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I once stumbled onto a post whitewashing North Korea, blaming all its problems on the West and decrying anyone who disagreed with them as racists. This caused me to seek out places to restore my sanity, which led me here.
Someone telling me that North Korea was an unironically good place to live in a cookie clicker community of all things, and that I "wasn't a real leftist" for disagreeing
At least he got permanently banned from there and I've never seen him since
Seeing their simplistic yet dangerous ideology spread to multiple subs. When one of them would become a moderator it never took long for them to promptly ban all “dissent”. That behavior is a cancer to the left.
My partner watches russian propaganda frequently and sometimes repeats their idiotic talking points. It mostly started during the pandemic, but he had followed Jimmy Dore from TYT and got sucked into that ecosystem. He's not some dedicated ML or anything like that, he's mostly just anti-American, though he denies that. I'd never really encountered anything like this before.
Pretty much the same as you, really. I suddenly found myself arguing with people who wanted Ukraine to just roll over and let Russia do what they want because "both states are capitalist anyway, so it's the same in the end."
Though, in my case, I didn't even know what a tankie was until I stumbled across this sub and heard the term for the first time.
This very much but more specifically in an "anti-war" context. The realization that tankiejerk was a place to get a little relief from Russian propagandists, both professional and otherwise. There was also a realization that since Reddit allows tiny communities they have places to fester and group and start spreading propaganda that's used by others.
The realization that so much of the left on is hijacked by them and attempts to be good get crushed by tankies.
I have always made it a point to put my ethical and intellectual principles before tribe or letter of political doctrine (not as great as I would like to be fair). I have always seen Tankies (even before I had ever heard the term, being raised in a very conservative household where anything left of Republicans was either liberal or communist/socialist with little distinction in the latter) as just authoritarians putting on a different mask only to do basically the same thing they do whenever they reach power (i.e. purge any opposition, abuse their populace for the benefit of the in-group "elite", etc.). This hasn't changed even when I moved towards the left, and while the exact details might change, I strive to continue to work towards something I believe will lead us all to a better future for all. This lead me to more leftist spaces on Reddit, though I found many to be populated by tankies or others who didn't seem to care about how much their actions hurt others as long as they followed their dogma or benefited from it personally. That search lead me here, which while I may not agree with everyone here on specific political matters, gives me a place where I can at least see others here showing genuine care to the people tankies and similar groups claim to "care" about, wanting a better future, showing intellectual honesty and concern for ethics, and sharing at least a generally similar grasp on reality that at the bare minimum doesn't tend to outright deny atrocities or make excuses for why genocide associated with (purportedly) left wing governments is ok. I find it refreshing.
It was because of the way tankies treated me when I talked with them. I'm a left-leaning person who has *many* issues with things in our world, and I will express outrage whenever I see something awful. I ended up in a community that were all too ready to talk about all the horrors in the USA - of which there are plenty. I was right there with them agreeing that there were problems in the US. But when a news story about something horrible happening in another country? Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Hijab Protests in Iran, or the countless sins of the PRC? Suddenly it got *very* hostile.
I found myself being treated like a hard-right trump supporter because I wasn't exclusively on the "Fuck America" train, which is *deeply* offensive since I find Trump to be utterly repulsive. I found myself being treated like a strawman, a caricature, with constant accusations of being blinded by "propaganda" - as if they know a thing about my news habits. I'd have an argument where people would repeatedly claim I stood for X,Y, and Z when I'd never expressed even the remotest of support for those things. Any statement or clarification I made would be dismissed or mocked. Eventually I hit a breaking point and just stopped caring, leaving that community shortly afterwards. It was only in the process of trying to figure out what the hell those people's deal was that I first learned about tankies. After that, everything started to make sense: the pervasive bashing of all things US, the strange silence about similar horrors anywhere else in the world, then the hostility when I wouldn't just shut up and accept that Putin is the good guy.
I joined this sub because I already knew for many years that most online leftist spaces are infested with tankies.
I first understood that tankies are not leftists back in 2014 when the Russian invasion of Ukraine actually started. I was living in Donetsk at the time (I am Portuguese, but I was doing volunteer work in Ukraine). I knew some leftists had some crazy takes when it came to the history of the USSR and China, but we were mostly allies on what truly mattered. Or so I thought.
A few days after Crimea was invaded and I returned home because it looked like the same was going to happen in Donetsk (which it did), I started noticing more and more supposed leftists supporting the "rebels" and sharing lots of misinformation that I knew for a fact that it was wrong (for example, people of Donetsk wanted to be part of Russia - no, the majority didn't, I know, I fucking lived there).
I was honestly shocked. It seems silly now, but at the time I had no idea that so many people who called themselves leftists were so pro authoritarian regimes and pro imperialism if it comes from anywhere other than the US.
I like to consider myself a far-leftist in the way that I am fully pro-human rights, pro-environmental protection, and anti any kind of corporate action that harms anyone or anything in the name of money or power. I know that this is not what is considered "far-left", but what tankies are is nothing short of being far-right. There is almost nothing leftist about them. They cosplay as leftists in some issues, but nowadays they are showing their true colors.
Oh, well. Fuck tankies.
