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.
Ironically this gets twisted in the "campist" argument to be like: "tankies are so fixated on hating America they refuse to support the imperial soul harvester even when it's being careful to pinkwash its crimes"
Yep, that's the one I see most often. They think that because Leftists nearly always oppose the west, they think that that is the logic behind it. Kinda like gravity, it's incredibly easy to see that it exists, but to explain it? Very difficult, if you aren't trained in Physics! It becomes a thought-terminating cliche, consistent views must mean they are simple, and simple views must be wrong.
Literally what not reading theory does to someone.
"Tankie" is anti-discourse. It is a thought-terminating cliche that is trotted out because a liberal saw a left critical analysis of geopolitics that challenges their chauvinism and they would like to end the cognitive dissonance.
If you continue to press them, they will usually start using new insults, usually racist ones. They have given up any pretense of having a discussion, now it is just their petty and raw ego lashing out at the person that hurt it. They reach for their tools that help them feel superior.
Nothing like a good old thought-terminating cliche. When I'm talking to people about politics, it jumps out at me clear as day. It really then requires a shift in approach because it singles to you that the doors are locked, and this isn't an invitation for conversation but a declaration of intellectual combat.
a tankie is a person who disagrees with the US State Department
Tankies remind people that it's actually possible to be principled in the face of an oppositional status quo. Maybe it's projection but it has to be pretty embarrassing to see an example of someone who doesn't compromise on their morals
I love saying "tankie and proud" as a response to "anti-tankie" discourse. It really is just a thought-terminating clichรฉ, often used by misguided westerners who truly do not understand class consciousness and materialism, with some of them going as far to paint "tankies" as "reactionaries disguised as leftists," when in actuality, "anti-tankie" sentiment is actually what seems to be more of a reactionary tendency posing as leftist, especially when you know of the horrors supported by prominent "left" anti-communists like Orwell.
I used to hang around anarchist/demsoc spaces a lot more, and in the past, I fell into this trap of painting AES states as being as "evil" as capitalist propaganda wants you to believe they are, and I tried whatever I could do to distance myself from them, their thinkers, and their ideologies. However, in the grand scheme of my life and the path that my material conditions led me down, three things eventually ended up turning me away from that kind of thinking:
- Joining Hexbear: When I got tired of using Reddit, especially since I was fed up of all the bigotry and discrimination that was seeming unavoidable on that site, I joined Hexbear because I was looking for an alternative that was not only accepting of marginalized peoples but more inclined toward leftism as a whole. Though I was still an anarchist when I first joined Hexbear, I quickly came to understand that the people that are commonly demonized as "tankies" are not this evil group of horrid people that many anti-AES leftists paint them as. It's actually been the contrary!
- Reading Theory: Reading Lenin especially helped with me overcoming this, but of course, just gaining an actual better understanding of the theory of Marxism in general was a huge plus as well.
- Connecting With Black Radical Thinkers: This is a bit of an extension of the previous point, but as a black person, I noticed that the common leftist tendency of many black radicals, such as the Black Panthers, was more in alignment with Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, etc. I didn't find black nationalist associations with anarchism to be as common, and I wondered why. Being able to examine the words of thinkers like Kwame Ture, Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon, etc. helped me process the connection of black liberation and how it pertains to radical ideology that I felt like I had a more difficult time grasping when I was mostly hanging around white, western anarchists and demsocs, considering their own ideological understanding of leftism and then tying it to the construct of black liberation. Black liberation was much harder for me to wrap my head around looking at it through a more anarchist lens than it was looking at it through a Marxist lens.
Though I am a former anarchist and a Marxist now, this isn't meant to be a sectarian dig at anarchists. It's just more of me being frustrated with how such "anti-tankie" sentiment has painted genuinely effective leftists as monsters and "fascists in disguise" when they have been nothing but the opposite, and ultimately, they have led the greatest and most broadly applicable implementation of tactics that can actually liberate so many oppressed people, both in the context of class and identity.
