops were perpetrated by Americans. Churchill arguably helped kill up to 4 million Indians during the war. Etc. etc.
I think it’s also in large part due to the human tendency to simplify reality. Reality is often complex, but we prefer to thing in categories, like black and white. And so you often see people thinking in or blindly accepting false binaries. Side A bad, so side B bad.
Agreed.
Nuance is difficult, and arguably more to the point, it’s sort of vague and insubstantial, not least because an awful lot of it necessariky boils down to “I don’t know.” People generally prefer something more solid to which to cling, so tend toward absolutes and unjustified certainties. And the most attractive ones are binaristic, because then you don’t even have to provide support for your claimed position - all you have to do is find fault with the (generally falsely dichotomous) alternative.
The Post 9/11 situation with Mass Media and RT is why it’s so desperately important for a Government to not lie or cover up it’s actions. Another example of this is Al Jazeera. The US Government’s dedication to hiding its dirty deeds opened the door for AJ to establish credibility which they later used against the US and it’s Government.
instead believing everything a “communist” nation says.
Your comment is on point, but it is your username that makes it perfect
Burn the palaces, baby 😎
Not a tankie, but this kind of framing is reductionist and condescending. It’s possible for someone to study the spectrum of political ideology and rationally decide that Communism is the best system. It’s honestly disheartening that a non-falsifiable claim presented with zero evidence would garner this many upvotes on this platform.
THANK you. I was considering saying something similar here, and did in response to another ignorant, self-assuaging user elsewhere in the thread. So I’ll just say the same thing I said to them, as a response to WatDabney above:
If you read the many comments in this thread, not to mention other threads on this topic, a significant chunk of western leftists who are ML arrive at Marxism Leninism only after going through a more anarchist phase, and only through a lot of examination of the world and themselves, coupled with a lot of study and reading, do they move from anarchism to come to recognize the undeniable accuracy of Marxism Leninism to reflect the real world and to offer an actually-working methodology for revolution.
Your fallacious description of people’s process towards becoming Marxist Leninists as being the same sort of way that poor, ignorant, emotionally needy people latch onto a cult, is ridiculous, and the kind of things liberals like to say of all of us on the anticapitalist left to comfort themselves into maintaining their simplistic “I’m right but they’re wrong” worldview and avoid having to engage with the many real reasons people become anticapitalists. But that’s what you’re doing. Don’t be like the liberals. Try to understand the real why of things, don’t make up nice little bedtime stories that ensure you don’t have to examine your own misconceptions.
And some of them just get born into it.
No one is born into Marxism Leninism, anarchism, or any other ideology, and saying that is a grotesquely anti-anarchist thing to say.
And to add to that, when first coming to realize the lies you’ve been told by the state you live under, it is a lack of nuance to immediately jump to the false premise that just because your state is bad, that must mean all states are bad. That’s just the easy and childish answer. That doesn’t make it inherently wrong, but it does make it the one that requires further examination and sometimes a hard look at ones misconceptions. MLs are the ones who have done that hard work, not the ones who have fallen for the easy, un-nuanced end point. As someone else here went into a lot of detail describing but I can’t find at the moment, the typical and more easy trajectory for a young leftist is to go from disillusionment at their own state to anarchism. It is only after a lot more learning, examination, and recognition of nuance, that a person comes to see that the understandable kneejerk reaction that “all of them are evil!” is naive, simplistic, and totally lacking the nuance these things need.
It takes more internal work to conclude that “oh wow, all these other things I assumed were just the flat truth, common knowledge, - like how evil the communist states were and how bad they were for their people - were actually just more lies I was being told for a reason.” Which is why we have so many young anarchists who over time become ML’s but only rarely the other way around. @WatDabney@lemmy.dbzer0.com has it exactly backwards.
Uh, I don’t think you understood their point. Tankies aren’t communists, they’re authoritarians with a red paint job. We’re not talking about nuanced Marxist thinkers, we’re taking about people who think “Just line everyone who doesn’t accept my exact interpretation of communism up against the wall” is rational praxis.
There are plenty of ways to rationally arrive at Communism, but really the only way to get to Tankie is, as the top comment says, rejecting Western propaganda in favor of the propaganda of so-called “communists”.
You’re making a semantic argument and wrapping it up with a “no true Scotsman” fallacy.
OP is making an assumption about his opposition with zero evidence to support his claim. It’s a claptrap for people who want to feel intellectually superior, even if it’s to a straw man.
Not really, no. Words have definitions. It’s not a "semantic argument’ to clarify the definition of a word. It’s not “no true Scotsman” either, that’s when you define a group by some unrelated or incidental quality. What I’ve referred to is the definition of a tankie. The quality described is neither unrelated nor incidental.
Bedtimes are authoritarian, your parents are dictators
Those people don’t exist. You’re making things up.
Unfortunately not, I have had conversations with them. And I know your next line is going to be “But they’re just trolling, no one really thinks that”, and I call horseshit. That “trolling”, when so religiously adhered to, inspires weak-willed onlookers into sincere belief.
Unfortunately not, I have had conversations with them.
Any examples? As it stands, you’re not beating the “I use a strawman as a club to terminate discussions” allegations.
This is just intellectual dishonesty. We both know that every side has its extremists, and to deny their existence simply makes you look like a liar.
