I keep seeing “fuck tankies” everywhere, and seem to see people getting called “tankie” for any number of things–I used to feel like I knew what it meant (the formal definition, which I thought was the only application) but that’s clearly not the case anymore. Saw someone get called one because they… Liked the idea of universal basic income and wanted walkable cities? And now the same sentiment is on a large number of Lemmy communities, lol.
I feel like I’ve been living under a rock.
Edit: Wow, I guess it’s just as meaningless of a term now as it seemed. At least it’s a nice, bright flag for ghouls not worth engaging with meaningfully, lol. I saw “fuck tankies” on a genderqueer community and got pretty confused on how the two ideas correlated in the slightest, so I guess that was the tipping point on me finally asking about it.
It means whatever it needs to mean in the context in which it is deployed.
It’s a tool deployed by liberals against people to the left of them in exactly the same way that woke is a tool deployed by reactionaries against people to the left of them.
It gets deployed against everything from ML to anarchist to even socdems, depending on whether you say something that goes against the US’ imperial core goals.
The purpose of the tool is thought-termination. To prevent people from listening to the person that it is deployed against. Reactionaries use woke to prevent people among their ranks from listening to anything reasonable the ““woke”” person might say, and liberals use tankie to prevent people among their ranks from listening to anything reasonable the left might say.
It is an adaptation of mccarthyite behaviour.
You ain’t done nothing if you ain’t been called a Red applies now to this word just as much as it applied back then.
opposing imperialism, colonialism, racism, capitalism, patriarchy, animal abuse, domestic violence, or pollution in a way that is not utterly ineffectual or pacifistic
spoiler
even pacifists get called tankie for having rhetoric that’s too “mean”
even pacifists get called tankie for having rhetoric that’s too “mean”
See: Roger Waters
Much like “woke” is for conservatives, for liberals, “tankie” means “person that I disagree with that says things that are too leftist for me personally”
A blanket term to denigrate any leftist with Marxist ideas
Basically, gg once you say anything left of soc dem
Tankie is just the lib version of woke
It basically means ‘leftist’
Someone with good opinions.
anyone with the smallest criticism of US Imperialism is a tankie now
Wow so you think slavery was bad, didn’t know I was talking to a tankie
“US has historically treated black people poorly”? Mmm nice Kremlin propaganda 🙄
Yeah I’m a tankie, I support going back in time to give Sherman a Sherman
Hexbear eat Lemmy already. I want my fucking username back
tankie is when you don’t want to send tanks to ukraine
Liberals think it means someone who lies about wanting socialism and instead just wants to kill people. They think it refers to a proponent of a society where all decisions are made by a single crackpot dictator. They think they have a correct view on how to create and institute socialism, which would involve things like voting in elections, organizing pickets, and very slowly seizing power through mass appeal. As a corollary to this, liberals believe this type of socialism has already been achieved in places like Sweden and Denmark. Depending on how much they’ve read socialist theory they may also point to Catalonia or the Zapatistas, but they’ll usually be referring to completely imaginary mangled versions of these events that don’t reflect history.
What tankie means in practice though is something more like “race traitor.” Or “nation traitor.” Liberals will say they hate the west’s actions and what it stands for, but what they really mean is they hate everywhere else more. Any designated enemies of western countries are permanent enemies and outside of liberal values. People who call themselves socialists will still use this dichotomy. Tankie means someone who expresses sympathy for countries that have been designated as enemies to the west. You’ll notice that Xi Jinping himself isn’t called a tankie. Stalin’s not a tankie. Figures like that get called authoritarians or dictators. Tankie is someone in the west who has broken convention and gone to the bad guys. That’s all it means at this point.
I really believe there’s been a decades long project to usurp socialist rhetoric by liberals, whether they realize it or not. The existence of tankies threatens their reputation, because it draws socialist terminology back into scary communism. Liberals have spent decades trying to position themselves as the true, good leftists. That only works if they can paint socialist movements worldwide as liars and their own internal socialists as traitors
Was hoping to find your definition of tankie here
What tankie means in practice though is something more like “race traitor.” Or “nation traitor.”
yeah I’m hoping the idea gets more widespread that “tankie” has racist connotations built into it
woke
The real Tankies are the friends we made along the way.
Anyone with policy positons that aren’t generally safe towards neoconservatism?
same meaning as “woke”, i.e. a term which has lost all meaning
Someone who drives a tank