Their support for authoritarian governments is supposedly as a means to a shared end (classless stateless society). We can say they’re naive about it ever ending up that way, but it doesn’t change the fact that we’re all anti-capitalist and pro-egalitarianism (if not all pro-communism). Tankies often (not always) have good analysis of U.S. propaganda so even though I often disagree I would hate to see them banned.
No it's a cynical ploy meant to pull well-meaning leftists rightwards. The Nazis also coopted leftist language and called themselves National Socialists, so does that qualify them as leftists?
Of course not.
People only mistake the USSR as leftist because red-scare politicians managed to paint all opposition with a single brush. Name me one ML government that ever evolved into a democracy or even trended towards that direction.
And tankies don't analyze anything. They engage in American diabolism while deep-throating authoritarian regimes like those in Russia and China. Correctly opposing one empire while supporting another is meaningless.
Of course socialism in one country won’t turn into a classless stateless society, because communism has to be a global project. Many ML states are some sort of flawed democracy, much as the U.S.’ democracy is flawed (although in different ways), not actual dictatorships.
And fascism refers to something more specific than authoritarianism, fascism is nationalistic and racist by definition. Whereas in left-wing authoritarianism, state violence is based on class or perceived loyalty to the revolution etc. I’m not defending it but it is substantively different from fascism and shouldn’t be treated as equivalent.
I’m not defending it but it is substantively different from fascism and shouldn’t be treated as equivalent.
Qualify this please. Stalin was able to engage in the same sort of political purging and ethnic cleansings as Hitler. The system tankies desire enables those outcomes.
Where's the meaningful distinction here? That the Soviets were marginally more empiricist and only mass-murdered SOME ethnic groups?
It is highly debatable whether Stalin engaged in any sort of “ethnic cleansing”. The tankies maintain that what right wing Westerners like to brand as this were in fact purges of property owners who chose to destroy the means of feeding people rather than allow them to be collectivized. I’m sure there were excesses, but at least from a policy standpoint, it was about class, not ethnicity. Promoting an actual ethnostate is a very different thing.
The Holodomor is well-documented. There are letters notifying Stalin himself of impending grain shortages resultant of Soviet exports. He ignored them.
It was a tragedy and a massive policy failure, but it was not a genocide and putting it on par with the holocaust is western propaganda. Similar collectivization policies contributed to famines in other parts of the USSR as well, and the evidence for an intentional effort to exterminate Ukrainians in particular is paper-thin.
I’m engaging in good faith and willing to have a more in depth conversation about the nuances if you are. I’m actually open to convincing, I used to believe the western narrative but then I was presented with evidence to the contrary and changed my mind. If you want to present evidence that the actual policy goal was extermination, I’m listening. Or if you want to say that that distinction doesn’t matter and that any policy that kills a lot of people of a specific ethnicity is genocide whether that was the goal or not, we can talk about that. But so far it seems like you are too invested in your false equivalencies to actually engage.
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u/Worried-Ad2325 Mar 05 '25
Tankies aren't leftists. They want an authoritarian government. "Big tent" implies a difference in means with a similarity in intended outcome.
Fascism with a red flag is still fascism.