Sure, so we can say the people OP is referring to in their post do not actually share the views described by the comment I replied to, if that makes you feel better. The people that get the word “tankie” thrown at them that actually meet that comment’s description are extremely few in number, perhaps a dozen on the entirety of Lemmy.
No, I don’t think they’re trolling. I think that you mistake any comment that is vaguely supportive of China or Russia or that contradicts the mainstream western narrative about those countries as wholesale support for anything those countries do.
You would be incorrect, I do no such thing. I’m speaking about a specific phenomenon, as I described.
Can you link to an example? Because I haven’t encountered such a person yet in my 6 months on Lemmy (admittedly not a long time).
Uh, I don’t think you understood their point. Tankies aren’t communists, they’re authoritarians with a red paint job. We’re not talking about nuanced Marxist thinkers, we’re taking about people who think “Just line everyone who doesn’t accept my exact interpretation of communism up against the wall” is rational praxis.
These people don’t exist, so effectively the purpose for maintaining this as your definition is to use it as a discussion-terminating club against those that uphold socialism as it exists in real life, tacking on the sins of this strawman like a scarlet letter A.
It’s possible for someone to study the spectrum of political ideology and rationally decide that Communism is the best system.
Seems you’re assuming all communists are tankies, when they wrote about communist nations, ie, communist states which are all some variety of Marxism-Leninism, not general communism. Who’s being reductive here?
Hey I can understand your frustration at their supposedly misplaced reasoning. But you have to let them have that view for some time so their own experience can align it closer to what you believe is happening. It shouldn’t be disheartening that people might have incorrect explanations of how the world works for some time.
You are right that we cannot know and understand the life of every individual in a group, but we may observe typical or aggregate behavior, and we may seek reasonable inferences.
Tankies express a general pattern of behavior that is bad faith.
They quote passages instead of explaining from personal comprehension. They attack individuals against an opportunity to discuss ideas. They defer to doctrine instead of reasoning independently. They anchor to absurd lies about anarchists. They lie and deny instead of admitting to problems. They rely on disingenuous rhetoric such as the motte-and-bailey fallacy.
Such observations converge on a pattern of anchoring to convictions for reasons that are unrigorous, prejudiced, and generally misguided.
The problem with your argument is that it relies entirely on anecdotal evidence and personal experience, which is heavily influenced by confirmation bias.
Politics is not an empirical science.
Where are these tankies? Are they in the room with us right now??
Literally, yes, there are people in comment threads in this post doing the read theory meme. You not acknowledging their existence doesn’t mean they aren’t real. You make leftists look like fools.
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“read theory” is never a valid response. Articulate the point to me or forfeit.
Telling someone to look into something is only a valid counterpoint in reference to evidence. Theory is not evidence.
Tankie is just the flavour du jour for the modern version of red scare. It’s easier to call someone a tankie when they disagree with the current narrative about the war in Ukraine or the Palestinian genocide than meet them at their argument and have an honest discussion. To this day nobody has been able to explain to me, if Putin elected Trump and the pedo is a Russian asset, why did Putler decide to invade precisely when his asset was not in power. Also, why did Macron and Scholtz beelined to Moscow to stop a war while Bojo and Biden went full hawk? An aggressor is always in the wrong, period. That said, if Mexico and Canada entered a military alliance with North Korea or China do you think the US would sit idly by? Is it so hard to believe that Biden, after the traitorous IRA (stealing industry from the EU), was all too happy to wreck the EU industry by just precipitating the war rather than collaborate on its avoidance? Nobody ever does the “qui bono” analysis before they chest thump about “DeMoCrAcY”. That’s why the name tankie exists, it’s too hard for the average hollywood consuming joe to understand the grey in international politics. They just understand absolutes, especially within the anglosphere, which if PISA is anything to go by, is fast losing reading comprehension and ability to process complex problems. If you go agaist the narrative you’re a tankie, even if you’re on the side of the victims of genocide or argue we should support Ukraine because it’s the only way to assure a positive outcome for the EU rather than “we’re the good guys”.
Kinda like how when someone finds god, they go hardcore devout-mode, only surprisingly…. More ignorant.
People deify their favorite State and overlook the bad it does. All States commit atrocities so it is easier for everyone to look away rather than say “I like x about how y nation handles z” and be specific about it.
It’s a tiny fringe, just here on Lemmy they can be quite noisy 🤷
This goes for almost any obnoxious behavior on the internet. It’s about 5-10% of people who are just assholes (of whatever description), and everyone else is fine. It only seems like the whole place is jerks because of how noisy the jerks are, and how skilled they are at amping up the normal people into noisy arguments that go nowhere.
Any time you’re in one of those comments sections, take a step back and look at the number of people who are actually initiating the dickishness and you’ll see that it’s a tiny tiny minority.
not really my experience now that they have legitimate fash instances. getting Sybil downvoted is pretty hilarious though.
“Communities”
Top community: 15 subscribers, 5 users/month
I rest my case
the jerks also go around… harassing and insulting people. and like take a personal quest to ban/report you because you upset them.
normal people who disagree with you don’t do that. like i read internet comments i don’t like, laugh, and move on with my life. and if i engage in reply I’m not insulting/harassing the person, going into their comment history to report old comments, etc.
commies are eternal protesters
nice to have something to do i guess
What you are seeing in ‘tankie’ and “read theory” communities is an anti scientific epistemic style that treats ideology as a filter that outranks evidence. When they say the reasons are “complex” and involve propaganda, they are not doing ordinary source criticism that checks documents, reconciles contradictions, and updates beliefs under constraint.