I've gone through a very similar story. I've realized that anarchists and tankies are not enemies are really want the same end goals. I'm still an anarchist because I truly do believe that hierarchy is fully avoidable BS but hexbear has worked it's magic on me. I now call myself an anarcho-tankie.
Hexbear introducing me to the concept of critical support was what fully awakened me to the idea that tankies and communists and everyone else aren't the bad guys. Anyone who opposes the US Empire deserves my support, because the US empire is responsible for the most oppression worldwide.
Side note: I find that the stereotype that many online anarchist spaces are largely ignorant, white, suburban teenagers to be largely true. (Source: I was one) However, I don't find this to be a reason to shed the anarchist label because of people like andrewism.
~hope any of this made sense, was just a little brain dump~
I fucking love Andrewism, and I still watch him quite regularly even though I'm now a Marxist.
He's from Trinidad and Tobago, which is where my family comes from. I feel really connected to lefty content from someone like him as someone born to Trinidadian/Tobagonian immigrants who are quite conservative.
I'd never be sectarian, but I'm definitely over the deeply unserious anarchists that'd rather be "anti-authoritarian" edgelords than push for actual effective leftist action. Thankfully, a good deal of anarchists, especially ones you encounter IRL, are not like that.
Libs: "we have critical support at home." Critical support at home: "a vote for a 3rd party is a vote for Trump."
I think another factor here, especially considering a certain tendency of Libs who think they're leftist, is that bourgeois democracy actually works okay for them. Not great, bad enough in fact that it makes anti-capitalism appealing, but they still enjoy a relatively decent amount of social stability and pedestrian civil liberties. Even if we push all the BS propaganda aside, they probably wouldn't enjoy either of those things as much in a developing world AES state.
A stable, secure, prosperous capitalist state doesn't really care if you want to engage in some cute grassroots leftist organizing, community gardens and DIY punk spaces aren't really a serious material threat to them. They enjoy a degree of freedom and even some passing social acceptance because they're ultimately seen as a well meaning if misguided subculture within the broader bourgeois liberal society. They dislike "Tankies", partially because they believe (correctly or not) that life in an AES state unpleasant and also a serious ML Party would be an actual threat to the bourgeois liberal state which could in turn result in a crackdown on them.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. This is something I consider myself, seeing as I live a somewhat okay life and things like revolution and civil war would certainly destabilise that. But I don't know if most people would have this level of self awareness; at least, not on a conscious level. I think the libs you are referring to would not be able to articulate fully that the status quo benefits them and that is enough to warrant their support. No, what bothers me, I think, is that there is no such recognition, only proclamations of submission to greater ideals, such as democracy, freedom and, of course, the very recent and not nearly far-reaching enough LGBTQ rights. In this sense, I almost find fascists more tolerable, because they at least seem self aware and honest about their intentions (when talking to each other, at least).
But I don't know if most people would have this level of self awareness; at least, not on a conscious level. I think the libs you are referring to would not be able to articulate fully that the status quo benefits them and that is enough to warrant their support.
I see them articulate this sentiment a lot, I've seen a lot of "well at least America is a democracy", "I can go to the White House and hold a sign saying 'fuck Biden' unlike with Xi in red fash China", "at least we don't eat rats". Their insistence on believing even the most ludicrous accusations about socialist states is also a demonstration that they want to be convinced the US is better, because it is better for them and the lifestyle they want to lead.
A stable, secure, prosperous capitalist state doesn't really care if you want to engage in some cute grassroots leftist organizing, community gardens and DIY punk spaces aren't really a serious material threat to them.
and adding on to this with in my mind a more critical point, said capitalist state not only doesn't care, but actively benefits from it and has its own arms (both capitalist and intelligence/state) to push it and manipulate it. Anti-capitalism can be sold as a product, made into a consumer identity, alienated from and scrubbed of its content where needed, and reify itself back into capitalist consumerism. An obvious example is the Che shirt phenomenon. Or all those hot topic type shops that sell anarchist or ACAB shirts.
