Authoritarianism. It’s where the idea of horseshoe theory comes from. There are those who cannot live with ambiguity and seek an answer, even if from a strongman/government. Oppression becomes a tool to enact justice and both sides believe that their justice is correct. Honestly, it reminds me of billionaires when they read the dystopian scifi novels and rather than see the message that we all see, they read it as “oh, well if I build this technology, I’ll do it the right way.”

My brother Anarchist, what’s your plan to subvert the Capitalist dictatorship? Those “tankies” have something.

And American hatred. The Evil Empire must be destroyed and its soldiers citizens submitted to compulsory reeducation.

I think it’s because they reached a point of American hatred (no judgement there) that they support form of resistance against the American world order, even if that resistance is in the form of dictatorships with horrible human rights records (they delude themselves to believe these countries are paradise however).

Thats why a lot of them still lick Russia’s boot, despite being thoroughly capitalist and fascist. Any and all resistance against America.

You get called a Tankie when complaining about human rights violations in the middle east

You then get called Tankie for using Tankie Sources which are the only sources that document these violations

You then get silenced and labeled fetishist of war when posting direct evidence on the grounds of those violations as an alternative

Then you get cold shoulder treatment and a “you deserved it for using Tankie sources” after talking people through all the above you went through

And finally you check out what Tankies are stay in Tankie spaces

Disclaimer, I saw this on All, I’m not subscribed here.

Idk if I count since I don’t self-identify as these things, but I’ve been called a “tankie” and a “Stalinist” for ideas I came to by grappling with historical and material reality and settling on what made the most sense and seemed most consistent with the available evidence. I’ve also tried, for the sake of leftist solidarity and a united front, to understand and do shit along anarchist lines, and I just haven’t gotten it.

Reasons I’ve been called these terms:

• thinking that the anticolonial revolutions in Cuba, Vietnam, and non-occupied Korea were better than the alternative.

• thinking that the Bolsheviks did the best they could under siege and made the right call of attempting to achieve “socialism in one state” rather than laying down arms, giving up, being killed, and “setting the cause of socialism back 200 years” (I’m not exaggerating, an anarchist has told me this).

• thinking it’s not inherently evil to bring the repressive hammer of a state down upon fascists

• supporting the idea of a centralized revolutionary government to marshal a newly socialist state’s defense against the inevitable counterrevolution as opposed to hoping that an entire nation will freely associate its own decentralized military defences.

• being somewhat skeptical of any narrative that serves the Fourth Reich’s information-war interests.

• generally, preferring concrete ideas for solutions over abstract principles and magical thinking.

And far far more.

Tbh just watch BadMouse videos to get a deeper view into tankies minds

Several times in their life a person learns that something they were taught to believe is bullshit. For example, one may buy into the idea that their own country is the best and their enemies on the global stage are pure evil, only to later learn that life is more complicated than that. Thing is, there is a phenomenon I’ve personally witnessed where a person confronted with one of these realizations overcorrects instead of actually learning the lesson about nuance. In the above example, this person would adopt the idea that their country’s enemies are the best and their own country is evil. They still see the world in black and white just as before, but with the roles reversed. They’re so angry about being lied to that they’d uncritically accept the propaganda of said enemy at face value, refusing to consider the idea that they might also be lying because “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.

I’m certainly not an expert on human psychology, but I think this could explain why people end up in these spaces.

One potential driver of it is that ML/Stalinist groups are not too dissimilar from a secular religion; it has a group of people ready to welcome you as a friend and ally as long as you agree to a certain worldview and a very specific reading of history from approved texts that always pose historical Maxrist-Leninists as righteous figures who didn’t really do anything that bad, and if they did, it was for the greater good, and justified.

Those texts can even make a certain amount of sense if you’re disillusioned with the status quo, and distrust western media. It’s also likely extremely comforting to believe that while the western world is fucked up and exploitative, there are at the same time powerful allies elsewhere in the form of the AES states, which in their view are making steady progress towards the promised socialist utopia.

So ML groups can offer a feeling of belonging, friendship, a comforting worldview, and the belief that if we just follow the directions of long dead prophet-like historical figures (like Lenin or Stalin), then we will someday have heaven on earth. These are extremely appealing aspects to someone who may be very lonely, or who may have suffered a severe trauma and may not have their basic needs met (which may also be what leads to some people being attracted to the MAGA cult)

To someone well versed in history and a desire to find multiple viewpoints for a historical event to avoid propaganda bubbles, the true nature of ML/Stalinism and its authoritarianism becomes self-evident. But for those who never went down that path and are in a vulnerable state, a ‘scientific’ cult offering you hope, meaning, and companionship is very easy to fall into, and thus willingly self-delude themselves to attain in-group status.