In the sciences, “theory” is a deliberately fragile summary of what has survived contact with data, it must expose itself to being wrong through clear predictions, and good practice means you actively cultivate the ability to withhold belief when the evidence is thin or messy; in a lot of sociology, and especially in Marxist derived subcultures, “theory” often functions less like a falsifiable model and more like a lens, a vocabulary, or even a doctrine that tells you ahead of time what counts as evidence and what must be discounted as “ideology,” which flips the direction of inference so that evidence is recruited to serve the framework rather than constrain it.
Tankies are invoking a built in rule that inconvenient data about a favored regime can be dismissed as structurally tainted by bourgeois institutions, Western media, liberal academia, or intelligence services
That move makes the worldview functionally unfalsifiable, because counterevidence is reclassified as propaganda while any supportive anecdote is treated as proof. Historically this connects to Marxist Leninist political practice where the vanguard party claims privileged access to historical truth and where “correct line” competes with open inquiry, so truth becomes something defended for its political usefulness rather than tested for its correspondence with reality.
The Cold War did involve real propaganda and information warfare on multiple sides, and that kernel of truth gets inflated into a blanket permission slip to disregard any hostile reporting and to treat doubt as ideological contamination. Online this becomes a status ritual in which fluency in canonical texts substitutes for empiricism, and where moral anger at capitalism plus anti imperial identity incentives push people to defend any state positioned against “the West.”
The result is that atrocities are minimized, rationalized as necessary, or outright denied, not because the evidence is genuinely ambiguous but because the community’s habits convert theory into a replacement for falsifiable claims.
That’s a very long and convoluted way of saying “tankies treat communist theory as dogma”. As a tankie: I didn’t become a tankie by reading theory, I became a tankie by reading demonstrable facts.
I don’t support the Soviet Union because “it followed Marx and Lenin”, I support the Soviet Union because it provided universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, it abolished unemployment, it guaranteed housing and abolished homelessness, it created the lowest levels of economic inequality seen in the history of the region, it defeated Nazism and saved tens of millions from extermination, it almost tripled life expectancy and saved tens of millions from abject poverty, hunger and disease, and it gave support to emancipatory anticolonial projects everywhere in the globe. Running the numbers is not “atrocity minimization” as you claim, it’s pragmatic experimentalism.
For me, it’s actually backwards: it just so happens that the projects that in my view have achieved the most liberating and emancipatory goals in history were following Marxist doctrine, which for the unfamiliar, is explicitly materialist and experimental in nature.
It’s been fun to watch the tankies dribble in and do exactly what they are accused of. Thanks for going along with it and making everyone here’s point for them.
Your original comment (translated to understandable English from your pompous-ass style): “tankies treat theory as dogma, disregard empirical evidence and data as propaganda, and mold their worldview as a contest to see who’s more anti-western”.
My reply: “me being a tankie is actually the result of data comparisons between capitalist and AES states for the measurable empirical improvements in quality of life and the reduction in victims, together with the support for emancipatory projects elsewhere”
Your reply: “tHaNkS foR pRoViNg My PoInT”
epistemic style that treats ideology as a filter that outranks evidence
cultivate the ability to withhold belief when the evidence is thin or messy
flips the direction of inference so that evidence is recruited to serve the framework rather than constrain it
competes with open inquiry
status ritual in which fluency in canonical texts substitutes for empiricism
Imagine unironically typing like that, lmfao
CS undergrad I bet, they all talked like that when I had to share lectures with them. It’s just funny that this particular specimen is waxing on about data and evidence based thinking and not just doesn’t present any but actively ignores it since it’s in this very thread 🤣
do you often make a habit of mocking people for how they talk or communicate? Not very proletariat of you, elitist scum.
Surely the proletarian way of writing is overly pompous using obscure latinisms?
And no, I don’t make a habit of mocking people for how they type, my original response was detailed and serious, but when the commenter above decided to become a smug shit, I lost any reason to respect them.
What do you think a tankie is?
It used to mean a communist who supported the USSR’s decision to send in tanks to Hungary to protect the revolution from reactionary forces, but now it’s just a thought-terminating straw man for the modern red scare.
lol comparing being a genuine communist during the red scare to your plight of being trolled on the internet by actual working class people is so out of touch.
What part is out of touch?
A red scare is manifestly happening - see Maduro being kidnapped this morning. Trump constantly talks about jailing and deporting socialists. And online, the term tankie is being used as a way to discredit and slander all communists. People are very serious about their tankie hate here.
And it’s 2025, things that happen on the internet have real impacts on IRL society.
I get that you’re just trolling me (great SLAM, btw), but if you’re actually a leftist, you might want to think about who you’re serving when you try to undermine other leftists.
The out of touch part is that you feel comfortable posting your thought crimes online while simultaneously trying to push a “tankie is the new red scare :<” narrative.
There is so much wrong with this I don’t even know where to begin. Why wouldn’t I publicly push against a the beginnings of a red scare? Especially in a leftist space?
I suspect you’re just a troll though, so I’m going to stop feeding you now.
