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 :)
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
Personally, I think you’re making an unconvincing argument.
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.
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.
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:
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. @[email protected] has it exactly backwards.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
That’s just a straw man. The “critical” in “critical support” stands for criticism of the states which anti-imperialists support. A guiding principle of Marxist analysis is ruthless criticism of all that exists.
That that’s a “guiding principle” doesn’t even begin to imply that it’s something in which people actually engage.
Now that you mention it though, I’d say that it’s plainly obvious that tankies fail specifically by not engaging in criticism and instead engaging in apologetics. They stubbornly and often even angrily avoid even facing, much less analyzing, the inherent issues with state “communism” and instead dedicate their time and effort to making excuses for and distracting from any and all examples of those inherent issues.
You can join our weekly news megathread! We often analyze what countries like China are doing and criticize it. We criticize Putin, too, obviously (though sometimes the criticism has been that Russia is not aggressive enough so you might find that horrifying).
Here are frequent criticisms of AES states from MLs off the top of my head:
spoiler
I keep hearing that MLs are “campists” who don’t engage in nuance, but the side I typically see lacking nuance is the “anti-authoritarians” who refuse to acknowledge any successes of AES and label anything short of universal condemnation as “apologetics”. That’s actual campism.
You’ve probably heard of the expression “when someone is accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”. There is a similar dynamic going on here: When someone is accustomed to black and white thinking, shades of gray look like whitewashing.
This is disproven as of 2025, though, to the best of my knowledge. This misinfo comes directly from Khruschyov’s secret speech, but with the opening of the Soviet Archives the official agenda of Stalin has been found, and he wasn’t enclosed getting drunk for days as Khruschyov said but actually had hours-long meetings the following day to the invasion. Or maybe you mean something else?
Yeah, someone informed me here.
I didn’t know much about it, but the story I remember reading was something like “the Nazis are invading” and Stalin’s attitude was “shut up that’s impossible; it’s too soon”.
I’m honestly not too surprised that it’s false because it didn’t make much sense. Everyone knew it was inevitable.
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.
What’s an example of a piece of false Russian propaganda that you’ve seen blindly accepted by Western “tankies” (MLs) who watched Russia Today?
Off the top of my head?
The Russian line about Skripal, Litvenenko, or similar.
The idea that Russia and China are playing anything but a highly duplicitious role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Occasional strongly worded letters, some great propaganda, while close strategic and economic ties continue unhindered or even increase.
The idea that Russia is denazifying Ukraine or that Ukraine has a particularly big nazi problem. In the 2019 Ukrainian elections the far right got 2% of the vote. Meanwhile Putin has historically cultivated close ties with Russian fascists, skinheads and hooligans. He is also a fervent admirer of people like Ivan Ilyin, quotes him regularly and helped have his body repatriated to Russia . Ivan Ilyin, who was a self-avowed fascist, openly admired Mussolini and Hitler, and a virulent anti-communist.
Anyway, being a communist/ML and being a tankie aren’t synonymous. Actual communists realise tankies are cosplay communists. Actual communists don’t make excuses for anti-communists. They don’t make excuses for some of the richest people on the planet. They don’t make excuses for oligarchs and robber barons. They don’t side with fascists, because they happen to be anti-western. They don’t make excuses for authoritarian capitalist states.
That’s something tankies do. It’s embarassing.
If anything tankies are useful idiots for the far-right, because their nonsense and lack of critical thought helps undermine serious leftists, socialists and communists.
China’s opposition (or lack of it) to Israel is controversial among MLs. I’m not familiar with the specifics of Russia’s opposition to Israel or what RT has claimed about it, but I’ll grant you that it’s probably similar to China’s dynamic with Israel.
I strongly disagree with the characterization of everything else as false propaganda, however.
I’m inclined to side with people like Jeremy Corbyn, Aaron Maté, and academics like Stephen F. Cohen and David S. G. Goodman who all expressed skepticism over the Skripal poisoning. IIRC, he was supposedly exposed to poison on the doorknob to his home at a time when he wasn’t even in the city.
If the idea that Ukraine has a Nazi problem is Russian propaganda, then most Western media outlets prior to 2022 qualify as Kremlin propagandists. The Neo-Nazi problem is highly regional. Ukraine is a divided country, which is why it entered a civil war in 2014. You referenced the far-right party Svoboda’s mere 2% of the national parliament, however, in the Neo-Nazi stronghold of the western Lviv Oblast, where statues of Stepan Bandera are erected, that share rises to 34%[1]. Furthermore, their influence is outsized, because they’re highly organized. NATO armed and supported the Banderite Azov Battalion beginning in 2005.[2] Today, that group has been upgraded to encompass multiple brigades.[3] Ukraine is the only country in the world with a Neo-Nazi group formally integrated into its federal armed forces. Starting in 2014 under Poroshenko’s coup regime, after massacring leftists in an inferno in Odessa, these fascists began traveling to the east to ethnically cleanse Russian Ukrainians in pogroms.[4] Zelensky ran on a platform of peace with Russia, which is still the dominant position, but was powerless to rein in the NATO-backed far right in his country.
