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Police discover 80 Russian torture chambers in Ukraine
(www.ukrinform.net)
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this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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No, the tankies are also most definitely swallowing up the same bullshit because they believe Russia and China to be freer states than the rest of the world.
I mean, there is a long documented list of crimes that make China look like a Muslim paradise compared to anything in Europe or North America, and Ukraine has every problem that Russia does. Again, why are we all trying to compare sides? Of course, with Russian suppression, it will soon be just as repressive as Ukraine, and China has a bunch of "war on terror" laws just like the US, so there's nothing to be proud of there.
I mean i don't think they actually believe them to be freer, i think they don't care about individual freedom. Whether or not Russia is more free or more repressive doesn't matter to authoritarians. (Or if anything, they prefer the repression.)
You haven't been paying too much attention then. The tankies are vomiting the same pro-putin propaganda as the right-wing fascists. The right-wing fascists want to suck Putin's dick because he hates gays and loves economic corruption. The tankies want to suck Putin's dick because they have some kind of delusion that modern Russia is a communist country and believe west=bad so anything westerners hate must be good.
I actually went and asked on Hexbear their opinions about this and tried to dig a bit to understand the logic. I don't agree with it and I think their logic is cold, brutal and lacking in empathy, but there is a logic.
Essentially, they support Russia critically. This means they agree with any normal person that Russia is a shithole, but it's a useful shithole that challenges NATO. They see this as a proxy war between NATO and Russia, and the more they can bleed each other the better, especially if it weakens NATO. The civilians who are caught in the middle are acceptable collateral damage according to them.
I've also talked to some of these folks, and my strong sense is that they are teenagers who have never been to any of these places, or really understand much about the complexity of global systems
I also get the strong sense that the vast majority are from North America, which greatly limits their perspectives. It's very easy to see this in simple calculus terms when the war isn't going on right over the border and has the potential to destroy a sibling country (Moldova, I'm Romanian).
I have a strong sense that a lot of them aren't people, they're CCP LLMs.
I honestly don't think that's the case. This seems to me to be people who have an ideology (fair enough, we all do) but then see the entire world and everything around them through this black and white filter where everything either supports the cause or doesn't, and anything and everything is justified in support of that.
Why don't you think it's the case? The CCP and Kremlin want to take down the current rules-based international system, and using LLMs on social media is an incredibly cheap way to do it.
If you think we're a big enough or influential enough of a target for moving the needle on public opinion here on lemmy, I have a bridge to sell you :))
I do get where you're coming from, but I do feel like you're running from bushes thinking they're bears.
Have you seen how many people use the fediverse? It would be easy to set up bots in this relatively unmoderated space and spread propaganda.
Rules-based international system? Did you copy and paste from a right-wing think tank or something? I always thought that phrase was a joke for rich Americans to say when they carpet bomb a wedding and the military gets away with it. You can sleep at night peacefully, I'm sure, since China and Russia would need at least a decade or two to finish the job.
But if your "rules based system" collapses because Chinese bots are posting memes in communities with a few thousand followers, then it deserves to happen.
There's definitely a lot of teens and young adults in those spaces, on both sides.
A lot of American communists supported Stalin. They refused to believe that the anti-Stalin news was anything but American propaganda. When Khrushchev exposed Stalin for what he did in an attempt to try rebuilding the country, many were disillusioned to the point that they left communism. Some remained pro-Soviet but rejected Stalin, some remained communist but rejected the USSR as state capitalism, and some remained pro-Stalin. I’m just pointing that out to make sure that we all remember that people can be all over the place and still justify their positions to themselves.
To me, supporting Putin because he opposes NATO is like supporting Donald Trump because he opposes Biden. There are some accelerationists who literally do that. I personally think it is idiotic, and anyone who does so is a fascist and not a communist. Putin’s homophobia, xenophobia, right wing religious fascism, and misogyny should be more than enough to dissuade any person with a conscience from supporting him. Honestly, I really think it does. I believe that the majority of the “tankies” supporting Putin are right wing accounts sockpuppeting as leftists. No one who supports LGBT rights could support Putin. I think the tankies are the same type of crowd that populated the_donald - people cosplaying a political position until it becomes internalized.
There is an absolutely massive literature in American and Western communism. Most of it predates Putin - at least, predates Putin bring anything other than a mafioso with a superpower to fund his personal wealth. You can read all about the soul searching about actually existing communism vs ideological communism and the moral dilemma that resulted.
But insofar as it’s about opposition to American imperialism or accelerationism, I think that the Trump years should have shown that to be tragically misguided. Putin’s opposition to NATO isn’t helping anyone in the West except for people like Trump and LePen. It’s not like supporting Ho Chi Minh or Mao, and it’s certainly not like supporting Allende, Castro, or Che. It’s like supporting Hitler on the basis of Hitler being anti-British.
You need to research some info on LaRouche and Dugin. They sound like complete jokes and everyone downplays their influence, but it's very real. That's where this comes from.
Also, Stalin was supported at that time in the US because of major wins in labor disputes and the fact that we were allied during WWII. The USSR was defeating Germany under Stalin, and we (the US) decided to finish off the losing team (luckily Germany). He was considered a hero, and a genuine revolutionary Communist for his work, and the fight against Nazism is how he went down in history. Ironically, wrt. your comment, it was the de-Stalinizing USSR under Khrushchev that were the "tankies", it had nothing to do with Stalin at all.