Btw: tankies aren’t leftists. They are authoritarians. That’s not leftism.
I wasn’t talking to you
While your prose is a little embellished, I think it’s a good diagnosis of the situation.
One thing I’ll say is that your appeal to the sciences might not be the most persuasive. Science can certainly inform the realm of philosophy and ideology, but I don’t believe that it’s equipped to answer the sorts of questions the latter broach. Axioms cannot be proven in the real world.
It’s funny though. I know .world blocks hexbear, but even in this thread, I’ve seen Marxist-Leninists call themselves materialists/empiricists - just as you claim them to be dogmatists.
I always appreciate seeing discussion on Lemmy with MLers tho. I’m apprehensive to adopt their ideology in full, but as someone who’s American Gen Z and growing up in the decline of an Imperial Core nation, I’m looking for ways that can get us out of this real, perceivable, falsifiable hellscape of a country. American Conservatives can’t do it, American Liberals got us here via the Rachet Effect. The only other option is Left, but I see dangers in moving that direction as you have to avoid falling into the same traps that fascists do.
Go read “on practice” and “on contradiction” by mao zedong. Hilarious conjecturing based purely on vibes, nothing to back anything up. The fact that you’re waxing on about tankies getting radicalised by ignoring data while ignoring every “tankie” telling their story about radicalisation in this very thread and not presenting anything to back up your steep claims makes it pure comedy.
More data for you to ignore I guess lmfao
they are not doing ordinary source criticism that checks documents, reconciles contradictions, and updates beliefs under constraint.
absolutely no self awareness bud
Award for least self-aware lib of 2025 goes toooo… It was a hotly contested category folks but TropicalDingdong was able to snatch it with seconds to spare
You really are pathetic.
They really keep doing this and then wonder why no one likes their tired repeated points.
Yes, every tankie tells me facts are ‘propaganda’. and ‘everything is propaganda’.
Which is, as you said, a worldview in which there is no such thing as truth, facts, or objectivity. Everything is ideology and nothing can exist outside of it. It’s a form of relativism, wherein mass atrocities, oppression, and violence are totally cool, as long as it’s your side that is doing it. If the other side does it, only then is it ‘bad’.
Hey buddy, from one academic to another, you sound dumb as fuck.
Oh your an academic? Name every academy.
sorry sir u didnt graduate college so even tho i could apparebtly write a comment totally pwning u, instead in going to talk down to u!!!
Shut up, trash.
imagine typing this unironically lmao
Reply some more.
Sure.
Edit: quick edit btw but dog, you realize every time I reply, it’s because you replied, right? “Reply more”. Embarrassing.
Go ahead, reply again. You look so good right now.
Sorry, did you somehow think this comment would do anything other than embarrass you?
I’m happy to swat down smarmy dilettantes. It’s fun, especially because folks in academia don’t type like that in their free time, which leads me to think this was an undergrad. Which is hilarious.
Okay elitist lol
Good talk, champ.
Too often these criticism’s of “tankies” involve calling questioning blatant cold war lies as tankie behavior and very often i get accused of being a tankie by both liberals and “anarchists” because i oppose the democrats its far past time to retire the word.
it’s the same mindset that has “good cops” backing “bad cops” no matter what. the idea that someone like them can be wrong is an affront to lots of people, because it makes them face the reality that they could be wrong some day as well. and nobody enjoys admitting they’re wrong. so instead of thinking critically, they circle the wagons and reject anything that criticizes anyone like them.
Interesting, is it difficult for people to admit they are wrong? As someone who’s almost always wrong, I cannot fathom why it would be so hard to admit wrongness.
because it’s shameful. it invites shame and ridicule.
being correct is good. being wrong is bad. people don’t want to be bad.
being comfortable with wrongness, fault, etc, requires a lot of education and maturity that very few people ever attain. and it also requires having an ego that can tolerate the ridicule/rejection that comes with admitting fault you will receive from a lot of people, which is kind of a lonely position. admitting you are wrong is opening yourself up to social rejection.
basically if you never admit you are wrong you can hang out with other like minded morons and never feel alone and sad. hence why such communities tend to be so emotionally compelling for people, and so hard to get out of. you have to be willing to go be alone to break out of such mindsets, and as social animals, a lot of human beings are pathologically afraid of being alone.
Actually existing socialism actually exists: imperfect, flawed, with tragic excesses and rightist deviations. But it exists.
And I’m interested in the real world, not creating an ideal world in my head that can’t actually become reality.
Nuance? In my hate thread? You get out of here with that nonsense!
It’s more or less the same position the rest of us “tankies” have. We push back on bourgeois framing of the flaws of real socialism, be it fabrications, exaggerations, or minimizations, but we acknowledge that there are real flaws.
Omg someone who is named specifically!
Can I ask you what you believe/want to happen?
Real talk homie, I’m genuinely curious!
What do you mean by “named specifically?” Either way, I want the end of the era of imperialism, and the completion of the already begun global transition to socialism, and then the global transition to communism. I want a better world, one I believe we are in the long, queer, protracted, messy process of bringing about, and as such I support the movements that further this process.
Someone said your name further up in the comments.
And that sounds dope as fuck from an objective pov.
“Queer” as in complex and not easily defined, though communists are very often queer sexually.