I don’t believe RT has ever claimed that Putin is a communist. Presumably you’ve enumerated his ties to Russian nationalists to suggest that he and the Russian Federation could not possibly be genuinely opposed to Nazis. But even Russian nationalists share the Federation’s immense pride in the victory of the Red Army in the Great Patriotic War, for which the country still holds huge annual parades. A guiding tenant of past and present Nazi ideology is a boiling hatred of Russians, which is why they exterminated 18 million Russian civilians in that world war. Nationalism is characterized by pride in ethnicity and nation, and so nationalists tend to dislike people who consider them subhuman and want to kill them. Thus, opposition to Nazis and concern for the security threat they pose make sense from the perspective of both the left and right within Russia.
Apologists for Ukraine and its endless proxy war on behalf of NATO which is decimating Ukraine’s population and propelling the entire world towards WWIII and thermonuclear brinkmanship are IMO the embarrassing, useful idiots for the far-right and their genocidal ambitions in the Donbass.
https://ukraine-elections.com.ua/en/vybory/result/11 Svoboda translates to “Freedom”, which is how it’s listed here ↩︎
Per Col. Larry Wilkerson ↩︎
https://azovlobby.substack.com/p/how-we-learned-to-stop-worrying-and ↩︎
https://tankie.tube/w/11tj9DFjVqbdfBMzqVSUU1 ↩︎
Because you’re a tankie and unlike actual communists, you people like to make excuses for horrible regimes.
Stephen F. Cohen who is on the record as saying that Putin is not an autocrat, Russia’s invasion of a sovereign country was justified, and disputed evidence on MH17.
Aaron Maté who regularly appears at events hosted and paid for by the Russian government.
Corbyn is on record as saying the evidence points towards Russia, even if he urged caution at the time before the evidence became overwhelming.
Bad faith argument. I didn’t say that. I said tankies make excuses for anti-communists, and authoritarian capitalists. People like Putin and his government, an argument you have just repeatedly proven to be true.
Actual communists don’t make excuses for anti-communists, the far right, and corrupt oligarchs.
Russian propaganda. Ukraine didn’t pose a serious security threat to Russia prior to Russia’s invasion.
Meanwhile in Russia:
I point out that Putin venerates an actual bonafide fascist, has and had ties with actual fascists, and you proceed to make excuses.
Once again, this is not what actual communists do. It’s what cosplay communist tankies and bad faith actors do.
Ukraine didn’t start the war. Certainly not on behalf of NATO. Blatant Russian propaganda.
The war started by Russia is decimating Ukraine’s population, correct.
Threats of nuclear war. Russian propaganda.
Russian propaganda from someone who has just repeatedly made excuses for far right nationalists and anti-communists, while claiming to be a communist.
You’re flailing out of control, name calling, pointing and yelling “Russian propaganda!” at every inconvenient fact, and completely missing the crux of my arguments in general. Just stop.
Look, I already thought he was based. You don’t have to try to convince me further! No, Putin does not hold absolute power over his country. That’s a childish characterization. His intervention in the Ukraine civil war in 2022 was done partially because he was receiving criticism from the Duma for being soft on NATO. None of his problematic qualities change the fact that he has been popularly elected just like Western presidents have (but with a much higher approval rating which makes it even harder to deny). Ukraine effectively ceased to be a sovereign country in 2014 when it was couped by the CIA—it no longer even holds elections. The only investigation done on MH17 concluded the damage was more consistent with a NATO munition. That’s a fact.[1]
Are you one of those liberals who claims Jill Stein is a Russian agent because she had dinner in Russia once lol? Who cares?
I was making a good faith assessment of your argument by recognizing that you weren’t directly answering my request for examples of RT propaganda (which is okay), but rather making the case that Russia is right wing in order to argue that they’re not attempting to denazify Ukraine. After recognizing that crux of your argument, I proceeded to make a detailed case for why that’s irrelevant in this case.
“We should take up arms and shoot those god damned Russians along with their leader. I will rally the entire world as best as I can to turn all of Russia into a field of scorched Earth. We should light them up with nuclear weapons!” —People’s Deputy of Ukraine Yulia Tymoshenko[2] (years before Russia’s military intervention)
Playing “let’s see which country has more photos of Nazis” is not the way to properly assess the cause of this war, but it is also a game Ukraine cannot win. There is a reason why Western news agencies have been instructed to censor far-right symbology from photos taken of the AFU—a problem that does not exist in the Russian army. Listing all of Ukraine’s examples would fill several web pages.
What you call “making excuses” is just the acknowledgement of material reality and causation. Making excuses would be something like denying that Russian nationalists exist, or saying that it’s okay that they exist because of X. I did no such thing. I embraced the complexities and nuance. I lament the capitalist restoration which caused reactionary elements to surge in both Russia and Ukraine.