Just like with normal religions/cults, once they are deep inside it, they are heavily encouraged by the in-group to suspect any outside information that challenges their narratives or isn’t approved by the group, and thus the cognitive dissonance they could create if looked at more objectively can mostly be avoided.

Also similar to religions; a ML member is strongly encouraged not to have doubts about the validity of the approved sources/texts/history. If doubts are voiced, the group will attempt to re-affirm the validity of the texts (keep the faith). But if that fails and the member continues to voice doubts, they are likely to be ejected from the group, which is very traumatic for most people, but especially so if there is no other support groups to lean on. This likely results in many keeping doubts to themselves, or convincing themselves those doubts are just CIA lies, similar to how Christians try to reject their own doubts with the concept of Satan spreading lies to tempt a Christian from their faith through logic or archeology.

What makes you say the term has lost its meaning, OP?

Authoritarian psychology. Roughly 30% of any given population would much prefer to live in a society of strict hierarchies, rules, and consequences where everyone knows their place.

See: the entire career of Bob Altemeyer. Specifically I recommend “The Authoritarians” it’s a free PDF on his website.

I was mauled by a weretank, and now I stalk the night with my pack, hoping not to run into those stupid sexy anarcho-vampires

Back when I was still an anarchist I had a dream about commandeering a tank and using it to dispel a group of neo-Nazis. I relayed this dream to a liberal^[1] I knew, who called my behavior in the dream “tankie”. I thought but didn’t say, “What, so would you have preferred me to just do nothing and let those neo-Nazis go around chanting hate slogans and intimidating immigrants?”

That interaction was pretty formative for me, I think, because after that I pretty much stopped taking the word “tankie” seriously whenever I heard it; because if an anarchist in a dream, breaking the law and acting in an individual capacity to dispel full-on “blood and soil” neo-Nazis, could be called a “tankie” by someone who isn’t even a revolutionary leftist; then surely anyone can be called a tankie by anyone else for any reason. All that “tankie” really seems to mean is “leftist who Does Stuff” — because leaving a mark on the world means pushing your hand into the clay, applying force, one might even say — gasp! — imposing authority. “Have these gentlemen ever seen a” yadda yadda yadda. I also once heard someone else say “better to do no wrong than do something right” to describe the sort of thinking that leads people to call other people “tankies”: it’s a very Christian sort of mindset, you know, just one of a series of words for “leftist I don’t like”.

Now personally, I call leftists I don’t like “yahoos”, and the truth is that every single leftist on the planet is at least a little yahooish: you’re a yahoo if you support China too much; you’re also a yahoo if you support China too little; and I’m a yahoo for not knowing what the right amount of support for China is, even though I am not and will never be in any sort of position where my opinion on China will even remotely matter to the historical development of our planet; and my actual contribution to The Revolution™ will only ever be a very China-unrelated microscopic drop in the bucket.

As for how I abandoned anarchism, which some might say is when I “truly became a tankie”: it just made an intuitive sort of sense to me that history is a series of forces being metaphorically “persistence-hunted” by other forces. So learning about dialectics and historical materialism and whatnot didn’t really feel like abandoning anarchism so much as it felt like a new understanding of strategy, that anarchism / abolition of the state / communism as a historical force is not yet strong enough to win, but it can become strong enough if the currently stronger forces get to duke it out first and become tired enough for abolition of the state to persistence-hunt. Which means that my goal as an actor however small in the historical process should be to hasten that battle.

I was born into a conservative family and every time someone stepped onto an obvious, predictable ideological rake I moved a little bit left.

Everything is a team sport now. So that means you have to drop all critical thought processes and just mega stan for “the other side”. Or something ;)

Nuance is dead, long live Nuance.

They get recruited. It’s like any other cult. They find vulnerable and minority groups, and claim they support them. A good example is the trans community of the US. A large number of them (on Lemmy) are very very brainwashed by the Chinese tanks, yet they would have the same or fewer rights over there. Call them on that and wait for the explosion.

That and the actual numbers of tankies are far less because they employ bots and alt accounts to inflate their numbers.

Example, countless times have I made a comment that triggered a tankie. Then, out of the blue a dozen other accounts will swoop in to back up the tankie. This is propaganda, manipulation, gaslighting, and whatever other words you like. It’s likely this is all controlled by one person, and not a dozen individuals who were not instructed.