this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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Tankies are pretty close to fascism, and tend to support regimes like in Russia the same as regimes in China. For them, the motivation doesn't seem as motivated by economics as itvi government structure, since modern Russia is very far from socialist ideals. Basically, anything that goes against US interests is the priority, not economics as it would for your average socialist.
I think you're losing some nuance but yeah "anything that goes against US interests is the priority" is a real problem in some leftist spaces (I was banned from /r/latestagecommunism for suggesting that maybe the things we hear about North Korea aren't just Western lies to discredit a true Communist state.) Of the "big three" I see the most of that on lemmygrad so I don't bother.
But there's a scale of uncritical support and I think people use "tankie" a little too broadly to dismiss people rather than consider the different facets of belief. Online discourse sucks.
Agreed 100%. People also use "Nazi" way too liberally, and it's really off-putting and cheapens the term for actual Nazis.
And there's only so much nuance I'm going to put into a comment, but for "tankie," I generally mean those who support authoritarian regimes because they stand up to the US, not because of their actual ideology. Supporting China, Russia, and NK in the same breath is nonsensical, especially since only one of those is actually somewhat communist and one is explicitly not. I get it, there are a lot of reasons to dislike the US, but that doesn't make Russia and NK "good."
And yeah, online discourse sucks, probably because we self-organize into echo chambers. Reddit was less bad when I joined, but pretty much any reasonably popular SM is problematic now.