I have a friend who literally doesn’t get it. He identifies very strongly as a “leftist”. I don’t know that he identifies with any more specific label, but he’s got a big primitivist streak. (As do I, really.) He’s the one who inspired me to read Ishmael. No way he could be considered a Tankie in the slightest.
We were talking about politics in the U.S. and about how right-wingers, despite major ideological differences, tend to band together to… for instance… elect people like Trump. Just by virtue of being right-wing, they can work to accomplish common goals. The left, meanwhile, cancels each other and themselves constantly and can’t really manage to get any kind of momentum as a result.
He kindof implied that the ideological differences between leftists aren’t consequential and we should all be working together.
And I was like “well… tankies, though, right?” And he’s like “what’s a tankie?”
We’ve been talking about it a lot. I’ve shared lots of examples of tankies defending DPRK and Stalin and stuff. And I think he’s still skeptical that such people even exist, somehow.
It’s not that he’s a tankie who doesn’t get why authoritarianism is a losing strategy. He’s an anarchist who so can’t understand or identify with the tankie mindset that he thinks they’re some tiny group of inconsequential nuts so worthy of being ignored as to not even require a footnote in any discussion of left-wing solidarity.
It’s not that he’s a tankie who doesn’t get why authoritarianism is a losing strategy. He’s an anarchist who so can’t understand or identify with the tankie mindset that he thinks they’re some tiny group of inconsequential nuts so worthy of being ignored as to not even require a footnote in any discussion of left-wing solidarity.
tbf, if you were talking in the context of the US, tankies are a tiny group of inconsequential nuts who aren’t even a discussion in left-wing coalitions in this country.
The issue comes with how quickly the rot can grow… like the Bolsheviks going from single-digit percentage support at the beginning of the anti-Tsarist provisional government in February 1917, to couping the socialist-aligned provisional government in October 1917. And that’s often a harder thing to wrap one’s head around.
the issue with these guys isn’t that they are going to take power
the issue with them is their memes break containment because they post ten thousand times per second 24 hours per day, and all of their memes encourage losing on purpose and encouraging others to lose on purpose
if you are mad about this, name a political thing you personally succeeded at lol
I wonder how many Bolsheviks were monarchists and fascists simply expressing their desire for oppressive hierarchy in communist terms. They didn’t all die or join the white army, and if reactionaries were suppressed many of them would find the closest tolerated ideology.
Authoritarianism and totalitarianism are against the dictionary definition of leftism. There are countless political parties that pretend to be for democracy and even put it in their name but promote far-right politics, such as the FvD in the Netherlands or the LDPR in Russia. I don’t know why anyone would accept that tankies are leftist.
I have a friend who literally doesn’t get it. He identifies very strongly as a “leftist”. I don’t know that he identifies with any more specific label, but he’s got a big primitivist streak. (As do I, really.) He’s the one who inspired me to read Ishmael. No way he could be considered a Tankie in the slightest.
We were talking about politics in the U.S. and about how right-wingers, despite major ideological differences, tend to band together to… for instance… elect people like Trump. Just by virtue of being right-wing, they can work to accomplish common goals. The left, meanwhile, cancels each other and themselves constantly and can’t really manage to get any kind of momentum as a result.
He kindof implied that the ideological differences between leftists aren’t consequential and we should all be working together.
And I was like “well… tankies, though, right?” And he’s like “what’s a tankie?”
We’ve been talking about it a lot. I’ve shared lots of examples of tankies defending DPRK and Stalin and stuff. And I think he’s still skeptical that such people even exist, somehow.
It’s not that he’s a tankie who doesn’t get why authoritarianism is a losing strategy. He’s an anarchist who so can’t understand or identify with the tankie mindset that he thinks they’re some tiny group of inconsequential nuts so worthy of being ignored as to not even require a footnote in any discussion of left-wing solidarity.
I envy him, sometimes.
tbf, if you were talking in the context of the US, tankies are a tiny group of inconsequential nuts who aren’t even a discussion in left-wing coalitions in this country.
The issue comes with how quickly the rot can grow… like the Bolsheviks going from single-digit percentage support at the beginning of the anti-Tsarist provisional government in February 1917, to couping the socialist-aligned provisional government in October 1917. And that’s often a harder thing to wrap one’s head around.
the issue with these guys isn’t that they are going to take power
the issue with them is their memes break containment because they post ten thousand times per second 24 hours per day, and all of their memes encourage losing on purpose and encouraging others to lose on purpose
if you are mad about this, name a political thing you personally succeeded at lol
I wonder how many Bolsheviks were monarchists and fascists simply expressing their desire for oppressive hierarchy in communist terms. They didn’t all die or join the white army, and if reactionaries were suppressed many of them would find the closest tolerated ideology.
Authoritarianism and totalitarianism are against the dictionary definition of leftism. There are countless political parties that pretend to be for democracy and even put it in their name but promote far-right politics, such as the FvD in the Netherlands or the LDPR in Russia. I don’t know why anyone would accept that tankies are leftist.