I think I’m going to refer to myself as queer from now on.
And it’s actually dystopian and murderous. because it exists does not make it good . the irony of your name and how hostile they are to lgbt is priceless
Anything’s possible when you make shit up kiddo
How socialist is a system that crushes the working class beneath it’s boot heel, though? Is that really the working class seizing the means of production because that just seems like someone else beating us to the punch and becoming our new overlords.
By the time it achieved industrialization, USSR had universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, had abolished unemployment and homelessness, had the lowest income inequality rates seen in the history of the region, and materially supported emancipatory anticolonial movements all over Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Was it imperfect? Yes. Was it the most emancipatory project humanity has ever seen? Absolutely.
You’re judging them while they have the boot heel of Western imperialism on their necks.
There it is! The goalposts just got kicked into another galaxy.
The goalpost is “actually existing socialism actually exists”
That’s it. The fact that it exists under siege simply means that our goal should be to lift the boot off their necks, instead of wasting time criticizing them. Are they imperfect, flawed, with tragic excesses and rightist deviations? Yes. That’s beyond the scope of anything we can possibly do. Our project, if you actually believe in anything other than capitalism, is to use our privileged position within the core to fight for the defeat of the empire: lift the blockades, end the espionage, stop regime change.
Right now it’s Venezuela on the chopping block. You will help them far more by fighting the US than by criticizing Maduro.
Defenses of “AES” always equivocate on whether it is actually socialism.
At best, the term is a deliberate lie, but the situation is much worse.
As soon as the characterization of socialism is challenged, it is walked backed, and the challenger is gaslighted for saying that what was said moments earlier was ever said.
“AES” is a nonsense concept defended by nonsense arguments.
It’s the only socialism that actually exists, hence, actually existing socialism.
So, choose. Do you want capitalism, or the only existing alternative? In Venezuela you can support Maduro, or you can support Trump’s regime change. Those are the only options that exist. Pick one.
You insist it is socialism.
When someone correctly objects that socialism not yet exists, you deflect and make excuses.
Socialism is worker control of production. Chinese workers being employed by companies in China is not socialism.
“AES” is obscurantist nonsense.
In what way is AES “nonsense?” Countries where public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy and the workint class in control of the state factually exist. It isn’t a “deliberate lie” because you either disagree with that or with the understood definition of socialism.
No, you’re just desperate for an excuse to dismiss valid criticisms
Thanks for the feedback.
You’re welcome!
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Simple, that shit is fictional
The working class in China are not being crushed under anyone’s bootheel, though. They really do enjoy a dictatorship over the bourgeoisie, which has been used to great effect to improve working class lives. Yes, a dictatorship of the proletariat as mediated by the party, but vast swathes of the working class people are the party. And those who are not, well, there is a reason the party has an over 90% approval rating and it’s not some disgusting racist trope about Asians being sheep. It is because they’ve watched their quality of life rise by leaps and bounds, repeatedly.
Yes I’m sure the suppressed LGBT really enjoy the weight of that boot as much as you enjoy its taste
Yes, a country that 70 years ago was feudal has some backwards social policy. Is that an own?
The difference betweent China and the west in this regard, is that social justice victories in China are not constantly threatened by right wing parties and far-right Nazis.
Cope harder buddy, nobody buys that shite except you lot.
You should check out hexbear, plenty of pro China queer people there!
Which is naturally a disgusting phenomenon to see queer people support oppression of people like them. But I guess needing to fit in is indeed a strong counter to cognitive dissonance.
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I’m nowhere near well versed enough on the topic to chime in. But isn’t this the same excuse people try to throw against supporters of Palestine? “Oh yeah you support ending the genocide in Palestine? Did you know they throw LGBT people off the rooftops”.
Regardless of the truth/inaccuracy of the statement. It seems like it’s not really that relevant to the conversation and just thrown out there as a cheap gotcha. Does the suppression of LGBT individuals mean that their overall quality of life hasn’t improved? Does a country have to be perfect and not have other social changes that need to be worked towards in order to acknowledge progress? This is not an endorsement of China, again I’m not knowledgeable enough on the topic. But just a criticism of this rebuttal.
why one would deliberately praise any authoritarian system this hard.
To quote Bertrand Russell: “Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.”
To put it simply, a lot of tankies crave power but just don’t want to admit. They are simply faux concerning for their own ulterior motive. I saw a meme from one of the .ml instances stating that communism simply “wants to improve” society. But I was like: didn’t you guys suppress free elections and speech and persecuted anyone who simply disagrees at the slightest?
It’s not uncommon for many authoritarian communists to eventually become fascists, especially after the end of the Cold War. The ex-leader of Red Army faction became neo-fascist in 2000s. A local politician in my country ran on xenophobic platform, but was a member of a Marxist-Leninist party in the 1970s. All that said, it means these people simply run on whatever ideologies, so long as they can attain power for power’s sake.
Edit: grammar
Edit: The amount of conjecture and thought terminating cliches in this thread is through the fucking roof lmfao. Peak reddit.
A lot of tankies are actually posting how and why they believe what they believe. If anyone’s seriously interested in an answer look at this thread from https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/60633370?scrollToComments=true
There are 206 comments in total at this time.
