Tankies - Tumblr Posts
Tankies aren't Comrades
For context: I recently migrated to Tumblr and Im used to the State of Reddit where of course there where Tankie subs but it wasnt to hard too acually avoid them.
But Holy Fucking Fuck! The State of leftists Tags on this site is so fucking bad. Like you cant browse the Anticapitalist, communist or socialist Tags without seeing people praising the Soviets or China or just blatantly denying Genocides. Of course I am of the opinion that the left would be stronger If it wouldnt constantly start Infights over nothing. BUT defending Authoritarian regimes, denying Genocide, defending Imperialism(as long as it isnt USA), Warcrimes and the Overall supression of the working Class are under no circumstances part of leftist Values and we dont need these people to stand strong against the System.
If you still consider fighting side by side with these people I recommand you take a look at what happend to teh CNT-FAI during the Spanish civil war. Or the Anrchist/libertarian socialists that fought in the Russian Revolution. These people will stab you in the back or put you in to a Camp first chance they get.
If you are part of the LGBTQ community or Religious minority I recommand looking what is currently happenig to the Uyghurs in China or Russias war on the LGBTQ community.
Luckily most of these people are Keyboard warriors and dont engage with the real world.
But under any circumstances, TANKIES ARE NOT YOUR COMRADES!
Tankie mad
Tankies aren't Comrades
For context: I recently migrated to Tumblr and Im used to the State of Reddit where of course there where Tankie subs but it wasnt to hard too acually avoid them.
But Holy Fucking Fuck! The State of leftists Tags on this site is so fucking bad. Like you cant browse the Anticapitalist, communist or socialist Tags without seeing people praising the Soviets or China or just blatantly denying Genocides. Of course I am of the opinion that the left would be stronger If it wouldnt constantly start Infights over nothing. BUT defending Authoritarian regimes, denying Genocide, defending Imperialism(as long as it isnt USA), Warcrimes and the Overall supression of the working Class are under no circumstances part of leftist Values and we dont need these people to stand strong against the System.
If you still consider fighting side by side with these people I recommand you take a look at what happend to teh CNT-FAI during the Spanish civil war. Or the Anrchist/libertarian socialists that fought in the Russian Revolution. These people will stab you in the back or put you in to a Camp first chance they get.
If you are part of the LGBTQ community or Religious minority I recommand looking what is currently happenig to the Uyghurs in China or Russias war on the LGBTQ community.
Luckily most of these people are Keyboard warriors and dont engage with the real world.
But under any circumstances, TANKIES ARE NOT YOUR COMRADES!
Everyone who trots out that "the Soviet Union decriminalized homosexuality in 1917!" factoid as "proof" that the USSR was queer-friendly should be legally obligated to then say how long that lasted
btw, the molotov cocktail got named that by Finns who used them when fighting back against the Soviet Union's imperialist invasion of their country, as a mocking reference to Vyacheslav Molotov's propaganda about said invasion ("we're not bombing them, we're just flying in food deliveries because they're starving!")
so i'm not gonna stop y'all from making molotov cocktail jokes, but you'd better not turn around and post soviet apologia afterwards. respect the cocktail's history
not going to name names but some of y'all are way too comfortable telling slavs and especially slavs with connections to judaism (slavic jews + people like me whose family was jewish but was forced to give up their culture) how we are meant to feel about the ussr
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?
"Ukraine should just surrender to avoid a humanitarian disaster" THE RESPONSIBILITY TO AVOID A HUMANITARIAN DISASTER DOES NOT LIE WITH THE COUNTRY BEING INVADED BY AN EMPIRE THAT DOESN'T WANT IT TO EXIST
And this person's tags only get worse from there. We got victim-blaming, genocide denial, and just blatant misinformation
I feel like the root problem of american tankies' shallow ideals is redirected american exceptionalism. Internet and globalization has caused them to realize that that they're not in fact the best country in the world as school etc has told them. But instead of understanding that they have problems just like the rest of us (though tbf, their ability to cause other nations harm is unmatched) they now flipped to saying that the us must be the worst country in the entire world and the source of all evil. They cannot comprehend that non-americans are perfectly capable of doing the most heinous shit and thus assume that behind every war or conflict lies a us conspiracy and influence - because surely non-americans are just so innocent, naive and primitive and unlike americans lack the cunning to advance their political goals without help by the US. The fact that not only the US government but also its enemies can be vile at the same time and that sometimes they can even be on the good side is completely beyond them which is why they are never truly against imperialism, genocide or opression unless it is done by americans or their allies.
