On tankies and online discourse about them
On tankies and online discourse about them
I'm not one to post often. I'm not really one to rant to strangers online often, even. But, after migrating from r*ddit to lemmy, I've had this on my mind and this seemed like the place to vent.
I see discourse about tankies constantly on Lemmy. This struck me as odd. Why are these so called tankies such a threat? Why do I see people calling themselves left-wing and attacking tankies more voraciously than neoliberals and, sometimes, even fascists?
I think I know the answer, just as well as most people who will read this. These are the Zizeks of the world: people who do indeed think in a left-wing oriented way, but fail to recognise that they're also Western to the core and the biases that come with that.
I sincerely care about this much less than the actual reason I'm making this post. That is: why don't these people notice that their talking points, left-oriented as they may seem, always end up supporting US allies or attacking US enemies? I mean, do these people not see that Ukraine winning the war is a boon to the US, regardless of who is "right" in that conflict? Many other such cases, but I think I've made my point, or, rather, my confusion, clear.
That's it. That's the post.
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Yes these radlibs also supported overthrowing Assad and US occupation forces in Syria stealing oil. They supported destroying Libya. They supported the Hong Kong colonialist tantrums. Every single time the rubber meets the road they are on the side of imperialism. Only decades later to they ever admit they were wrong, if we are lucky, and that never seems to change their current day chauvinism
A bit unrelated, but this made me laugh out loud. Maybe this won't make sense to you, but there's this game called Victoria 2 (seems somewhat popular on hexbear) where the people can manifest different ideologies, and then there's the more radical equivalent for each. Like, communists for the socialists, reactionaries for the conservatives etc. They made up what they called anarcho-liberals for balance reasons, in order to make the liberals have their radical versions in-game, and your comment made me think of categorising these so-called anarcho-liberals as radlibs.
Radical Liberals is exactly what they are, it’s a decent way of framing it. More accurate than the radlibs self perception that they are “as left as it gets” and tankies are right wing actually
I think it makes sense in their head that there exists a dichotomy between left and right (restricted to liberal/conservative in a very US-centric way) and that they are on the left of that spectrum. Then, being "as left as can be" is a matter of being more what they consider left, which, indeed, they are.
God, I forgot how annoying I find this phrasing they adopt, especially when you know they haven't done the least bit of reading to inform their opinions.
They only change their minds decades after the fact when its safe to be correct. See the Iraq and Afghan wars.