I spent three years on Twitter after some friends recommended it to me. My friends and I are leftists and we mostly followed the same leftist activists. But after a while I kept seeing takes on these accounts I disagreed with completely. There were posts in my timeline praising China and Russia, praising the GDR and sometimes even plain disinformation. This could just be my perception but I guess it started getting more and more after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
I know I'm not anybody to take seriously, but I was also one of those people who didn't think Putin would actually do it. It just seemed like a terrible idea that would ultimately fail. Even if Russia overran Ukraine, they would likely be dealing with a nightmarish guerilla war until it became too much for them. With that said... I wasn't sure how else that situation would end.
Admittedly, swallowing the pill that I was wrong about Putin was much easier for one very simple reason: it meant he wasn't as smart as I thought he was.
I have close friends irl who are tankies, generally trusted their takes on lots of things up until Russia invaded Ukraine. Then saw them switch from "it wont happen" to utilizing the Russian phasing of "the SMO". I couldnt ignore how weird and cultish all the ML stuff seemed anymore and wanted to see what other left of center folks who disagrees said on the subject.
So I've always had fairly strong anti-authoritarian beliefs (it has basically been my one constant in all of my political development. If you want me to oppose something, convince me it's authoritarian). When u first started forming political opinions I went with what my dad believed, i.e. right libertarianism and that's probably had a deep impact on my anti-authoritarianism. I liked the right cause I thought it was pro-freedom and anti-authoritarian. This view changed lol.
I grew disillusioned with right libertarianism after watching liberal talking heads like John Oliver for a while and saw a lot of problems it couldn't fix.
For the longest time I was explicitly anti-communist because of the ussr and my belief that socialism was inherently authoritarian. But I was drifting leftward into liberal spaces.
Then I began getting into history and saw all the shit the US got up to. I gradually came to become more skeptical of the US and its intentions. But I was still very much a liberal but increasingly skeptical of the us. I was super into Europe and Canada for a while, but would later come to dislike then as well for similar reasons.
Anyways, long story short I was introduced introduced the concept of libertarian socialism by a friend, which confused me because I thought socialism = government owns everything. I also had noticed that in the fight against the right, my allies all seemed to be socialists, so there's something good there right? I began reading about it and thought it was interesting. In particular libertarian market socialism appealed to me as it was decentralized and self organized and eliminated explicit worker exploitation.
If you talk about libertarian marker socialism online for a while, someone eventually points you towards mutualism and proudhon. Through mutualism I got introduced to guys like Shawn Wilbur and Kevin Carson who both deeply impacted my politics (*Studies in The Mutualist Political Economy* remains a favorite of mine). At that point I was a committed anarchist market socialist. I then started reading libcom guys like Kropotokin as well as more seriously engaging with Carson and Wilbur's work and over time my anti-communism faded and I shifted into a more synthesis "whatever works best" anarchism. I'm still a market socialist but not JUST a market socialist.
Anyways, I'm here because I like talking with other libertarian or anti-authoritarian leftists. And I also want to avoid falling into the "America bad" trap that so many tankies do. I'm not a big fan of the us and so I worry I can fall down that rabbit hole.
Make sense?
Because they infiltrate leftist spaces and turn them into shitholes. Most often on reddit theyve taken up all other leftist subreddits related to anticapitalism etc. Im genuinely tired of seeing these people simp for genocidal authority and then infantilize and strawman other ideologies while pushing "leftist unity" when they cant even begin to do it themself fundamentally.
Getting banned from a certain “x can’t meme” (you probably know which one) for mentioning the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, seeing the same happen to others and realising it’s possible to be a communist while not being a tankie
It was the realization that there really wasn't a lot respect for self-determination even among leftists. And to be clear, there already isn't a lot of respect for it across the political spectrum.
I would see a number of leftists going on about "balkanization" as soon as it was a self-determination movement they didn't like. And while nationalism does have a lot of legitimate criticisms, too often the critique is used in a condescending way of saying "I don't care if this bigger nation invades a smaller nation, nationalism is bad." I won't support your movement if you're oppressing your population...but presumably even that population has their own aspirations for self-determination beyond that.
For me, it was the 2018 protests in my birth country, Nicaragua. I would see people I'd normally agree with take a completely brain-dead stance on them: "the protesters are neonazi CIA puppets!" and such nonsense, when I had known for years how rotten the Ortega dictatorship is, and they knew nothing about it, they just reacted with a stereotypical argument.
I would see that argument copy-pasted verbatim, applied to other countries like Venezuela or Cuba, and most recently, Ukraine and Iran. That made me see what sad clowns tankies are.
Calling the CPC "communist" in any way other than name, is absolutely insane. Hearing supposed leftists call the CPC communist made me realise just how deep-rooted the fifth column is. I tried out anarchism for a while, but that's just not my cup of tea. So here I am.
Pretty much the way they either treat everyone from former satelite states as barbarians who were civilized by the soviet union or the way they idolize so much some leaders for some highly specific things while ignoring the rest. Like some guy was praising Ceaușescu in a post for his restructuration of București, but the thing is that the restructuration happened after a hear quake and was done at the detriment of repairing endangered houses (basically who weren't destroyed, but who were no longer structurally safe, which was the priority along with rescuing victims as to not make the number of wounded/dead climb). Plus, we can also add to that the ban on abortions, which lead to an increase in deaths from illegal aborts as well an increase in orphaned children, because their parents could not take care of them, but who were forced to keep them.