My journey started here:
https://hexbear.net/comment/3763871How they piqued my interest:
https://hexbear.net/comment/5606499The reason I switched:
https://hexbear.net/comment/5355388It was a combination of them just not being horrible “redfash” monster everyone says they are, them being able to consistently back up their seemingly “obviously wrong” takes and me and seemingly no one else being able to come up with better answers.
In discussions tankies were the only ones who had good faith discussions, obviously they didn’t always, but if it wasn’t just an internet slapfight the tankies were the ones citing sources and having incredibly nuanced understandings while me and the other libs didn’t really. All I ever saw was a “nuh-uh” backed up by “obvious” claims that “everybody” knows like your “mao zedong was the worst mass murderer”.
There is a post I could make about this “black book of communism” statistic now, having read about these sorts of claims, but not on my phone.
me and the other libs
Is this a parody?
At the time I was a lib even if I didn’t identify as such
No. The great majority of MLs on Lemmy were born, raised, and still live in the imperial core, just like most other people on Lemmy. We got the same education, indoctrination, and propaganda as everyone else, so most of us started out as liberals with largely the same beliefs as everyone else. We believed all the same Cold War propaganda as everyone else. Investigating and peeling away the layers of propaganda and lies is actually a long, slow, and not particularly pleasant, effort.
Speak for yourself, peeling off cold war propaganda is an incredibly liberating process for me. It actually gives me hope that revolution is possible and that not only things can potentially be done, but have already successfully been done.
So you support Russia invading Ukraine, China doing a genocide?
Because that’s literally what Tankies believe in
I didn’t support Russia until I learned the history of the region going back to 2013. Now I critically support it like most other marxists.
I used to condemn China for committing genocide until I learned that it actually isn’t. Even installed xiaohongshu and could see for myself.
That’s what I meant by
tankies were the ones citing sources and having incredibly nuanced understandings while me and the other libs didn’t really.
See this comment for an example of a typical debate between a tankie and a lib.
Removed by mod
I don’t think they’re redfash monsters, I just know most historians disagree with what they say, and as someone who is not an expert, I will trust the experts over the people I see post 18 paragraphs that the one time I looked into was not very relevant and often just cause more confusion. An easy example is china’s treatment of the uyghurs, I have yet to see a response that isn’t, as you say, a thought terminating cliché.
See that for me was quite the opposite. The people everyone was piling on as tankies had demonstrably better knowledge of not just both history and current events but could trace a lot of the claims levied against them, like the uyghur genocide hoax, to their source, in this case Adrian Zenz, and really completely decimate them.
Those contradictions kept piling on, tankies were rebutting “common knowledge” and backing up seemingly ludicrous claims in depth and clearly previously researched. Whereas the libs were just consistently out of their depth, either insulting, claiming without anything to back it up or in the best case throwing around tangentially related articles or wikipedia entries that were obviously just the first results from an ad hoc google search. Until just sort of all came crashing down and sent me reeling, my whole worldview coming undone. My family and especially my wife got really worried even, but it kind of tapered away and settled into a new approach to things that feels like I am actually able to take at all these complex and finally have the tools necessary to understand them if I invest the time to do so.
I do not know better than the united nations or several peer reviewed journals. The journal also has references to dozens of historians. It is possible some small group on the internet know more than they do, and are interpreting it better than people who do it as a job, I just find that unlikely. The UN believes it is a persecution if not a genocide. I am a layman on this topic and will defer to experts, because I know there is a lot of astroturfing and I have previously seen arguments that seemed flawless but were missing key details that an expert showed why they were flawed.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623528.2020.1848109
The sources used in your link are sourcing Chinese tabloid Global times. I am fully convinced it’s astroturfing at this point.
A reuters article about some UN article. Not even the UN article itself.
And a journal article citing Zenz multiple times, Plus other citations that are however themselves based on zenz. it looks like zenz all the way down.vs
a whole historical rundown replete with sources
Yours is essentially an appeal to authority, davel obviously went through the trouble of researching the entire history behind the conflict.
Your rebuttal? “Wow you must be a paid troll actor”
And that’s how I became a tankie 😄
Thanks for the live demo
Brother this took me 15 seconds to find, this is very low effort astroturfing https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countries/2022-08-31/22-08-31-final-assesment.pdf
e: also all the interviews with matching details https://www.npr.org/2018/11/13/666287509/ex-detainee-describes-torture-in-chinas-xinjiang-re-education-camp But again the entire UN agrees this is happening, and the only one who says it’s not is the country that benefits from saying it’s not.
Wow, one of the twenty-odd links isn’t from a Western source? Must be a foreign secret agent!
Deeply unserious.
No they are sourcing a Chinese tabloid which is governed by China to prove that China did not do something, while every other country’s reporting, including Chinese historians interviewed, says it is happening. This is the only link I checked to see if it was worth looking over the rest. I am using the most likely conclusion that either they did not care to see the source was from a Chinese tabloid because it confirmed what they already believed, or they are a foreign agent, which have been confirmed to exist on every social media platform. You should be wary I am one too. Either way it’s not worth anyone’s time.
I just know most historians disagree with what they say
Serious contemporary historians, not airport bookstore historians, do agree with much of what we say, because after the fall of the USSR, they got access to troves of Soviet government documents spanning decades, which dispelled much Western Cold War propaganda.
