Essentially, in its modern context, it’s used against anti-imperialists and those who support existing socialist countries. Those using it as a pejorative have a different view of these countries and thus see “tankies” as defending the indefensible, while “tankies” tend to have more depth of knowledge going against the hegemonic grain.

Both justify investigation, that’s my point. Investigating why the USSR fell is important for any socialist, and thankfully socialist states have learned from it. Likewise, anarchists need to take anarchist history seriously and not just pitch it all on narratives of socialist “betrayal.”

Fantastic lol!

What the fuck? Wow.

To be fair, I have gotten banned for that from instances like Feddit.org, Piefed.social, and Lemmy.blahaj.zone.

Rimu’s crashing out.

“Totalitarian” isn’t a real thing, and neither Russia nor Iran are imperialist. Even if we assumed that you were 100% correct in saying they would be imperialist if they could (which is extremely debatable in and of itself), it remains true that right now they are undermining actual imperialism, which is being perpetuated by and practiced by the west and their vassals exclusively.

The fact that the USSR did fall justifies investigation. Is it intrinsic to socialism, or the specific struggles of the USSR? Much the same way Marxists have to grapple with that reality (and have), so too must anarchists grapple with the fact that they lost out. Either all of the anarchists combined couldn’t overcome the Marxists, which means anarchism is entirely ineffective, or that a majority of them sided with and even joined the Bolsheviks (which is what happened). The former has even less evidence, considering the Marxists were the greatest ally of the Spanish anarchists, and the anarchists in Spain were fairly effective (especially once they adopted more centralized organizing methods).

One thing about anarchism is that it goes against having tight discipline and a unified group. When anarchists joined the Soviets, they tended to drop the anarchist label and just became Marxists. That’s why what remains are usually instances of conflict. Anarchists chose to be integrated into the Red Army, don’t take away their agency.

From the Marxist perspective, anarchists that genuinely wanted to overturn the socialist state and replace it with anarchism were working to restore capitalism, unintentionally of course but from this respect in such a turbulent period they chose not to take chances. Again, though, many anarchists joined not just the Soviets but the Bolsheviks, and later the CPSU.

My goal here is to highlight that people tend to highlight the real conflict while ignoring that this conflict was against the remaining anarchists, and not the anarchists that had joined the Red Army and even the Bolsheviks unless they continued to press for anarchism. This isn’t to say that these anarchists-turned-Bolsheviks were “fake” anarchists, they chose to join the socialists in establishing a socialist state and were helpful in doing so.

🫡

Gay should be uncensored 😤

I’m sure it probably was a joke, but it still helps IMO to answer genuinely for onlookers. And yea, CobraCommander whitewashing pograms (intentionally or not) is why I think it’s still helpful to counter these and take jokes “seriously” when they come from people that may not be joking.

The west started this when they helped overthrow Yanukovych in 2014, causing Donetsk and Luhansk to secede and a decade long civil war. If Russia stops, Donetsk and Luhansk cease to exist. If Ukraine stops, Donetsk and Luhansk get to officially join the Russian Federation like they want, and Kiev gets the majority of Ukraine without throwing countless lives away. Russia isn’t trying to erase Ukraine.

No problem! They were called the “Red Anarchists” by Lenin.

In reality, the majority of anarchists joined the Soviets just fine. A huge number of proletarian and peasant anarchists joined the Red Army and banded together with the rest of the proletariat and peasantry. The remaining anarchists were largely petite bourgeois, bourgeois, etc, and this makes sense, as the new socialist state worked in the interests of the working classes while it continued to work against the petite bourgeoisie. In other words, socialism was liberating for most anarchists, but continued to oppress the minority of anarchists that did not gain from socialism.

The narrative of Marxists stabbing anarchists in the back is meant to split the left. Of course there’s ideological disagreements, but the idea that the anarchists were so weak and ineffective that they got rolled completely makes anarchism entirely unconvincing. The reality is that the majority of anarchists didn’t actually fight back, they fought alongside the Marxists and generally came to Marxism over anarchism. They were fantastic comrades and their victories in defeating the Whites with the rest of the Reds is erased to keep leftist infighting going.

Kinda, but it’s also in a bit of a crisis.

Can’t say I’ve seen MLs be racist. I’ve seen sexism in some bad orgs, and some orgs have been transphobic like the CPGB, but either way, sorry that that’s been your experience. Marxism-Leninism is a liberatory ideology that stands against racism, sexism, and transphobia if one is to actually follow dialectical materialism.

I will say, the anarchists that constantly joke about killing communists and “tankies” is also a problem. It’s a two-way street, and usually arises from being entirely too online and not touching grass.

At the end of the day, I disagree with anarchism. I abandoned my anarchist past and agree with Marxism-Leninism, and that’s only gotten firmer over time. At the same time, I really wish the slapfighting would stop, either have a real conversation or work together.

Nah, all of this is bullshit. You admitted to dehumanizing Russians and used racist tropes against them. Further, again, NATO is the defensive alliance of imperialist countries, they hated the Soviets for arming liberation movements globally.