Some tankie bs detection
I saw this post on my dash. The user is blocked now. But just to educate people so that they won't fall for idiotic claims online, here are a couple of facts:
1. The Islamic Republic is not anti imperialist, they're anti USA. The regime is very much in love with Russian imperialism. At this point, Iran is an unofficial russian colony. And by the support of their imperialist father figure they have their small version of imperialism in middle east. Ask Iraq and Lebanon.
2. There's no "safety" when it comes to economy in Iran. The "national sovereignty" is called "those fvckin thieves in power" here. Iran's regime is one of the most corrupt regimes by international index. Rent, nepotism, embezzlement and money laundering are serious issues in Iran. Done only and only by the governors and people in power. Social class is not only a thing, there's a raging gap between rich people and those in poverty. And the gap is getting bigger and bigger by month. If you have connections in government or you are in the government, you'll get richer and richer. Other wise, soon enough you'll be in poverty too. Many families, including mine, who used to be considered middle class, have incomes lower than the poverty threshold now.
About 15% of Iran's economic failure including inflation is on the sanctions. The rest is on the corruption within the regime.
Iran's banking system is also a corrupted organ. The so called Islamic banking is anything but Islamic. The loan interest rate is one of the highest worldwide, 23%, so that often you have to pay back more than twice the money you've received. It's called Riba in Islam and it's Haram. According to the regime themselves, the banking system in European countries, even in the USA, is more Islamic than us. The fact that some of the biggest embezzlement in Iran has been done by bank managers should give you a picture of how they're drinking our blood.
None of this is on USA imperialism. It's all the Islamic Republic.
3. The Islamic Republic doesn't support Palestinians. The regime is extremely racist and anti Arab. I dare you talk about this with an actual Arab. IR don't give two shites about Palestinians lives. The regime is antisemitic. That's what they are. Palestine is just an excuse to attack Israel. In the past 20+ years of my life, living in Iran and dealing with these posers, not once we've been educated about Palestine and Palestinians lives. Everything I know, I've learned from online resources and documentaries make by Palestinians. The regime doesn't talk about Palestinians when they pose as supporters. I'm pretty sure they don't know or care to know anything noteworthy about Palestine, considering my knowledge of the human rights violations there is always more than basiji people of my country, and I don't even know that much. All the regime talks about is how Israel should be eliminated. IR supports a terrorist organization called Hamas, not Palestinians.
4. Let's forget about everything I said so far. I wonder if tankies like the op has any ounce of humanity in them! The regime has been oppressing women, violating every type of human rights and murdering lgbtq people and other-thinkers for the last 40 years. The spectacular environmental disaster in Iran is the direct result of regime's policies and neglect. This is a case of human rights violation since it's ruining people's lives, especially ethnic minorities, like Arab farmers in south.
No religious minority is safe in Iran, be it atheist, Baha'i, Jew, christian, or Sunni Muslim. They commit crime against children, through labor and through war. IRGC have little regards for human lives in general but it descent into no regards at all for ethnic minorities.
They have MASS EXECUTED 30,000 leftists (members of Marxist Communist parties and their supporters) within the first decade of their autocratic rule. It's unbelievably funny to me when foreign leftists support a regime that has executed many of their fellow thinkers and still arrest and torture any left activist in Iran.
To say the reason the 1979 revolution happened was to get rid of western influence and to establish a democratic free independent government is true. But the Islamic Republic is not that result. Don't be fooled.