Tens of thousands of civilians dead before 2022. Just watch the first fifteen minutes of this, I beg you comrade. The West has completely ignored these events. The only party that was seriously interested in ending the civil war through diplomacy was Russia, but their attempts were scuttled at every turn.[3] Diplomatic cables from 2008 released by Wikileaks prove that the US knew that Russia did not want war in Ukraine and would only intervene if NATO kept pushing at their border.[4] The fracturing and weaponization of Ukraine was a plan thirty years in the making that was done largely out in the open.
Russia’s military intervention came to a natural end after just six weeks, when both sides were close to an agreement at Istanbul, but Ukraine’s puppet masters sabotaged the peace deal because they wanted to weaken Russia at the expense of Ukrainian lives.[5] Today, a majority of Ukrainians are willing to conceded territory to end the war, but the corrupt and authoritarian Zelensky regime has ignored the will of the people and suspended elections, opting instead to kidnap people to use as cannon fodder.[6]
The Doomsday Clock is the closest to midnight it has ever been in its 78-year history.[7] That’s a fact. And the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is a liberal Western organization.
https://tankie.tube/w/nWdES2mkxMqzeBqRvAz4ez?start=1h24m32s ↩︎
https://tankie.tube/w/11tj9DFjVqbdfBMzqVSUU1?start=8m4s ↩︎
covertactionmagazine.com/2022/12/19/former-german-chancellor-angela-merkel-admits-that-minsk-peace-agreements-were-part-of-scheme-for-ukraine-to-buy-time-to-prepare-for-war-with-russia/ ↩︎
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW265_a.html ↩︎
https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2022/09/03/west-peace-proposal-ukraine-russia/ ↩︎
https://hexbear.net/comment/6759613 ↩︎
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock#/media/File:Doomsday_Clock_graph.svg ↩︎
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.
What has anyone here said that isn’t true? You are making an assumption that any of us are “trusting everything a nation says,” but that is not what is happening. If you browse any “Tankie” instance you will see plenty of debate and criticism about every communist leader and state, as well as many western sources backing up our claims
As communists we are materialists, we rely on evidence to form our perspectives. Not everyone is going to do this perfectly all the time but generally a communist just wants everyone to be liberated from capitalism and understands that we can only achieve that through evidence based systems, science and pro-social community building. There is no need to “trust everything a nation says,” there is plenty of evidence from all sides to form our opinions.
Nerds 😤
Quoting a different comment from this thread:
That doesn’t sound to me like any kind of good faith argument as much as an excuse to praise the consolidation of power in one person, which I still have trouble understanding how anyone on the fediverse is for - doesn’t it go completely against everything decentralization stands for? How is it so easy to understand the corruption of business billionaires but impossible to understand that a single person in charge of the means of distribution could easily become corrupt and authoritarian?
When I think of a “tankie”, I do not think of a Marxist-Leninist arguing in good faith, I think of the people who praise oppressive regimes simply because they are communist, and hold no place for debating alternatives to or safeguards against giving one corrupt individual complete power over a nation. Authoritarianism is not synonymous to communism (see: fascism) and it seems crazy to me to believe that it does not exist, or that it is somehow good.
Perhaps you are not one of the people falling for everything certain nation-states say; in that case, I wouldn’t consider you a tankie. But those people absolutely do exist.
Bedtimes are authoritarian, your parents are dictators
I’m not going to speak for that user but in general I think they are referring to a few things:
All states are authoritarian. The idea that communists are especially authoritarian to a point that it means they deserve to be attacked and defeated by “non-authoritarian pro-democracy” nations is essentially an ad campaign by the US and their allies to justify their cold war aggression against communists. We are talking about the British and US empires, during the jim crowe era, accusing the USSR and China of being authoritarians and themselves as democratic. You see how this is nonsense right? There is no way that the British empire, a monarchy with an imperialist bourgeoisie was more democratic or less authoritarian than the USSR, even if most of the lies about the USSR were true. The slave holding jim crowe indigenous genocide USA, with its colonial holdings all over the world, was more democratic and less authoritarian? It just can’t be so. The reality is that this word is essentially meaningless, every state has a monopoly on violence and is authoritarian.
None of these people had power consolidated to one person. Stalin, Mao, all of them had a lot of people involved in the decision making process. This is well documented and even admitted by the US in their internal documents about Stalin specifically.
I have been organizing in the real world with leftists of all kinds for over a decade, and unfortunately have seen a bit of the online left in that time as well.
A lot of people call themselves things and don’t even know what they mean.
I think calling them tankies is reductive and ignorant because it is misrepresenting every party involved and only serving to paint well meaning MLs as bad because people who are not actually MLs are being allowed to represent us.
+1 for keeping the convo civil
Maybe it was different at one point, but right now, I think it’s fair to ask not if western governments/media are lying, but how they are lying.
Your comment is on point, but it is your username that makes it perfect
Burn the palaces, baby 😎
Kinda like how when someone finds god, they go hardcore devout-mode, only surprisingly…. More ignorant.