The internet is great at doing this, through funneling anti-capitalist trends into and making and consuming 'anti-capitalist content' and engaging in 'anti-capitalist communities' hosted on ad-supported data-mining social media sites and apps, etc. It railroads expression of "anti-capitalism" into impactless entertainment and cathartic sloganeering which still generates private profit and continues the cycling of capital; all while being able to track and contain and siphon off anti-capitalists and adjacent into status-quo reinforcing pools; and in cases isolate and crush those who differ from these trends, both on a macro scale and on a narrower and even individual scale when "known quantities" change or go dark or what have you (google was originally funded by the CIA to help them identify and track mass informational trends of humanity).
It happens online and in the real world --- an extremely sharp example of this contradiction around the subsumption and reification of anti-establishment politics in the real world is that the original Black Lives Matter protestors in Ferguson were extremely radical and explicitly movement-building for larger structural change. Then rose a Liberal Black Lives Matter Organization as an institution completely separate from the original movement, and financed by all kinds of sketchy donations and billionaire and state dept NGO support, while being explicitly less militant, more liberal and reformist and palatable in its actions and goals, while maintaining some rhetoric around topics that instigated protests but alienated from and scrubbed of the root causes and their solutions. The original protest leaders were vehemently critical of this, and while the media shifted into drumming up facades-of-empty-support and hand-wringing rage and terror on either 'wing' of the corporate-party media landscape of this newly-centered Liberal institutional organization BLM; the original protest leaders were disappeared and murdered including being found shot to death in a burning car with no suspects named by the police to this day.
It's part of the long legacy of the "Agreeable Left" campaigns that the CIA and FBI worked tirelessly on during the original red scare era; including them financing and publishing anarchist anti-communist literature to disrupt communists among the well known COINTELPRO programs and their ilk.
and adding on to this with in my mind a more critical point, said capitalist state not only doesn't care, but actively benefits from it and has its own arms (both capitalist and intelligence/state) to push it and manipulate it. Anti-capitalism can be sold as a product, made into a consumer identity, alienated from and scrubbed of its content where needed, and reify itself back into capitalist consumerism
The only reason life in AES is difficult historically is due to imperialist war and sanctions, and those revolutions happening in already poor countries.
If there were a revolution in the imperial core, there would be nobody to wage sanction wars against them and they would start with all of the worldโs wealth at their fingertips.
A communist revolution wouldnโt even be bad for them, but they canโt see it because of their chauvinism. They deep down believe that developing poor AES are that way because communism made them poor, which is ahistorical and really just an excuse to obfuscate their own nationโs colonialism and wealth extraction.
GOOD post, comrade
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?
A combination of the american civic religion, american exceptionalism, their own material conditions, recognition of their position as the secondary (or perhaps tertiary) benefactors of imperialism, and a century of anti-communist propaganda have left them believing the following:
- The US may SOMETIMES do evil, but that is either by mistake or the cost of doing business, and it is ultimately a net progressive force for "democracy" and "freedom" aka "good"
- No matter how bad the US is, every AES is/was worse
- Every enemy of the US cannot be trusted, so they can only consume
propagandamedia produced by the US and its allies - The US is actually a democracy, and policy can be influenced by voters
Whenever you bring up things that force them to address the dissonance between one of these and reality, they use the the other three to deflect. If you continue to press further, they either disengage, call you a tankie, or start the long slow path to tankiedom themselves.
I used to believe in all 4 of those things. It is painful when the illusion is shattered, so many avoid it.
At most, I can gently suggest that we're actually the bad guys, not the good guys, and people are starting to agree with me.
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?
There's no doubt they recognize this. What's happening is they still truly believe the US is a lesser evil vis a vis it's enemies (namely China, Russia, Iran, DPRK, Venezuela, Cuba). They think that while the US is a "flawed democracy," its enemies are hopeless authoritarian dystopias, and if they push back too hard against the US, "authoritarianism" will spread across the globe like barbarian hordes. These are the same people who will argue "real communism has never been tried."
They are illiterate chauvanists, basically. Unreformed idealists who cast judgment based on what would be right in principle instead of material reality.