Like many other impoverished, war-torn, or underdeveloped countries, socialism failed to be fully achieved in the USSR and ended up getting stuck. We could recognize the good and move on to build something better.
Cutting the nose, those fine fellows…
Why are you claiming that Putin hates gays like it's a bad thing, and then making fun of gay people? I don't suck dick, and I definitely wouldn't make the offer if I was trying to "own" a homophobe..
How am I making fun of gay people? Anyone with a mouth can suck a cock, regardless of gender or sexual orientation. The problem is sucking Putin's dick.
Why do you think only gay men can suck cock?
Oh ok, it's only okay to be homophobic if you're laughing at people who suck the wrong person's dick.
You mean to tell me that hearing that exact phrase during my entire life in a homophobic context has all of a sudden changed meanings? I don't buy your bullshit.
Have you been living under a rock? I've been hearing it used to mock, demean, or criticize people of any gender for over 10 years. So, congrats! You've discovered that the meaning of words and phrases can change. As it turns out, women can suck cock too. So can enbies! Women can have cocks, men can have vaginas, people can identify however they want, it's 2023, get with fucking times.
Oh, and I wasn't mocking them. I was using in a degrading manner. Sucking the cock of a lover or friend is one thing (and shouldn't be mocked), but being so enthusiastic about a genocidal dictator that you'd willingly gobble their cock is entirely different.
There are a lot of pro-putin (and other shitty regime) tankies, that's really my problem with them. If they were just militant communist types I wouldn't have too much of an issue with them, I may not agree with them, but I'd at least understand their position, maybe even be somewhat sympathetic in some cases.
When you dig into their reasoning, it's usually something like they support them because they're also against the US/NATO/the west, sort of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" kind of deal, but that argument doesn't really hold water for me, throwing your lot in with someone pulling the kinds of shit Putin does is totally indefensible, even if your plan is to ultimately turn on them after you've successfully toppled the west or whatever, you've still been supporting or at least turning a blind eye to some pretty horrific shit.
Exactly. I'm cool with communists, but fuck Hexbear and also kind of Lemmygrad for spreading authoritarian propaganda.
It's like how the far right tries to gaslight everyone by trying to change the meaning of the word "nazi". E.g.
Tankies are doing the same with the word "tankie". Even "militant communists" aren't tankies -- unless they cheer on brutal oppression by authoritarian regimes.
i think it's relatively clear and obvious that there needs to be a word that describes regimes which systematically inflict violence upon their own civilians via mechanized artillery and the simps who support these regimes,
and that word is 'tankie'
now, if I had my way, it'd be a different word, which would have served the purpose of freeing up 'tankie' for another purpose (a pejorative for people who brainlessly and uncritically gobble up the bullshit of think-tanks) but that's not the world we live in. In this world, tankie refers to the scenario wherein,
Granted, the present usage of "tankie" also carries implications about a given regime's economic system (which is to imply that the regime's economic system is Centrally Planned) but frankly that's a stupid distinction to make when even capitalist regimes will do this to their own civilians too.
Ironically, the "Russian Speaking Civilians" that Russia claimed they were invading to "protect" have suffered greater casualties directly from Russian-fired munitions than they ever had before, so even though they are actually, in fact, UKRAINIAN civilians that they're murdering, taking them at their word about these victims being Russian civilians would literally make Russia's actions a tankie move.
By my more utilitarian definition of what constitutes tankie behavior, it also includes the actions of the previous Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, who launched artillery strikes against the very same Ukrainian civilians back in 2014 (and subsequently had his ass kicked electorally by Zelenskyy on the basis that Zelenskyy was NOT going to be attacking civilians) so... it stopped being ukrainian policy by the time russia invaded. Russia stopped nothing, and on the contrary resumed needless civilian slaughter.
And there are some witless shitstains around the lemmy fediverse who unironically defend this abject fuckery.
(AKA Tankies)
TL;DR: Yes I concur my friend. The definition and usage of Tankie is indeed quite well established, ACTUALLY.
There's no excuse for it, really. They always get involved with anti-(US)imperialism, and end up having high ranking members of their parties shake hands with reactionaries. You can support lifting sanctions on Iran, Syria, etc. without actually supporting Bashar al-Assad or Holocaust-deniers. They went to far in pursuit of geopolitcs rather than recognizing that one's domestic bourgeosie is the major threat.
Imagine if Trump won 2024 and backed out of NATO. Who cares if Trump (a hardline anti-labor conservative) gets us out of wars if he thinks Joe Biden is a Communist. Of course, anyone to the left of Nick Fuentes would be sent to jail for "anti-patriotic actions" or some shit.
The same excuse of "the enemy of my enemy..." was used when the USSR told the Chinese Communists to just fully join with the Kuomintang after defeating Japan (which were backed by Americans that got rich off the Opium Wars and massacred leftists); or when China under Mao called the USSR social-imperialist and backed the Pol Pot regime.
tankies and extreme conservatives are the same kind of stupid and both deserve mockery
fascist alignment happens on the left - rarely, but it does. And when it does, they are very LOUD, and they unironically believe that ukraine was genociding russians.
It rarely happens because fascists laugh at them before ordering their execution, and they get purged by any serious Communist party. Loud as they are, we all know what happens to them in the end.