I know for a lot of people a tankie is just something that they know it when they see it, however I think that it is important to think about the reason that you define something as being tankie vs just a leftist.
I like libertarian socialists, I might be one myself. I just think that the word tankie gets thrown around a lot. If everyone (I don’t like) is a tankie, no one is.
Let me put it this way; If Bernie is a sexist (and he was called sexist many times from different groups of people), then everyone can be called a sexist, and the word has lost it’s meaning.
It is still a real term, and it is a problem.
It can be thrown around by liberals sometimes but most tankie criticizers ARE leftist in my experience. This place is one of them, and if someone disagrees with basic leftist sentiment us mods will take action.
“More recently it has seen a less specific use of the term” from wiki 2020 (oldest I found, kinda weird)
But yeah, it was just a gut feeling, now “verified” by wiki… Doesn’t give much more information though…
https://web.archive.org/web/20200923023209/https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
I have no idea why you won’t use the current Wikipedia page, but it says:
referring to hardline authoritarian or Marxist–Leninist positions on the left.
Yeah? It was saying it deviated from the original meaning which was supporting the crushing of the Hungarian revolution and Prague spring. And there’s a huge venn diagram between MLs and “actual” tankies.
As for the actual Wikipedia page:
It is commonly used by anti-authoritarian leftists, including anarchists, libertarian socialists, left communists, democratic socialists, and reformists to criticise Leninism, although the term has seen increasing use by liberal and right‐wing factions as well
I’m not going to argue about this anymore. This is not a debate community, and this is your final warning.