Tankies refuse to support the holocaust even though we're laughing maniacally and talking about how joyful we are while advocating for a more lethal military.
Tankies refuse to give tanks to Ukrainian Nazis.
Tankies don't have an internal map of
racescountries capable of self-determination with all of the non-white countries listed as bad unless they're militarily occupied by a good white country.Tankies read books written about non-white self-determination that I equate with Mein Kampf instead of books written for children and US State Department propaganda.
They're digusting. Just as bad as the non-white leader I'm going to depict with a 1910s racial stereotype.
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.
They only change their minds decades after the fact when its safe to be correct. See the Iraq and Afghan wars.
I do appreciate the growing awareness that the crux of being anti-tankie is being pro-western. It's a nationalist brainworm at its core. It's a claim that only white westerners know what socialism is and how to accomplish it.
It's quite literally a claim that every socialist movement throughout history did everything incorrect and all they really needed was someone with a big white brain. Ask any of these folks if they truly believe hundreds of millions of Chinese people truly don't know what socialism is. They'll always say the Chinese are brainwashed or can't actually voice their opinions out of fear. Yeah, ok.
I read the title and saw an outside handle and rubbed my hands together for a feast of bad opinions, but then I noticed that it was posted here and your opinions are good, actually. So I'm at a bit of a loss now
I usually "hang out" (lurk) more on hexbear than on my home instance, but the folks at lemmy.eco.br are usually cool as well
Ragebait except good
@ShimmeringKoi @Emanuel The difference is that lemmy.eco.br is not a western instance, but Brazilian instead.
It's chauvinism. They've hit a point where they can't deny that the West is awful, but it would hurt their white pride to admit that anyone else might be better.
And I do mean white pride. White supremacy is the beating heart of liberalism. Cut open liberalism, and you'll expose it.
To accept that your world view has been informed, for the better part of your entire life, by lies and slanderous claims, and that every defense you've put up for your world view has also been a defense of the atrocities that have been hidden from you, is likely one of the hardest hills to climb for almost every person looking for answers. I think most people never see that hill. I think for a subsection of people who do see the hill, they were brought there by someone who has seen the other side of it.
The more you have gained from these lies and slander, the better your position in life is, the harder it would be to walk up that hill. All of those material benefits you've had since birth drag you backwards, like the chains of Jacob Marley. For most of those people, they become what you describe, chauvinists. They become chauvinists because it would require them to admit they were wrong, It would require them to admit that their gains are ill-gotten, and it would require them to see their fellow citizens as worth saving.
The lies told to us are powerful, intergenerational lies. They are like a curse cast on the whole population. Breaking that curse requires starring into the deepest, darkest pit of horrors. Horrors that would make Hitler blush. The reaction to these horrors changes you, and you either turn away, tightening the grip of the curse, or you break free.
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?
Most do realise this. Most are oriented this way. Most are aware of which side they are on. They are liberals who use radical language to appear more left than they actually are. The appearance of leftism you sometimes see in them is worn as a fashion accessory because somewhere deep down they do know their positions are immoral so they wear the left as a fashion to feel more moral than they actually are.
As for the phrase "tankie". It is a tool wielded by different groups against anyone to their left. Anarchists use it against communists. Socdems use it against all revolutionaries, anarchist or communists, and liberals use it against all of these groups. It is a tool used identically to "woke" by reactionaries, which is deployed against everyone to the left of the reactionary clique in order to shut down the brains of everyone that considers themselves part of that clique. Once you deploy the word "woke" everyone is to not listen to anything the woke person says, so as to not actually learn anything or do critical thought. This is the same for the word tankie, it is deployed to prevent people listening to others and thusly to not learn anything. The two factions of liberalism both use the same tactics.
The goal the tool has is to prevent social political development.
Most do realise this. Most are oriented this way.
I do know most people are aware of this tactic. But I feel I also encounter people who are similar to ultras in the sense that they defy everyone, be it the US, China, Russia or whatever, but end up inadvertently (I think) focusing their attacks on opponents of the US, be they communists or not.