"Karelia? Idk much about India, but" versus "*while speaking over an LGBT Russian about LGBT Rights in Russia* As an LGBT person from America, Try Me Bitch." For Brain Dead Tankie Take of 2023
I’m not going to start a massive argument on the post that actually brought this on, because it’s late, I’m tired, and I’m worried about sending the wrong message and accidentally alienating some of the people I actually consider friends (something that I’m pretty sure did happen once before in a similar context and which I’m still not over)
But for fuck’s sake
You can assert that there’s no way to reclaim the USAmerican flag for the left. That’s an argument that has merit. You can’t do that while you’re “reclaiming” the hammer and sickle, especially not when you’re from a western country.
It feels like every few months some queer leftist from a post-Soviet country will make a post on here about precisely this - why you shouldn’t be trying to reclaim the hammer and sickle, especially in ways that imply it’s some symbol of LGBT+ liberation - and every single time we get people dismissing everything we say, accusing us of views we categorically do not hold, misrepresenting our words, and basically just going “but I wanna trivialize the symbol of a brutal regime :’(”
What are tankies?
They are the truly insufferable Online Leftists whose one and only political theory is "America is responsible for all the bad things in the world ever and no other country, government, or group of people has any agency at all, this is very progressive of me." If that sounds like a vast oversimplification, it's actually not. They have, at best, a middle school grasp of history, social studies, civics, politics, etc; it's like they learned about American imperialism in ninth grade and can't shut up about it or adapt any more nuanced or complicated view of the world. They are often also big fans of not voting and/or encouraging other left-leaning young people not to vote because in their view, the Democrats are as bad as or actually worse than the Republicans. Needless to say, the Kremlin is extremely vested in continuing to support and promote all of this.
I have likewise written posts about how the American left has a problem with denouncing Russia, since they still have an old-school, unreconstructed view of the USSR as the "triumph of socialism" and which is wrong on about 800 different levels. Tankies likewise tend to subscribe to old-school Marxism or Communism (you know, as if the entire twentieth century didn't happen) and have some jumbled Baby's First Commune idea of how society would work, thus revealing that they actually know nothing about globalism and capitalism while pretending to oppose both. They are often virulently misogynistic and think that race, gender, religion, etc are irrelevant; the only valid struggle is The Class Struggle. Some of them, particularly Glenn Greenwald and that horrible Briahna Joy Gray chick who used to work for Bernie and was a big proponent of "don't vote for Hillary Clinton because SCOTUS isn't important," have gone full-fledged Russian fascist cheerleaders, because Putin hates America, they hate America, and therefore they must be friends! Which, you'll note, is functionally identical to the GOP extreme-right Lunatic Caucus buddying up to Putin for the same reasons.
Anyway: tankies suck, they are wrong about literally everything, they're an insult to every actually progressive or historical-minded person with a basic grasp of reality, and the fact that their rhetoric has pervaded so far into young left-identifying political and social spaces, and is often taken as gospel by the members of those spaces, constantly drives me crazy. So yes.
It would be great if western leftists actually read material from leftists and anarchists in Russia and Ukraine, but that would destroy their narrative that everything is NATO's fault and would lead them to support actual liberatory politics in the region.
The thing is, I have nothing against socialism or communism as a political ideology; trust me, I'm as anti-capitalist as they come. The leftism is really not the problem here.
The problem is when in their leftism, people – Americans, really, and western Europeans – use the ussr as this sort of goal, this complete antithesis to the modern capitalist society, this almost-utopian place to live. They use hammer and sickle symbol, the ussr anthem; sometimes, as a joke, sometimes, not so much.
Not only that clearly shows that they know absolutely nothing about the ussr – it's also spreading russian propaganda, whether it's on purpose or not, which is especially insidious now, when russia is literally committing a genocide.