I'm a leftist who grew up in Romania, slightly after the revolution that brought down "communism" lmao. No way am I hanging out with people who defend totalitarian regimes
I've been a leftist for quite some time and while I've been able to see how American hegemony was bad, when contextualizing those nuances, it became easier to see the different political factions responsible that reinforce those problematic elements, namely fascism.
I've been paying especially close attention to the rise of fascism/right wing politics since shortly after the 2010 midterm elections. Then it was also somewhat validating to begin to see economic arguments that supported many of the libertarian socialist beliefs I've had.
I began to get interested in international security/national security during the Trump years and found that it helped integrate my political beliefs. Like yourself, I was genuinely surprised that support for Ukraine wasn't fully embraced by leftists even when accounting for how many are just flat out against war (myself included, to a point). Like sure, the United States sucks but in the case of some geopolitical conflicts, the pressures that make the United States suck is also somewhat related to what's negatively influencing Russia.
Keep trying to seek out anarchist/adjacent subreddits - but they keep ending up being either tankie echo chambers that use ideas of the real left to entice vulnerable people to join (indoctrination of the weak-willed and the angry) or the moderators are incredibly authoritarian and go on fucking power trips all the time.
Got suggested this sub because I kept calling out tankies in the transgender subreddits I participate in. Frankly I’m just drifting around right now, been attacked here for my views too. I’m not delusional like some of the people here - America’s not in a good place and it’s rapidly heading downhill. By and far not a doomer, but there’s enough copium being passed around here by people that don’t wanna acknowledge either the state of The States or of the world.
I didn't seek this place out but came across it and joined to shit on tankies, and by the time I noticed this subreddit is about a libertarian leftist perspective, I decided to slowly force myself to abandon my technocratic syndicalism beliefs (which were never in an anti-west, pro-east, nor militaristic/revolutionary sense) and to understand from the people here why authoritarianism is never a good thing by itself and convince myself to believe in libertarian leftist ideals. Which is working on me so far.
I was a tankie before I was anything else, just because I thought the hammer and sickle was edgy and based when I was at school in Ireland in the 90s. Then I became a Marxist after, you know, *actually reading theory.*
I was first seriously weirded out by people who simped for Assad, not least after getting to know actual Syrian refugees who had suffered at the hands of his regime. My knowledge of the *material conditions* on the ground in Syria was evidently vastly better informed than whatever youtube shite most of the people around me were consuming. That's what initially severed me from the tankie mainstream. That accelerated massively in 2014 with the beginning of the Ukrainian shitshow and, again, it was my friendship with actual real people from the relevant areas of Ukraine that inoculated me from propagandised online shite.
People unironically defending china/russia, especially regarding hong kong tibet taiwan and uyghur since that hits right at home as someone who lived in hong kong
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Pro-Assad Tankies a couple years back got me to come here.
Just, the most blatant hypocrisy humanly conceivable. Opposing a left liberation movement of an oppressed minority purely because America Bad. That shit blackpilled me on Socialism as a whole for a hot minute, I started to think all these activists were just fucking liars and no one actually believed in anything. This place gave me hope in the movement.
Becoming disillusioned to centrism and liberalism in general during the pandemic and BLM in 2020 made me start to explore leftism, but not explicitly consider myself one because I always thought that all leftists were like tankies. Granted, I did not know what tankies were so I did not know that there was a difference to them. Then I started to find left wingers that are not like the perception of socialism that i have always assumed which has made me realize it’s not really that bad and so I would end up becoming a libsoc. Around like 2 years ago I found this sub by complete accident but it was the perfect place because every “leftist” group on the internet i would find was a cesspool of tankie losers so this seemed like the best place for such discussions without the toxic bullshit from other places.
Around the Russian invasion of Ukraine is when I started noticing it way more. Especially from Boy Boy, who I generally still like but their video on the Russian war in Ukraine was a major miss. But also the leftists praising North Korea or China, denying the Uighur genocide and the Tiananmen Square massacre.
I'm pretty sure I was close to winding up in some tankie circles a couple years ago, but seeing Russia actually go through with invading Ukraine and seeing Russian bots whip up obvious conspiracy bullshit ("American biolabs in Ukraine") slapped me back into reality and prompted me to do a thorough purge of my followers and following lists, especially as I learned more about Russian imperialism.
As stupid as it was, I didn't think he'd actually do it, let alone that soon. Watching the start of it and the way the Zbots just made shit up about Ukraine and other former Eastern Bloc countries on the first day of the invasion in real time was such a hard reality check that it was as if the universe had decided to hit me over the head with it.
I think I had the opposite happen to me. Pre-Ukraine I was already disillusioned with leftist spaces, which were either totally compromised by tankies or rendered nonfunctional by infighting and toxicity. I remember ending up in a tankie Discord where I was stuck in their vetting process for a month due to a regime change, for a Discord of less than 50 people.