I think I know a lib when I see one. I am referring to people who say "Fuck the CCP, fuck the US" and truly believe in what they are saying, and then end up online attacking mostly the former out of some gullible principle.
Maybe you're right and the people I'm describing don't exist, or are so few in number as to be irrelevant. But a lib makes more sense to me than these people.
I do know most people are aware of this tactic. But I feel I also encounter people who are similar to ultras in the sense that they defy everyone, be it the US, China, Russia or whatever, but end up inadvertently (I think) focusing their attacks on opponents of the US, be they communists or not.
Ahh I see where you're coming from.
This is nationalism. It is unaddressed deeply rooted nationalism that these people have not yet exorcised from themselves.
When you remove the nationalism from them successfully and create internationalists, this behaviour stops and they become proper leftists. We do not have very sophisticated movements for deprogramming nationalism and creating internationalist mindsets at the current time, it just sorta happens. If we could build solid methods of achieving this outcome we could very rapidly turn all of this type of person.
A "tankie" is a leftist that has actually reads the theory and understands dialectics.
Good post.
Tankies
Tankies [1] donโt usually believe that Stalin or Mao โdid nothing wrongโ, although many do use that phrase for effect (this is the internet, remember). We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the bourgeois politicians who are typically put forward as role models (Washington? Jefferson? JFK? Jimmy Carter?), and that they havenโt been judged according to the same standard as those bourgeois politicians. People call this โwhataboutismโ [2], but the claim โStalin was a monsterโ is implicitly a comparative claim meaning โStalin was qualitatively different from and worse than e.g. Churchill,โ and I think the opposite is the case. If people are going to make veiled comparisons, us tankies have the right to answer with open ones.
To defend someone from an unfair attack you donโt have to deify them, you just have to notice that theyโre being unfairly attacked. This is unquestionably the case for Stalin and Mao, who have been unjustly demonized more than any other heads of state in history. Tankies understand that there is a reason for this: the Cold War, in which the US spent countless billions of dollars trying to undermine and destroy socialism [3], specifically Marxist-Leninist states. Many western leftists think that all this money and energy had no substantial effect on their opinions, but this seems extremely naive. We all grew up in ideological/media environments shaped profoundly by the Cold War, which is why Cold War anticommunist ideas about the Soviets being monsters are so pervasive a dogma (in the West).
The reason we โdefend authoritarian dictatorsโ is because we want to defend the accomplishments of really existing socialism, and other peopleโs false or exaggerated beliefs about those โdictatorsโ almost always get in the way โ itโs not tankies but normies [4] who commit the synecdoche of reducing all of really existing socialism to Stalin and Mao. Those accomplishments include raising standards of living, achieving unprecedented income equality, massive gains in womenโs rights and the position of women vis-a-vis men, defeating the Nazis, raising life expectancy, ending illiteracy, putting an end to periodic famines, inspiring and providing material aid to decolonizing movements (e.g. Vietnam, China, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Indonesia), which scared the West into conceding civil rights and the welfare state. These were greater strides in the direction of abolishing capitalism than any other society has ever made. These are the gains that are so important to insist on, against the CIA/Trotskyist/ultraleft consensus that the Soviet Union was basically an evil empire and Stalin a deranged butcher.
There are two approaches one can take to people who say โsocialism = Stalin = badโ: you can try to break the first leg of the equation or the second. Trotskyists take the first option; theyโve had the blessing of the academy, foundation and CIA money for their publishing outfits, and controlled the narrative in the West for the better part of the last century. But they havenโt managed to make a successful revolution anywhere in all that time. Recently, socialism has been gaining in popularityโฆ and so have Marxism-Leninism and support for Stalin and Mao. Thus itโs not the case that socialism can only gain ground in the West by throwing really existing socialism and socialist leaders under the bus.