Yes, mostly agree is not a difficult bar to pass when the US was lying about 99% of what they say. Of course almost everything the US said was a lie and historians agree with tankies on most of what actually happened. I can say “The US lied. Communism benefits the average person. These countries were handicapped by the US. China is not committing human rights abuses.” A historian would agree with 3/4 of those, but that doesn’t make what they said reasonable. This is why every argument feels like bad faith, because saying they agree with most of what tankies say implies the other claims must have credence as well.
A lot of people get fed up with slow or no progress, so they fall for supporting approaches that “get things done.” Even though they go very wrong, and by that point, some are too lost in the sauce to admit it’s wrong or severely off-base.
Being involved in anarchist and decentralized leftist orgs, it’s very discouraging how few people care and how little power we have.
Often times it takes weeks of planning and everybody’s collective effort and spare resources to provide meals to a few dozen people, or to host a single information booth or class at a larger leftist meet up.
After years of that, the temptations of centralized power to just dictate to the masses what will happen is very strong. The justification goes something like, “yeah there are a ton of problems with XYZ, but at least they are accomplishing ABC!”
I feel it too when I look around my country of the USA. Sure China is State-capitalist, authoritarian, pseudo-dystopian police state, and super politically repressive. But god damn it, they have some of the best public transport in the world, a kickass tech and manufacturing sector, solid public healthcare, and the actually imprison and even execute billionaire scumbags…
When I have to encounter the level of American idiocy on a weekly basis, listen to the most asinine politicians and talking heads, and endure capitalist bootlicking propaganda everywhere, I start to get really tempted to advocate for the China way…
So it boils down to “at least the trains run on time”?
Not OP but I think they are sold on the “consequences for billionaires” part
Wumao shills are everywhere now.
“Everyone who disagrees with me is corrupt and lying” lol cope
Tribalism
They opposed one tribe so they joined another
These kinds of answers are just the silliest. If you don’t know why we think the things we do—which you obviously don’t—then don’t “contribute” to the conversation with the first thing that pops into your head. It’s okay to not know things.
They’re not going to do that, because investigation of socialist positions would require them to confront the cognitive dissonance of their own beliefs. And once you go against mainstream liberal groupthink, you risk being ostracized by people calling you
wokea tankie.
This. Treating politics like team sports.
You can see it plainly when the defense comes up as “well your country lied about the one i like”
My dudes, they are both awful and both kill for sport and are horribly racist. That’s how they have such power to begin with.
This isnt sports. You can hate them both.
Reductively equating fundamentally different states at a qualitative level isn’t some grand, higher-level wisdom, but selective blindness to material reality and a decision to simply not compare because the outcome doesn’t matter to you. Claiming, say, Cuba or Virtnam “kills for sport and is horribly racist” and equating it to, say, the US Empire and Israel is pure dishonesty.
I am all for letting people believe what they want
Until those beliefs attempt to control others who don’t share the same beliefs. That’s the limit. I don’t understand why it’s so difficult for certain groups to leave people alone.
That’s exactly the complaint against tankies. Tankies are specifically authoritarian “communists”, who defend the violent enforcement of “communism” by authoritarian states. Tankies explicitly want to control others who do not share their beliefs, that’s the material distinction between a tankie specifically and a Communist in general.
“Tankie” is just a pejorative for those who recognize and uphold the legitimacy of existing socialist states. If you ask any self-described leftist if they support socialists stopping fascists, murderers, slavers, landlords, etc through violent means, 99% will support it. Marxists do not wish to “contril others who do not share their beliefs,” but instead recognize that the state violence committed against genuine fascists, slavers, sabateurs, imperialists, and so forth in real life was and is necessary. Anarchists also wielded force against fascists in Spain, but “Tankie” is reserved as a special pejorative for those who also uphold the socialist state projects.
because they aren’t liberals, in the libertarian sense.
they don’t want freedom, they want control of other people. freedom of belief and others having different belief is viewed as a threat to be met with hostility. other people being different, acting different, etc is all viewed this way.
What does being a decent person have to do with political ideologies?
Most people come to Marxism through being disaffected by the liberal systems we grow up in, work in, etc, and look to Marxist theory for answers. I actually came to anarchism first, found myself dissatisfied with it theoretically, then came to Marx. This leads us to organizing in real life, reading more theory, and gradually beginning to read western framing of socialist states and other designated “baddies” more critically, seeking a multi-sided and comprehensive view. There’s a lot to unpack in your comment regarding preconceptions you have about China, largely being western, Red Scare style framing, but what I answered is why I’m a Marxist-Leninist and uphold socialist states as legitimate.
For a look at theory, I made an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list you can take a peak at.
How do you reconcile all the queer people and dissidents your dream states murder with the theory you read?
I don’t have “dream states.” No socialist country has ever or will ever be perfect. If we look at Cuba, they originally criminalized homosexuality. However, because Marxism-Leninism is an emancipatory ideology, socialist states generally were more progressive than the regimes they replaced, and continued to improve. Cuba now has one of the world’s most progressive and queer friendly family codes, and has apologized vehemontly for how they treated queer people in the mid-20th century. By placing the working class in control, social progress is expedited.
As for “dissidents,” the large majority were landlords, slavers, fascists, capitalists, murderers, terrorists, etc. I won’t cape for them, and instead state that it’s sheer brutal necessity that building up state power in socialist society is a necessary evil to protect the gains of socialism.