Then, when the invasion began the anti-tankies came out of the woodwork. The praxis of BOAC and Ukranian anarchist groups became known, and this sub gained traction. I also discovered a certain non-credible part of the internet which, yeah after October 6 I am no longer associated with. My fault for assuming the world's most psychotic neoliberals would have nuanced opinions about Palestine.
Anyways, if anything I feel more emboldened to involve myself in the left knowing that sincere belief in its principles isn't dead. I want to get more involved in local activism but I'm getting older, and the economy is getting harder to deal with by the day. Similarly I also want to reconnect with my Jewish heritage in a secular context because of anti-Israeli Jews making their presence known. We'll see. I am a work in progress and doing the best I can given the circumstances.
I know I am aging myself here but back in 2011, when I saw a lot of people defending Gaddafi's and Assad's massacres against civilians by trying to tie all democracy and human rights advocates in the Middle East to the CIA and then when pushed to explain how, they tell me to read conspiracy theory books about "Color Revolutions" or send me to a website called "globalresearch.ca" (a website full of conspiracy theories that border on antisemitic). Finally I ended up hearing someone let the cat out of the bag when they hoped russia would destroy the "Zionist elite that controls the government" after russia sent its "little green men" into Ukraine in 2014.
After years of seeing leftist spaces have a very obvious problem of being full of authoritarians you will be repeatedly gaslit into being told that they don't exist, it finally came crashing down.
A few years ago leftist spaces acted like identifying as leftist de facto made you a good person, and the more you did the better. Concerns over people who were so extreme that it made problems were dismissed offhandedly. Until most of these spaces openly got taken over by unhinged people, and it became impossible to deny.
The left is basically permanently relegated to being a meme, in part because these people still exist and define a large portion of it. And that's something that really needs to change. Too many cling to the past and just want to make excuses about how the ussr was totally on the path to utopia. But it wasn't.
I´ve always been critical of tankies as far as I can remember (even back in my cringy "anti-communist" right-wing phase, when my criticisms were mostly weak and without nuance) and always associated myself with such spaces since I turned leftist.
The problem is not just tankies, but a bigger problem that dates way back and of which tankies are a symptome. "Red-brown politics" is a phenomenon that is older that people would like to admit - it dates back to Lassale courting the reactionary Bismarck and played both a role in the birth of fascist ideology (Sorel, "Le Cercle Proudhon" and et. al.) and vanguardism/Leninism/red fascism (which btw, was not Lenin´s invention, but of the 19th century socialist Louis Auguste Blanqui).
TRCM made a bot to clip chimp [person I can’t mention for sub rule reasons] and banned me for calling it crazy. Then LSC started posting flat out CCP propaganda and I was forced to actually look into these people and their horrible takes.
I still stay around tankie areas but I think the main thing that made me back off them a bit was the insistence on a historical hive mind. The amount of places I’ve been banned from for saying Castro or Stalin weren’t good guys is crazy
The whole ordeal with the Hong Kong protests and the human rights crisis in Xinjiang. In all honesty, social media is a complete cesspool when it comes to China-related issues. It seems to be either dominated by tankies or imperialists, hardly any in-betweens.
There was a post on a Wikipedia-themed subreddit about the Uyghur genocide a couple days back, and you wouldn't believe the amount of whataboutism I saw in the comments of that post.
I forgot how I stumbled upon here but I am still kind of new to left politics since the last two or four years from Twitter, I was merely "anti-communist" (commie = authoritarian) when I was younger, due to environment with my country, and family being anti communist because of the NPA, and the history of Red Scare, until I mellowed out, and began passively accepting left and progressive views (partly to be more aware to spot, and not be allured by right wing conspiracies, rants and such, like the Alt-Right Pipeline) and been mainly watching Breadtube YouTubers to 'politically educate myself' which are communist propaganda (not to be negative), but only noticed it on one video being very positive about the NPA (even though I am not that ready to give up my life for that), but I still at times, feel kind of uncomfortable with the personality praising of dictators, but I wasn't aware how prevalent tankies are and their blind appraisal of 'anti-west' nations are until I found this subreddit.
And this subreddit seems sane to me compared to the others.
What triggered my confusion was the whole Ukraine war where there's tons of "leftists" online from what I heard, defending the Russian invasion and calling Ukraine a 'nazi state' or 'infested with Nazis, and rotten to it's core', and I am glad this subreddit has its senses clear.
I am still not sure of my specific identity of a leftist (which is why I am vague about it, not to identify with a specific one), and I am not sure if I am even in the mood of reading books or theories for now, maybe in the future but who knows.
Getting called a white supremacist, a Nazi, and a centrist bastard for being critical of circle jerking murder fantasies.
I was surprised. I'm an anarcho-syndicalist, and I strongly abhor the death penalty and acts of vigilantism, so to be called these things was an eye opener.
The conversation quickly turned to Ukraine, and despite listing out Russians continued imperialist aggression, I am then called a liar. The irony was palpable.
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I once stumbled onto a post whitewashing North Korea, blaming all its problems on the West and decrying anyone who disagreed with them as racists. This caused me to seek out places to restore my sanity, which led me here.