The thing is, delinking socialism from Stalin also means delinking it from the Soviet Union, disavowing everything thatโs been done under the name of socialism as โStalinistโ. The โsocialismโ that results from this procedure is defined as grassroots, bottom-up, democratic, non-bureaucratic, nonviolent, non-hierarchicalโฆ in other words, perfect. So whenever real revolutionaries (say, for example, the Naxals in India) do things imperfectly they are cast out of โsocialismโ and labeled โStalinistsโ. This is clearly an example of respectability politics run amok. Tankies believe that this failure of solidarity, along with the utopian ideas that the revolution can win without any kind of serious conflict or without party discipline, are more significant problems for the left than is โauthoritarianismโ (see Engels for more on this last point). We believe that understanding the problems faced by Stalin and Mao helps us understand problems generic to socialism, that any successful socialism will have to face sooner or later. This is much more instructive and useful than just painting nicer and nicer pictures of socialism while the world gets worse and worse.
Itโs extremely unconvincing to say โSure it was horrible last time, but next time itโll be differentโ. Trotskyists and ultraleftists compensate by prettying up their picture of socialism and picking more obscure (usually short-lived) experiments to uphold as the real deal. But this just gives ammunition to those who say โSocialism doesnโt workโ or โSocialism is a utopian fantasyโ. And lurking behind the whole conversation is Stalin, who for the average Westerner represents the unadvisability of trying to radically change the world at all. No matter how much you insist that your thing isnโt Stalinist, the specter of Stalin is still going to affect how people think about (any form of) socialism โ tankies have decided that there is no getting around the problem of addressing Stalinโs legacy. That legacy, as it stands, at least in Western public opinion (they feel differently about him in other parts of the world), is largely the product of Cold War propaganda.
And shouldnโt we expect capitalists to smear socialists, especially effective socialists? Shouldnโt we expect to hear made up horror stories about really existing socialism to try and deter us from trying to overthrow our own capitalist governments? Think of how the media treats antifa. Think of WMDs in Iraq, think of how concentrated media ownership is, think of the regularity with which the CIA gets involved in Hollywood productions, think of the entirety of dirty tricks employed by the West during the Cold War (starting with the invasion of the Soviet Union immediately after the October Revolution by nearly every Western power), and then tell me they wouldnโt lie about Stalin. Robert Conquest was IRD [5]. Gareth Jones worked for the Rockefeller Institute, the Chrysler Foundation and Standard Oil and was buddies with Heinz and Hitler. Solzhenitsyn was a virulently antisemitic fiction writer. Everything we know about the power of media and suggestion indicates that the anticommunist and anti-Stalin consensus could easily have been manufactured irrespective of the facts โ couple that with an appreciation for how legitimately terrified the ruling classes of the West were by the Russian and Chinese revolutions and you have means and motive.
Anyway, the basic point is that socialist revolution is neither easy (as the Trotskyists and ultraleftists would have it) nor impossible (as the liberals and conservatives would have it), but hard. It will require dedication and sacrifice and it wonโt be won in a day. Tankies are those people who think the millions of communists who fought and died for socialism in the twentieth century werenโt evil, dupes, or wasting their time, but people to whom we owe a great deal and who can still teach us a lot.
Or, to put it another way: socialism has powerful enemies. Those enemies donโt care how you feel about Marx or Makhno or Deleuze or communism in the abstract, they care about your feelings towards FARC, the Naxals, Cuba, DPRK, etc. They care about your position with respect to states and contenders-for-statehood, and how likely you are to try and emulate them. They are not worried about the molecular and the rhizomatic because they know that those things can be brought back into line by the application of force. Itโs their monopoly on force that they are primarily concerned to protect. When you desert real socialism in favor of ideal socialism, the kind that never took up arms against anybody, youโre doing them a favor.
whataboutism 
Finally got around to reading this. And, yeah, as always, what I thought has always been thought of before, and better written also
Good post! Generally, these people critique leftists from the perspective of an Ultraleftist, but give the absolute most benefit of the doubt for liberalism. They haven't confronted their internal biases nearly as much as they need to. It's like finding a secret door, but thinking there are no more secret doors beyond it!
