I keep hearing the term in political discourse, and rather than googling it, I’m asking the people who know better than Google.
Someone who believes people outside of the United States of America are also human beings.
Typically it refers to leftists who strongly defend/advocate for authoritarian statist approaches to socialism/communism.
I’ve always felt the best way to define them as someone so against westernism that they support authoritarian governments like China and Russia while ignoring the hypocrisy of said governments. They’re not really communists, and they would violently oppose actual communism.
I don’t know what you mean by “hypocrisy,” communists support China as a socialist state and critically support Russia to the extent that they trade with socialist countries, oppose western imperialism, and have a populace increasingly sympathetic to socialism. Nobody supports Russia the same way communists actually support China, the USSR fell 3 decades ago. I also don’t know what you mean by saying “tankies” aren’t communists, “tankie” is just a pejorative for communist, nor do I know what you mean by the so called “actual communism” these supposed “tankies” would violently oppose.
Chinese citizens are, by all polls, much happier with their government and feel more represented by it than westerners. Being able to choose every 4 years the colour of the party applying austerity policy isn’t democracy. Germany ignored a referendum in Berlin to establish rent caps because an old fart with a wig said it was “un institutional”. The EU forced Greece to act against the state-wide referendum to revise sovereign debt. China is much more of a democracy than western countries.
When a South Asian calls the British monarchy fascist or Churchill a genocider in my experience.
Isn’t monarchy already a bigger bad word in itself than fascism?
Not according to the Yakubians over at the miserable island.
I actually always wondered a bit about the line between fascism and monarchism. To the casual observer they might seem nearly identical, though I wonder if in historical materialist terms it’s a reactionary attempt to backslide to feudalism rather than progress capitalism to socialism.
A leftist who believes any means necessary is justified to create a state ran society.
Even if that society isn’t fair, even if innocent people get hurt in the process, even if the society is a dictatorship.
We actually do see this in America too, with Trump. Who wouldnt say he is very authoritarian?
You seem to have a strong opinion on the subject, but your definition also feels a little tilted.
Nobody fits that definition, though.
A cute water cistern.
That is an adorable tankie
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No communist calls the ROK an “occupier,” it’s the US Empire that is occupying Korea, with the ROK’s government set up directly by them. This whole comment is really bad, to be honest. In practice, “tankie” is essentially a pejorative for “communist.” I recommend the Prolewiki article on “Tankies,” as well as Nia Frome’s essay “Tankies.”
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No, the government of the southern half of Korea, the Republic of Korea, is not an “occupier.” The democratically elected state was the People’s Republic of Korea (PRK), which spanned the entire peninsula before the US Empire came in, declared it illegal, and split the country in two, against the will of Koreans, and installed the dictator Rhee Syngman in place. The PRK was a quasi-socialist state that predated both the DPRK and ROK’s governments.
Again, “tankie” in practice is just a pejorative for communists, akin to “pinko” or “commie.” The fact that you’re getting very basic communist stances on Korea completely wrong here betrays any sense of legitimacy you have on the subject.
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The ROK has a liberal democracy, but it was forced on the people of southern Korea without their consent. The US Empire staffed it with prior compradors that were in power during Japanese colonialism. The ROK is currently a dictatorship of capital under a special class of people referred to as “chaebol,” under the occupation of the US Empire.
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All states are “authoritarian,” in that all states are means by which one class exerts its authority over the others. Communists support the working class being in charge of that authority, all communists (unless you count anarchists) support the use of the state against capitalists and fascists, and the majority of practicing communists support socialist states.
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I don’t like being referred to like “one of you.” I don’t care what they posted, I am explaining directly to you.
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The ROK essentially being a comprador government set up by a colonizer does not mean it’s occupying itself. The US Empire is occupying Korea, not the comprador government.
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“Tankie” isn’t a political ideology, it’s a McCarthyite strawman with ready-made characteristics designed to make it so that you don’t have to respond to the points communists make. The origin of the term being in putting down the 1956 CIA supported and MI6 armed fascist counter-revolution in Hungary where the fascists let Nazis out of prison to lynch Jews and communists doesn’t make any difference on today’s usage.
14·1 day agoYour image is really bad quality, you should get a better one, https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2025/0318/104-10110-10525.pdf
Thank you!
Tankie isn’t a political ideology, it is a commentary on the practice of policy in comparison to stated beliefs.
how dare those damn tankies improve material conditions.
No, it’s a pejorative and McCarthyite strawman.
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The current usage is as an anticommunist pejorative and McCarthyite strawman.
I’m losing track too. These policial people keep making up terms for the people they disagree with and they keep disagreeing with their own groups so those groups split into new groups and then more terms are needed for those new groups name.
It’s childish.
It’s essentially just the modern day “commie”, used to carry out mccarthyite witch-hunting against anyone perceived to be “anti-white”.
It really is adult name calling, and it further polarizes the political spectrum by naming every single fucking mindset and ideology combination you can think of. It’s just not constructive at all.