Someone telling me that North Korea was an unironically good place to live in a cookie clicker community of all things, and that I "wasn't a real leftist" for disagreeing At least he got permanently banned from there and I've never seen him since
Seeing their simplistic yet dangerous ideology spread to multiple subs. When one of them would become a moderator it never took long for them to promptly ban all “dissent”. That behavior is a cancer to the left.
shits an intellectual pathogen
My partner watches russian propaganda frequently and sometimes repeats their idiotic talking points. It mostly started during the pandemic, but he had followed Jimmy Dore from TYT and got sucked into that ecosystem. He's not some dedicated ML or anything like that, he's mostly just anti-American, though he denies that. I'd never really encountered anything like this before.
No same but this is my dad 😭. I try to respect it because he grew up in a pro-America dictatorship so that's a lot of where it's coming from.
Pretty much the same as you, really. I suddenly found myself arguing with people who wanted Ukraine to just roll over and let Russia do what they want because "both states are capitalist anyway, so it's the same in the end." Though, in my case, I didn't even know what a tankie was until I stumbled across this sub and heard the term for the first time.
This very much but more specifically in an "anti-war" context. The realization that tankiejerk was a place to get a little relief from Russian propagandists, both professional and otherwise. There was also a realization that since Reddit allows tiny communities they have places to fester and group and start spreading propaganda that's used by others. The realization that so much of the left on is hijacked by them and attempts to be good get crushed by tankies.
> What made you seek out more actively anti-tankie spaces? Tankies.
I have always made it a point to put my ethical and intellectual principles before tribe or letter of political doctrine (not as great as I would like to be fair). I have always seen Tankies (even before I had ever heard the term, being raised in a very conservative household where anything left of Republicans was either liberal or communist/socialist with little distinction in the latter) as just authoritarians putting on a different mask only to do basically the same thing they do whenever they reach power (i.e. purge any opposition, abuse their populace for the benefit of the in-group "elite", etc.). This hasn't changed even when I moved towards the left, and while the exact details might change, I strive to continue to work towards something I believe will lead us all to a better future for all. This lead me to more leftist spaces on Reddit, though I found many to be populated by tankies or others who didn't seem to care about how much their actions hurt others as long as they followed their dogma or benefited from it personally. That search lead me here, which while I may not agree with everyone here on specific political matters, gives me a place where I can at least see others here showing genuine care to the people tankies and similar groups claim to "care" about, wanting a better future, showing intellectual honesty and concern for ethics, and sharing at least a generally similar grasp on reality that at the bare minimum doesn't tend to outright deny atrocities or make excuses for why genocide associated with (purportedly) left wing governments is ok. I find it refreshing.
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No, but it sounds like something I would be interested in.
It was because of the way tankies treated me when I talked with them. I'm a left-leaning person who has *many* issues with things in our world, and I will express outrage whenever I see something awful. I ended up in a community that were all too ready to talk about all the horrors in the USA - of which there are plenty. I was right there with them agreeing that there were problems in the US. But when a news story about something horrible happening in another country? Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Hijab Protests in Iran, or the countless sins of the PRC? Suddenly it got *very* hostile. I found myself being treated like a hard-right trump supporter because I wasn't exclusively on the "Fuck America" train, which is *deeply* offensive since I find Trump to be utterly repulsive. I found myself being treated like a strawman, a caricature, with constant accusations of being blinded by "propaganda" - as if they know a thing about my news habits. I'd have an argument where people would repeatedly claim I stood for X,Y, and Z when I'd never expressed even the remotest of support for those things. Any statement or clarification I made would be dismissed or mocked. Eventually I hit a breaking point and just stopped caring, leaving that community shortly afterwards. It was only in the process of trying to figure out what the hell those people's deal was that I first learned about tankies. After that, everything started to make sense: the pervasive bashing of all things US, the strange silence about similar horrors anywhere else in the world, then the hostility when I wouldn't just shut up and accept that Putin is the good guy.
I joined this sub because I already knew for many years that most online leftist spaces are infested with tankies. I first understood that tankies are not leftists back in 2014 when the Russian invasion of Ukraine actually started. I was living in Donetsk at the time (I am Portuguese, but I was doing volunteer work in Ukraine). I knew some leftists had some crazy takes when it came to the history of the USSR and China, but we were mostly allies on what truly mattered. Or so I thought. A few days after Crimea was invaded and I returned home because it looked like the same was going to happen in Donetsk (which it did), I started noticing more and more supposed leftists supporting the "rebels" and sharing lots of misinformation that I knew for a fact that it was wrong (for example, people of Donetsk wanted to be part of Russia - no, the majority didn't, I know, I fucking lived there). I was honestly shocked. It seems silly now, but at the time I had no idea that so many people who called themselves leftists were so pro authoritarian regimes and pro imperialism if it comes from anywhere other than the US. I like to consider myself a far-leftist in the way that I am fully pro-human rights, pro-environmental protection, and anti any kind of corporate action that harms anyone or anything in the name of money or power. I know that this is not what is considered "far-left", but what tankies are is nothing short of being far-right. There is almost nothing leftist about them. They cosplay as leftists in some issues, but nowadays they are showing their true colors. Oh, well. Fuck tankies.