Phanstasmagoria 2: A game about a little office door and nothing else
Phantasmagoria 2 has epic BDSM blue curtains and don't look any deeper into it, or else you're some underwater basket weaving Humanities major
transforming oneself is difficult. The default mode we all have is what's raised into us. Tradition inherited via parents, and schooling. It's often trauma or something as un-anchoring as psychedelic experience that makes people crack and change themselves, and this process is so uneven and often incomplete because change is random and unsupported except by the whims of the altered ego.
There are very few unchallenging ways to honestly reject framing you've been trained to see as your only window to reality, and because of this it's easy for westerners to find themselves unable to fully break from the frames that define their understanding of their relationship to their society, government, the world, whatever.
I remember the day after I tripped for the first time because it really was that meme of like "wow so all of this is a fucking lie". I had to go to school and I was laughing at the things a teacher said [they were dealing with political material] because it was just fucking wrong. Presumptions about the way things are that the average liberal or conservative takes as sacrosanct, just all fucking nonsense. But I lacked the context and knowlege to develop this further at the time. A break was made, and it would take almost two decades to widen things further properly. An early lesson was that it didn't feel safe to fully leave the frame we're trained to accept as authoritative reality, because those frames determine social pecking order, they determine the jobs you can get. If you can't at least fake the faith in the dominant frames society lets you have, you'll be quickly ousted for being too weird. It's not even conscious for most folks, these mechanisms operate subconsciously to exclude difference of thinking and approach.
Even a good education is unlikely to, by itself, let you break free. Especially if you're educated in a prestige or elite context, you're being shaped to be the next generation of demonic overlord - the education you get is structured so that you're invested in the existing power structure - these places strictly do NOT educate in a manner that lets you go your own way intellectually.
So everyone from Qualified Experts to the average person on the street is operating on a framework that directly serves the interest of the country and the ruling elite.
I think people get fucked up because they take this to be conspiratorial, when social engineering is a field that's been in the process of being born for centuries now, a lot of the key players don't even know what they're doing, and that's by design. The structure is designed to maintain and propagate itself.
It's easy to break from it when you're the frontier of empire- you live with the politics of empire as a victim, as a deeply exploited resource.
People in the core are just as exploited, on the whole, but as beneficiaries with narrow education and limited interest and ability to educate themselves (on the whole) - they will not understand just what's happening.
I'm 34, and I have a love of learning. I literally get dopamine from study and acquiring new knowledge. How many freaks like me are there, really? Most people have trauma around education, or fully accepted it as a means to an end: there is rarely ever any love for the process of discovery and the requisite change that comes with it. Most people my age are figuring out how to live with themselves as they are, they're not trying to shake shit loose. My experience as a trans woman probably has more to do with my plasticity compared to my peers, but at no point are any of the individual circumstances that made me able to, finally, accept a more fundamental reality about my relationship to the world, to empire; things that are automatically salvific.
I'm a freakshow. We are freakshow. This is difficult work and most people who have the tools to wake up, never will, because the conditioning is strong, and breaking it requires the awareness and will to do so that the average ego just won't abide.
Something you said that really resonated with me is, besides the experience with psychedelics, the way that people will treat you as a conspiracy theorist for deviating from the "correct" frame. I think this is a major barrier for escaping the neoliberal narrative, as it is very natural for us to try to fit in, to not be weird, to be accepted. Nobody wants, at face value, to be the loony commie and ostracised.
I got called a tankie for not supporting PMCs, if you ever figure out an answer lmk.
Private military companies or professional-managerial class?
I'm glad I'm not the only one who asks this question in their head when PMC is written.
Both ๐ but Private military companies in actuality.
People who leave behind terrible world views often don't leave behind the thinking. For example, consider protestant Christianity. A lot of atheists in the US were originally protestants. But we've all seen the internet atheist Islamophobes turn into little Richard Dawkins muppets. They have identified their religious beliefs as being wrong, but they haven't stopped thinking in terms of protestant work ethic, prosperity gospel, homophobia, and so on.
