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”.

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. @[email protected] has it exactly backwards.

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.

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”.

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.