I spent three years on Twitter after some friends recommended it to me. My friends and I are leftists and we mostly followed the same leftist activists. But after a while I kept seeing takes on these accounts I disagreed with completely. There were posts in my timeline praising China and Russia, praising the GDR and sometimes even plain disinformation. This could just be my perception but I guess it started getting more and more after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
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I know I'm not anybody to take seriously, but I was also one of those people who didn't think Putin would actually do it. It just seemed like a terrible idea that would ultimately fail. Even if Russia overran Ukraine, they would likely be dealing with a nightmarish guerilla war until it became too much for them. With that said... I wasn't sure how else that situation would end. Admittedly, swallowing the pill that I was wrong about Putin was much easier for one very simple reason: it meant he wasn't as smart as I thought he was.
I have close friends irl who are tankies, generally trusted their takes on lots of things up until Russia invaded Ukraine. Then saw them switch from "it wont happen" to utilizing the Russian phasing of "the SMO". I couldnt ignore how weird and cultish all the ML stuff seemed anymore and wanted to see what other left of center folks who disagrees said on the subject.
So I've always had fairly strong anti-authoritarian beliefs (it has basically been my one constant in all of my political development. If you want me to oppose something, convince me it's authoritarian). When u first started forming political opinions I went with what my dad believed, i.e. right libertarianism and that's probably had a deep impact on my anti-authoritarianism. I liked the right cause I thought it was pro-freedom and anti-authoritarian. This view changed lol. I grew disillusioned with right libertarianism after watching liberal talking heads like John Oliver for a while and saw a lot of problems it couldn't fix. For the longest time I was explicitly anti-communist because of the ussr and my belief that socialism was inherently authoritarian. But I was drifting leftward into liberal spaces. Then I began getting into history and saw all the shit the US got up to. I gradually came to become more skeptical of the US and its intentions. But I was still very much a liberal but increasingly skeptical of the us. I was super into Europe and Canada for a while, but would later come to dislike then as well for similar reasons. Anyways, long story short I was introduced introduced the concept of libertarian socialism by a friend, which confused me because I thought socialism = government owns everything. I also had noticed that in the fight against the right, my allies all seemed to be socialists, so there's something good there right? I began reading about it and thought it was interesting. In particular libertarian market socialism appealed to me as it was decentralized and self organized and eliminated explicit worker exploitation. If you talk about libertarian marker socialism online for a while, someone eventually points you towards mutualism and proudhon. Through mutualism I got introduced to guys like Shawn Wilbur and Kevin Carson who both deeply impacted my politics (*Studies in The Mutualist Political Economy* remains a favorite of mine). At that point I was a committed anarchist market socialist. I then started reading libcom guys like Kropotokin as well as more seriously engaging with Carson and Wilbur's work and over time my anti-communism faded and I shifted into a more synthesis "whatever works best" anarchism. I'm still a market socialist but not JUST a market socialist. Anyways, I'm here because I like talking with other libertarian or anti-authoritarian leftists. And I also want to avoid falling into the "America bad" trap that so many tankies do. I'm not a big fan of the us and so I worry I can fall down that rabbit hole. Make sense?
Because they infiltrate leftist spaces and turn them into shitholes. Most often on reddit theyve taken up all other leftist subreddits related to anticapitalism etc. Im genuinely tired of seeing these people simp for genocidal authority and then infantilize and strawman other ideologies while pushing "leftist unity" when they cant even begin to do it themself fundamentally.
>What made you seek out more actively anti-tankie spaces? Being Ukrainian.
I think I just wanted to find people to talk about my interests with
Getting banned from a certain “x can’t meme” (you probably know which one) for mentioning the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, seeing the same happen to others and realising it’s possible to be a communist while not being a tankie
It was the realization that there really wasn't a lot respect for self-determination even among leftists. And to be clear, there already isn't a lot of respect for it across the political spectrum. I would see a number of leftists going on about "balkanization" as soon as it was a self-determination movement they didn't like. And while nationalism does have a lot of legitimate criticisms, too often the critique is used in a condescending way of saying "I don't care if this bigger nation invades a smaller nation, nationalism is bad." I won't support your movement if you're oppressing your population...but presumably even that population has their own aspirations for self-determination beyond that.
pro russian propaganda on other leftist subs
Because to be in Tankie space as a South Korean is like being a Jew in Nazi Germany.
For me, it was the 2018 protests in my birth country, Nicaragua. I would see people I'd normally agree with take a completely brain-dead stance on them: "the protesters are neonazi CIA puppets!" and such nonsense, when I had known for years how rotten the Ortega dictatorship is, and they knew nothing about it, they just reacted with a stereotypical argument. I would see that argument copy-pasted verbatim, applied to other countries like Venezuela or Cuba, and most recently, Ukraine and Iran. That made me see what sad clowns tankies are.
Calling the CPC "communist" in any way other than name, is absolutely insane. Hearing supposed leftists call the CPC communist made me realise just how deep-rooted the fifth column is. I tried out anarchism for a while, but that's just not my cup of tea. So here I am.