I think the anti-tankie crowd is the same way. They've correctly identified capitalism and the US is wrong, but they still believe in American exceptionalism, Cold War propaganda, white supremacy, misogyny, and all the other ways of thinking. If they had a socialist way of thinking (i.e. being against unjust hierarchies, using material analysis, etc.), they would stop with the anti-tankie rhetoric.
People who leave behind terrible world views often don't leave behind the thinking. For example, consider protestant Christianity. A lot of atheists in the US were originally protestants. But we've all seen the internet atheist Islamophobes turn into little Richard Dawkins muppets. They have identified their religious beliefs as being wrong, but they haven't stopped thinking in terms of protestant work ethic, prosperity gospel, homophobia, and so on.
and the good ones are still VOTE libs like... eh y'all don't care about some irrelevant bloggers i stopped following years ago
People who leave behind terrible world views often don't leave behind the thinking.
I think the anti-tankie crowd sees tankies as being this. They see chuds saying shit like "Hitler did nothing wrong" and denying the holocaust, then see MLs (a good portion of whom in the west are former chuds) denying the alleged communist crimes like the "Holodomor" and Uyghur genocide, and defending infamous communist leaders like Stalin and Mao (whom the libs see as being at least as bad Hitler, if not moreso), and they understandably come to the conclusion that tankies are red fash and not to be trusted.
These days liberals say "tankie" to refer to โ not the original definition of people who supported sending tanks to crush capitalist rallies in Hungary โ but anyone who supports any successful socialist project or past or ongoing armed resistance.
This means they would absolutely call even widely-agreed-upon heroes like Mandela a tankie if he was alive now โ because he worked with the USSR and Cuba, bombed railways, etc. If libs aren't calling you a tankie, you need to step up your game.
I think that trying to empathize, even with fools, is a good exercise. In this case, I think their railing makes sense if you understand that, from their perspective, we look like Nazis claiming to be leftists (which is part of why sometimes they just flat-out resort to calling us Nazis), and we support several states that they would also describe in such a way. Imagine if a group like that actually existed! You and I would find it pretty vile and seek to attack it as a perverting, corrupting, discrediting force to the left. In reality, the closest we get are the patsoc/"maga communist" types, who are irrelevant and so are only occasionally talked about.
I do agree that they hold these beliefs because they ultimately have not challenged many of their views that they inherited from the western mainstream. They're ultimately still adopting views that are compatible with neoliberalism, even if they "reject" neoliberalism in favor of what they find to be radical leftism. If those views represented a serious opposition to neoliberalism, they would find such views just as repellent as ours, because they would be just as villified.
Iโll take a slightly different take and argue itโs a coping mechanism. They see an ascendent neo-fascism that theyโre powerless to stop, with the liberal institutions discarding any pretense of caring about what their constituents want and are at best indifferent to the neo-fascism, at worst willing to ally with it to protect their interests (see: Macron). So they look for something easy to feel like theyโre getting a W and, oh look hereโs this loud online but completely powerless in real politics hard left. So they can act like โcontaining the tankie contagionโ is them doing their part to preserve โdemocracy.โ
Huh, maybe. I do see the tendency for them to try to dunk on "tankies" and feel good about it, though I would argue this is normal for any group of people trying to fit in with each other.
I find it silly, though, that they feel it's important and has real material impact in the world to wear the Ukrainian flag on their handles and other such shenanigans. Like they're speaking truth to power, only there's no power that represses them.
lemmy puts the fed in federated
Since you are from lemmy.eco.br you probably are very familiar with the critique people make of Lula in the Ukrainian war
That is: why donโt these people notice that their talking points, left-oriented as they may seem, always end up supporting US allies or attacking US enemies?
They never notice this, fuck Putin but why do they want Brazil to lose our good relationship with Russia, which is beneficial to our economy, in order to do the "morality right thing" and support Ukraine?
It always comes back to colonialism.
There's the western supremacists who defend their colonialist project, and their enemy: the anti-colonial movement, who gets labelled as tankie, commies, barbarian hordes, undemocratic, or whatever else because they refuse to be ruled by the racist hegemon.