The ussr wasn't a socialist utopia where everyone is equal. It was a totalitarian dictatorship, responsible for colonisation and genocide of multiple people and cultures. Just like the russian Empire before it. Just like modern russia continues to do now.
For many Eastern European and Central Asian people, hammer and sickle is not just a symbol of a political ideology. It's the symbol, under which people were starved to death, imprisoned or executed for daring to write in their own language; in which cultures were erased, people – forcefully assimilated, stripped of their own national identity.
It's the propaganda of being "the same people, the same nation" that russians love to use; that westerners love to believe, for the sole reason of the oppressed daring to look similar to the oppressor; for the sole reason of Americans being unable to look past their own history and realize oppression comes in many shapes and forms.
By using the ussr symbols in your political movement, you're denying the atrocities commited under that symbol and spreading russian propaganda, whether it's on purpose or not.
It's not "progressive" to wave around a hate symbol.
Do your research.
The Young Communists League (YCL), a ratified club at Victoria University in BC Canada has been harassing Ukranian students and the Ukranian Student Society (USS) club members.
USS has repeatedly reported the behaviour to relevant university bodies and were told to "find middle ground" with their harasses.
You can read their open letter on their IG:
This harassment by the YCL has been ongoing since 2018. Despite repeated reports, university admin have done nothing.
YCL members have approached USS tables and events, taking photos of other students then posting them on their social media with claims the are fascists.
They have also accosted and verbally berated Ukrainian students in person as well at events and vandalized their displays.
Here is just a sample:
The USS has repeatedly clarified they do not wish to see the club banned or disbanded or challenge their ideological reasons, and only want the harassment to stop.
The university has finally released a statement. It basically just says harassment isn't allowed but outlines no specific actions on this matter.
Not only are Ukranian students not feeling safe now, on top of having family and friends experiencing war, this hate has had serious consequences as in the same area the home of a Ukranian priest and his family was set on fire.
This is not an isolated incident either. Similar harassment has been reported at several Canadian universities.
Tankies will bend over backwards to justify every single shitty thing that Russia has done to Ukraine and call anyone that argues with them a Nazi because fundamentally they value stalinist aesthetics and sticking it to the west over shit like basic human decency. They've gone so deep down the anti-western contrarianism rabbit hole that on a long enough timeline I won't be surprised if they start saying that the Ukranian children getting raped by Russian soldiers deserve it because living west of the Dnieper river makes them Nazis by birthright or something.
I wish I could drag these people the the houses in Bucha and Irpin where there are houses with bloody nails in tabletops where women had their hands nailed in place before being raped by Russian soldiers, where you can see rows of blood stains on walls outside of houses where entire families were lined up and shot, and where the guys from my old squad found shipping containers full of corpses with their hands and feet bound. I want to force them to look at these horrors and then demand that they explain to me how any of this is some sort of "Marxist-Leninist praxis" and not just crimes against humanity of the exact same brand the Nazis carried out.
I wish I could take them through Donetsk oblast and show them town after town that lies in ruins. Buildings shredded by autocannon fire, flattened by artillery, and peppered with bullet holes. I wish I could point out all of the still nearly pristine Russian Orthodox churches. Shiny and mostly untouched by the advance of the Russian forces that respect a symbol of their own culture without having a hint of what Christ's teachings were meant to teach them.
I wish I could show them the elderly civilians, struggling to survive in recently liberated areas. Either incapable of leaving, or too stubborn to go. I wish they could see the children. Waving and the soldiers. Smiling when given food. Feeding their families by teaching some of the foreign fighters Ukrainian.
I can't show them any of this. Because they don't care. They aren't interested. The death and suffering here is an abstract concept for them. They don't give a shit about people. Just about the ideology that defines their sense of self. That's theory without praxis. The ironic peak of the hypocrisy of internet tankies.
Fellas is it anticommunist to criticize a far right regime for bombing civilian infrastructure in a city u live in atm
Everyday someone unironically puts people like brendanicus an txttletale on my dash and I would greatly appreciate it if they stopped doing that already.