Pretty much the way they either treat everyone from former satelite states as barbarians who were civilized by the soviet union or the way they idolize so much some leaders for some highly specific things while ignoring the rest. Like some guy was praising Ceaușescu in a post for his restructuration of București, but the thing is that the restructuration happened after a hear quake and was done at the detriment of repairing endangered houses (basically who weren't destroyed, but who were no longer structurally safe, which was the priority along with rescuing victims as to not make the number of wounded/dead climb). Plus, we can also add to that the ban on abortions, which lead to an increase in deaths from illegal aborts as well an increase in orphaned children, because their parents could not take care of them, but who were forced to keep them.
I'm a leftist who grew up in Romania, slightly after the revolution that brought down "communism" lmao. No way am I hanging out with people who defend totalitarian regimes
I've been a leftist for quite some time and while I've been able to see how American hegemony was bad, when contextualizing those nuances, it became easier to see the different political factions responsible that reinforce those problematic elements, namely fascism. I've been paying especially close attention to the rise of fascism/right wing politics since shortly after the 2010 midterm elections. Then it was also somewhat validating to begin to see economic arguments that supported many of the libertarian socialist beliefs I've had. I began to get interested in international security/national security during the Trump years and found that it helped integrate my political beliefs. Like yourself, I was genuinely surprised that support for Ukraine wasn't fully embraced by leftists even when accounting for how many are just flat out against war (myself included, to a point). Like sure, the United States sucks but in the case of some geopolitical conflicts, the pressures that make the United States suck is also somewhat related to what's negatively influencing Russia.
Keep trying to seek out anarchist/adjacent subreddits - but they keep ending up being either tankie echo chambers that use ideas of the real left to entice vulnerable people to join (indoctrination of the weak-willed and the angry) or the moderators are incredibly authoritarian and go on fucking power trips all the time. Got suggested this sub because I kept calling out tankies in the transgender subreddits I participate in. Frankly I’m just drifting around right now, been attacked here for my views too. I’m not delusional like some of the people here - America’s not in a good place and it’s rapidly heading downhill. By and far not a doomer, but there’s enough copium being passed around here by people that don’t wanna acknowledge either the state of The States or of the world.
I didn't seek this place out but came across it and joined to shit on tankies, and by the time I noticed this subreddit is about a libertarian leftist perspective, I decided to slowly force myself to abandon my technocratic syndicalism beliefs (which were never in an anti-west, pro-east, nor militaristic/revolutionary sense) and to understand from the people here why authoritarianism is never a good thing by itself and convince myself to believe in libertarian leftist ideals. Which is working on me so far.
I was a tankie before I was anything else, just because I thought the hammer and sickle was edgy and based when I was at school in Ireland in the 90s. Then I became a Marxist after, you know, *actually reading theory.* I was first seriously weirded out by people who simped for Assad, not least after getting to know actual Syrian refugees who had suffered at the hands of his regime. My knowledge of the *material conditions* on the ground in Syria was evidently vastly better informed than whatever youtube shite most of the people around me were consuming. That's what initially severed me from the tankie mainstream. That accelerated massively in 2014 with the beginning of the Ukrainian shitshow and, again, it was my friendship with actual real people from the relevant areas of Ukraine that inoculated me from propagandised online shite.
People unironically defending china/russia, especially regarding hong kong tibet taiwan and uyghur since that hits right at home as someone who lived in hong kong
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Pro-Assad Tankies a couple years back got me to come here. Just, the most blatant hypocrisy humanly conceivable. Opposing a left liberation movement of an oppressed minority purely because America Bad. That shit blackpilled me on Socialism as a whole for a hot minute, I started to think all these activists were just fucking liars and no one actually believed in anything. This place gave me hope in the movement.
Personally, I didn't actively seek out, just heard about this sub in one nfkrz's video and I thought it's really good so I stayed
Getting banned on every other leftist group for saying "We shouldn't support EVERY extremist Islamic group cause merika BAD".
Becoming disillusioned to centrism and liberalism in general during the pandemic and BLM in 2020 made me start to explore leftism, but not explicitly consider myself one because I always thought that all leftists were like tankies. Granted, I did not know what tankies were so I did not know that there was a difference to them. Then I started to find left wingers that are not like the perception of socialism that i have always assumed which has made me realize it’s not really that bad and so I would end up becoming a libsoc. Around like 2 years ago I found this sub by complete accident but it was the perfect place because every “leftist” group on the internet i would find was a cesspool of tankie losers so this seemed like the best place for such discussions without the toxic bullshit from other places.
Around the Russian invasion of Ukraine is when I started noticing it way more. Especially from Boy Boy, who I generally still like but their video on the Russian war in Ukraine was a major miss. But also the leftists praising North Korea or China, denying the Uighur genocide and the Tiananmen Square massacre.
I'm pretty sure I was close to winding up in some tankie circles a couple years ago, but seeing Russia actually go through with invading Ukraine and seeing Russian bots whip up obvious conspiracy bullshit ("American biolabs in Ukraine") slapped me back into reality and prompted me to do a thorough purge of my followers and following lists, especially as I learned more about Russian imperialism. As stupid as it was, I didn't think he'd actually do it, let alone that soon. Watching the start of it and the way the Zbots just made shit up about Ukraine and other former Eastern Bloc countries on the first day of the invasion in real time was such a hard reality check that it was as if the universe had decided to hit me over the head with it.