As for “dissidents,” the large majority were landlords, slavers, fascists, capitalists, murderers, terrorists, etc.
“Terrorists” seems general enough to include anarchists.
Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t. Anarchists largely joined the red army and the bolsheviks, with a minority joining the whites or forming their own cells. There wasn’t a blanket “kill anarchists for thought crime” order, nor did the soviets sit back when groups like Makhnovschina started their banditry against soviet villages and camps.
I admire the inclusivity.
So state sanctioned murder is fine as long as you agree with who’s getting murdered? That tells me all I need to know about your values, thanks.
Killing fascists, landlords, slavers, etc. is a good thing, yes.
not a tankie, but how would you deal with fascists, parasites, slavers, murderers, terrorists, etc.?
I just don’t think giving the state license to mass murder its political enemies is a smart idea. I think steps need to be taken to prevent bad actors like that from harming people, but I’d favor an approach based more on education and rehabilitation than outright murder. Every innocent you wrongly deem an enemy of the state should be an unforgivable occurence, not the cost of doing business.
Ultimately I’d prefer no state apparatus exists that could wield that sort of power to mass murder members of the population. Even if constructed with the best of intentions it’s corruptible and fallible.
I concur with you completely, but again, how do you prevent fascist genocides, landlord hostile evictions, slavers, state murderers (cops), terrorists, etc.? Education and Rehabilitation hasn’t worked on them for 143 years, and science keeps proving why. RN, fascist are genociding in China, Gaza, US, Cambodia, etc… And educated folks are letting it happen.
I disagree with your premise that it doesn’t work, I don’t believe many people have ever put serious effort towards that.
The criminal justice system seems more than capable. Mass murder & a hierarchy of uncontrolled government power/authority to abuse individual liberties aren’t necessary.
Killing evil people is good, fucking duh
By not being fucking gullible lol
Relevant revolutionarythot
Actual answer: It’s pretty much just teens who get radicalized by youtube channels such as wow_mao, yugopnik, hakim, badempanda and most notably thedeprogram podcast, and young students joining ML/Maoist book clubs in their unis though that’s more of a hit and miss since some book clubs actually read Marx and Lenin. They have audiences in the hundreds of thousands, sometimes even millions so it’s not a “small, underground current”.
Through these communities and channels they learn what I’d describe as “falsified pop theory” that usually manifests as exclusively Stalin/Mao and out of context quotes from actual Marxists like Lenin. This results in uncritical support of China and other ML countries like Vietnam and Cuba (all of whom are bourgeois states and literally nothing about them resembles DOTP), embrace of nationalism, maoist third-worldism which is where the “unlimited genocide on the first world” comes from and just endless moralism that you’ve heard time and time again which is explicitly anti-marxist. At times, they might also show support to Islam for some reason.
If my tone sounds a bit harsh, that’s because they’ve completely bastardized marxism and just continue being more and more annoying with their “agitprop” (making communist memes and throwing them into social media void to spread “marxism” or something, revolution through reddit and lemmy), quote farming, absolute glazing of certain historical figures and just dogshit takes in general.
Saying that Hakim is almost exclusively Stalin/Mao is actually an impressively uneducated take. I’d say half of Hakim’s videos are atrocity propaganda of western imperialism, which is absolutely necessary, and I’ve learnt more about the horrors of capitalism through him than through anyone else.
The majority of the theory I read is Marx, Engels, Lenin, and modern theorists. I do read Mao and Stalin too, of course, but the groundwork for Marxism-Leninism is in Marx, Engels, and Lenin, of course. The fact that I have read Marx, Engels, and Lenin is why I support socialist states, rather than do everything in my power to cherry pick quotes to avoid supporting existing socialism and make a mockery of Marxism. I recommend Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the Theory and History of Socialist Governance.
If my tone sounds a bit harsh, it’s because the goal is to understand the world so as to change it, not just doompost.
Yugopnik is a tankie? I don’t listen to deprogram, just his channel
Not sure how you didn’t pick up on it but Yugopnik is indeed a Marxist, which is what “tankie” is a pejorative for, for the most part.
precisely this, I would say with a touch of “just wanting to belong”. I think a lot of people who end up in tankie circles are chronically online, and have a hard time socializing. echo chambers don’t really care, and will treat anyone who regurgitates the same talking points as an equal. maybe that’s just around here though, there’s plenty of leftists around but I have yet to see specifically ML/maoist groups that aren’t just more than reading theory. I imagine it’s easy to fall into that kinda “western country bad” thought pattern when the only people who you interact with tell you it’s righteous and justified with zero nuance.
I’m a socialist and am lucky enough to meet a lot of leftists irl, and I get along with all of them regardless of specific viewpoints. unfortunately, the people who are the loudest on lemmy aren’t the kind of people you meet walking down the street, so they end up lacking the “challenging your own ideals” bit of developing rational and sane viewpoints.
aren’t those groups funded by China?
No, in the same way how feminists aren’t funded by The Big Feminism™, online incels aren’t funded by The Big Incel™ or Linux evangelists on Lemmy being funded by GNU project. Not everything has to do with geopolitics or geopolitical influence, it’s sometimes just a matter of ideology and communities around these ideologies.
If anything, I’d argue that ML’s are closer to being a CIA psyop than some agents of China or some shit
