Everyone, there has been a lot of miss information about what is a tankie and the ability for the lemmy community to criticize the Chinese government.
I present to you a simple test to see if the person you are talking to is trust worthy.
Ask anyone to say the following
I lemmy user Denounce the terrible treatment Xi Jing Ping has inflicted upon the Uighur Muslims. Slavery and concentration camps in China are wrong and not ok.
The admins of lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml will not say this. Actually they cannot say this because they are probably employed by the Chinese Government and would be put to death if they did.
Thats all and happy posting!
You think so? I think the definition has been the same all the way, a communist fundamentalist with the tank possible alluding to Tiananmen Square.
I present to you a simple philosophical conundrum when it comes to asking people if they are lying…
What if they lie when they say they don’t lie?
Of course admins of the mentioned instances won’t say that, they’re quite outspoken about their political world views. It’s not a big Jack Huges revelation.
Also, I don’t think a political stance has much to say about trustworthiness. If someone says they’ll purge you for having different opinions and then do it? Exactly as promised. 🤷
The tank has nothing to do with Tiananmen, it’s a reference to the Hungarian revolution and Prague uprising of the late 50s and 60s.
I’ve never heard that. Is the tank thing even related to tanks, the combat vehicle? Do you have a link where I can learn more?
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tankie
TIL
I’ve seen quite a lot of it unfortunately >.<. I’ve seen a lot of tankies in threads claim that anyone who calls them out is not a leftist and equate opposing authoritarian “”“communism”“” (none of the states they like to bootlick are or have been actually leftist, imo) with anti-leftism.
The odd liberal actually using tankie as a generic term to attack any leftist doesn’t help, though I contend that most usage is by non-authoritarians and it was created as a term by non-authoritarian leftists. (I don’t consider any authoriatarian ideology to be leftist because for me leftism is about distributing power and less hierarchical organisation and society, so I don’t consider tankies leftist ^.^).
In case you are curious, the tank refers to the 1956 hungarian revolution btw, where the local worker councils (original meaning of the word “soviet”) attempted to seize control back from the USSR, and the USSR killed the people there with tanks.
I disagree with OPs claim of the tankies being CCP employees too. While there are probably a few tankies that actually act directly as CCP propaganda agents, I dont think its likely to be many of them. People are plenty-capable of bootlicking all on their own ;p
And given how offputting they are to other people who would otherwise be attracted to leftism… I’d be more inclined to think they are CIA agents, if I was prone to conspiracy theories, but I generally think people are capable of being bootlickers and holding authoritarian and offputting views without government prompting ;3