Originally supporters of using literal tanks to crush student protest. It’s applied to the auth left and refers to those who favour using force against the proletariat to ensure state power is not threatened.

2 major errors here:

1. The Hungarian counter-revolt was fascist in character. Students participated, but literal Nazis let out of prison by the counter-revolt were lynching communists and Jews.

2. “Tankies” support using the state against fascists and capitalists, not the proletariat. Further, the path to eroding the basis of the state is through socialism, therefore a counter-revolt against the socialist state doesn’t weaken state power in general, but socialist state power in particular. It just opens the road for restoration of capitalist state power.

“Tankie” was a pejorative for Marxists that support socialism in real life then as well as now. It originated in the Communist Party of Great Britain. The term was coined because of the British tendency towards silly-sounding insults, and because the Soviet Union sent in the Red Army to stop the western-backed fascist insurrection. This caused a split in the party (as it always does in western orgs).

The Hungarian revolt in 1956 was infested with anti-semitic pograms. MI6 funded, supplied, and trained the Hungarian counter-revolutionaries. These counter-revolutionaries were allied with fascists who were lynching Jewish people and Communists. The Truth About Hungary by Herbert Aptheker heavily relies on citing western sources like the New York Times. Aptheker backs up his claims heavily.

"The special correspondent of the Yugoslav paper, Politika, (Nov. 13, 1956) describing the events of those days, said that the homes of Communists were marked with a white cross and those of Jews with a black cross, to serve as signs for the extermination squads. “There is no longer any room for doubt,” said the Yugoslav reporter, “it is an example of classic Hungarian fascism and of White Terror. The information,” continued this writer, “coming from the provinces tells how in certain places Communists were having their eyes put out, their ears cut off, and that they were being killed in the most terrible ways.”

“But the forces of reaction were rapidly consolidating their power and pushing forward on the top levels, while in the streets the blood of scores of massacred Communists, Jews, and progressives was flowing.”

“Some of the reports reaching Warsaw from Budapest today caused considerable concern. These reports told of massacres of Communists and Jews by what were described as 'Fascist elements’ …” (N.Y. Times, Nov. 1. 1956)

“The evidence is conclusive that the entry of Soviet troops into Budapest stopped the execution of scores, perhaps thousands of Jews, for by the end of October and early November, anti-Semtic pogroms - hallmark of unbridled fascistic terror - were making their appearance, after an absence of some ten years, within Hungary.”

"A correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Maariv (Tel Aviv) reported:

During the uprising a number of former Nazis were released from prison and other former Nazis came to Hungary from Salzburg . . . I met them at the border . . . I saw anti-Semitic posters in Budapest . . . On the walls, street lights, streetcars, you saw inscriptions reading: “Down with Jew Gero!” “Down with Jew Rakosi!” or just simply “down with the Jews!”

Leading rabbinical circles in New York received a cable early in November from corresponding circles in Vienna that “Jewish blood is being shed by the rebels in Hungary.” Very much later-in February, 1957-the World Jewish Congress reported that “anti-Semitic excesses occurred in more than twenty villages and smaller provincial towns during the October-November revolt.” This occurred, according to this very conservative body, because “fascist and anti-Semitic groups had apparently seized the opportunity, presented by the absence of a central authority, to come to the surface.” Many among the Jewish refugees from Hungary, the report continued, had fled from this anti-Semitic pogrom-like atmosphere (N.Y. Times, Feb. 15, 1957). This confirmed the earlier report made by the British Rabbi, R. Pozner, who, after touring refugee camps, declared that “the majority of Jews who left Hungary did so for fear of the Hungarians and not the Russians.” The Paris Jewish newspaper, Naye Presse, asserted that Jewish refugees in France claimed quite generally that Soviet soldiers had saved their lives."

Further, the CIA also backed Hungarian resistance forces:

Prague in 1968 was a similar fascist uprising in both cases there were some elements of progressive protest, but these were greatly overshadowed by the fascist movements. Dubcek wanted to sell out to the IMF, and restore capitalism. The idea that any of this was about “democracy” or “freedom” is silly, it was always about Cold War tactics to destabilize socialism.

TL;DR imagine if the January 6th rioters were armed and trained by foreign governments, started lynching officials and Jewish people, and the US sent in the army to put down the insurrection. The MAGA chuds would claim that it was about “freedom” and “democracy,” but we all know that they just wanted Trump in office.

Nowadays, it’s used by any random anti-communist to refer to anyone that supports socialist states or doesn’t buy into the imperialist narrative about global south countries. It was the ones they call “tankies” that knew the stories of WMD and Saddam’s forces leaving babies outside of incubators were both bullshit to manufacture consent for war, but now that its decades later the anti-communists all suddenly have collective amnesia about their willing participation in spreading the lies of empire to murder hundreds of thousands of people.

Sure, the important bit is whether or not the socialist actually supports existing socialism, or condemns existing socialism and simply likes the idea of socialism. The ones that support real, existing socialism are the ones that get attacked, because it means you stand on the side of something that already exists.