We need to talk about ideas and issues and how we can understand and compromise for one another.
Wassa tankie?
Feryerhealth
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Yeah, they totally ran protestors over with tanks. You can even see it in the full tank man video.
https://files.catbox.moe/7zvmf3.mp4
Oh, huh, that’s weird. He didn’t get run over. It even seems like the tanks are trying to avoid him. Maybe the perfidious chicoms are the ones who are telling the truth and it’s our free and fair liberal press who are lying 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔.
Post the video coward
Are you referring to the like twenty minute video where a guy stands in front of a tank and even jumps on top of it before two other protestors come by and he walks off with them willingly? Not even the US embassy in China claimed there was a “massacre”. Was the embassy full of tankies?
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First step, learn the name of the historical location + event you want to pretend you know about. Second, use internet search to look up where Tank Man was Tankmanning. Your browser should automatically search the web if you type appropriate keywords in the navigation bar. You can also use this to learn how things are spelled.
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Sorry, I will try not to cite the US Embassy again. My apologies sir.
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There was no massacre on the square, though. All deaths happened around Beijing, but the dispersal of the protestors on the square was peaceful.
rofl no
What do you mean? Of the few hundred people that died in the riots and fighting, the square was dispersed peacefully. Marxists in general, on Tian’anmen is that hundreds of protestors and PLA officers were killed in Beijing that day as the PLA advanced towards the square, but that the square itself was evacuated peacefully, which matches leaked US cables and the CPC’s official stance on what it calls the “June 4th incident”. This is a rejection of the commonly reported story of 10,000 people being killed on the square itself, which originated from a British diplomat’s cable. Said diplomat was later confirmed to have evacuated well before.
Western nations intentionally sensationalize the quantity of deaths and the character of the events. This is also why Western Nations don’t frequently report on the South Korean Gwang-Ju massacre that occured around the same era, where the South Korean millitary murdered thousands of High School and College students protesting against Chun Do-Hwan’s dictatorship. All of what I said is backed up by the Wikipedia page for Tian’anmen Square Protests and Massacre, such as Alan Donald revising his estimate from 10,000 to the low thousands yet BBC continuing to report the 10,000 figure:
In a disputed cable sent in the aftermath of the events at Tiananmen, British Ambassador Alan Donald initially claimed, based on information from a “good friend” in the State Council of China, that a minimum of 10,000 civilians died,[237] claims which were repeated in a speech by Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke,[238] but which is an estimated number much higher than other sources provided.[239][240] After the declassification, former student protest leader Feng Congde pointed out that Donald later revised his estimate to 2,700–3,400 deaths, a number closer to, but still much higher than, other estimates.[241]
oh hey I know how to paste links too
- https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8555142/Wikileaks-no-bloodshed-inside-Tiananmen-Square-cables-claim.html
- https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/89BEIJING18828_a.html
- https://redsails.org/another-view-of-tiananmen
- https://rumble.com/v233t44-tiananmen-square-chai-ling-hoping-to-cause-bloodshed.html
- https://worldaffairs.blog/2019/06/02/tiananmen-square-massacre-facts-fiction-and-propaganda
- https://johnmenadue.com/the-tiananmen-square-massacrethe-one-sided-story/
- https://mango-press.com/the-tiananmen-square-massacre-the-wests-most-persuasive-most-pervasive-lie
- https://johnmenadue.com/how-psy-ops-warriors-fooled-me-about-tiananmen-square-a-warning
- https://web.archive.org/web/20170706000928/https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_myth_of_tiananmen.php
♥️
Wow, so you’re saying the embassy was infiltrated by Chicoms. How devious. Well, I’m glad Wikipedia wouldn’t source some infiltrated Chicom embassy. They have higher standards.
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The word Tankie originates from 1950s British Communist circles. Specifically, it was used by British Communists to derisively describe their comrades who supported the 1956 invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union.
Images of the Soviet invasion featured a lot of tanks, hence, “Tankie”.
After that died down, the term didn’t come back into use really, until the 2010s, when leftists on the internet started using it in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way. It was fun to bring back a stupid sounding, incredibly niche, British slang word.
At some point the word breached containment and started to be used by liberals, in a very cavilier sort of way. I’ve seen people use Tankie to describe anyone from Marxist-Leninists, to Marxists generally, to Leftists generally, weird right-wingers who converted to Russian Orthodoxy, pro-Palestine activists, mods of Lemmy instances someone doesn’t like.
Shit, I’ve seen literal Anarchist get called Tankies.
Basically, it’s a meaningless nothing word now, that’s a bit like your boomer grandpa who still thinks it’s the Red Scare, calling Joe Biden a Commie Pinko.
So don’t worry about it too much.
A size of tank, smaller than normal tank, but bigger than tankette.
Anyone ideologically left of Richard Nixon according to our local blue conservatives.
Nixon was a tankie according to them. He’s responsible for the EPA and OSHA.
Left of Reagan.