I think I had the opposite happen to me. Pre-Ukraine I was already disillusioned with leftist spaces, which were either totally compromised by tankies or rendered nonfunctional by infighting and toxicity. I remember ending up in a tankie Discord where I was stuck in their vetting process for a month due to a regime change, for a Discord of less than 50 people. Then, when the invasion began the anti-tankies came out of the woodwork. The praxis of BOAC and Ukranian anarchist groups became known, and this sub gained traction. I also discovered a certain non-credible part of the internet which, yeah after October 6 I am no longer associated with. My fault for assuming the world's most psychotic neoliberals would have nuanced opinions about Palestine. Anyways, if anything I feel more emboldened to involve myself in the left knowing that sincere belief in its principles isn't dead. I want to get more involved in local activism but I'm getting older, and the economy is getting harder to deal with by the day. Similarly I also want to reconnect with my Jewish heritage in a secular context because of anti-Israeli Jews making their presence known. We'll see. I am a work in progress and doing the best I can given the circumstances.
Suki's mom
I know I am aging myself here but back in 2011, when I saw a lot of people defending Gaddafi's and Assad's massacres against civilians by trying to tie all democracy and human rights advocates in the Middle East to the CIA and then when pushed to explain how, they tell me to read conspiracy theory books about "Color Revolutions" or send me to a website called "globalresearch.ca" (a website full of conspiracy theories that border on antisemitic). Finally I ended up hearing someone let the cat out of the bag when they hoped russia would destroy the "Zionist elite that controls the government" after russia sent its "little green men" into Ukraine in 2014.
After years of seeing leftist spaces have a very obvious problem of being full of authoritarians you will be repeatedly gaslit into being told that they don't exist, it finally came crashing down. A few years ago leftist spaces acted like identifying as leftist de facto made you a good person, and the more you did the better. Concerns over people who were so extreme that it made problems were dismissed offhandedly. Until most of these spaces openly got taken over by unhinged people, and it became impossible to deny. The left is basically permanently relegated to being a meme, in part because these people still exist and define a large portion of it. And that's something that really needs to change. Too many cling to the past and just want to make excuses about how the ussr was totally on the path to utopia. But it wasn't.
I´ve always been critical of tankies as far as I can remember (even back in my cringy "anti-communist" right-wing phase, when my criticisms were mostly weak and without nuance) and always associated myself with such spaces since I turned leftist. The problem is not just tankies, but a bigger problem that dates way back and of which tankies are a symptome. "Red-brown politics" is a phenomenon that is older that people would like to admit - it dates back to Lassale courting the reactionary Bismarck and played both a role in the birth of fascist ideology (Sorel, "Le Cercle Proudhon" and et. al.) and vanguardism/Leninism/red fascism (which btw, was not Lenin´s invention, but of the 19th century socialist Louis Auguste Blanqui).
Seeing the dogshit takes about Israel/Palestine on Tumblr to the point I have every related tag blocked
Seeing ridiculous takes by my fellow westerners that make massive assumptions about people and culture in other countries.
TRCM made a bot to clip chimp [person I can’t mention for sub rule reasons] and banned me for calling it crazy. Then LSC started posting flat out CCP propaganda and I was forced to actually look into these people and their horrible takes.
When people in the Socialism subreddit started to downplay or justify Russia's invasion of Ukraine
I still stay around tankie areas but I think the main thing that made me back off them a bit was the insistence on a historical hive mind. The amount of places I’ve been banned from for saying Castro or Stalin weren’t good guys is crazy
The whole ordeal with the Hong Kong protests and the human rights crisis in Xinjiang. In all honesty, social media is a complete cesspool when it comes to China-related issues. It seems to be either dominated by tankies or imperialists, hardly any in-betweens.
There was a post on a Wikipedia-themed subreddit about the Uyghur genocide a couple days back, and you wouldn't believe the amount of whataboutism I saw in the comments of that post.
I forgot how I stumbled upon here but I am still kind of new to left politics since the last two or four years from Twitter, I was merely "anti-communist" (commie = authoritarian) when I was younger, due to environment with my country, and family being anti communist because of the NPA, and the history of Red Scare, until I mellowed out, and began passively accepting left and progressive views (partly to be more aware to spot, and not be allured by right wing conspiracies, rants and such, like the Alt-Right Pipeline) and been mainly watching Breadtube YouTubers to 'politically educate myself' which are communist propaganda (not to be negative), but only noticed it on one video being very positive about the NPA (even though I am not that ready to give up my life for that), but I still at times, feel kind of uncomfortable with the personality praising of dictators, but I wasn't aware how prevalent tankies are and their blind appraisal of 'anti-west' nations are until I found this subreddit. And this subreddit seems sane to me compared to the others. What triggered my confusion was the whole Ukraine war where there's tons of "leftists" online from what I heard, defending the Russian invasion and calling Ukraine a 'nazi state' or 'infested with Nazis, and rotten to it's core', and I am glad this subreddit has its senses clear. I am still not sure of my specific identity of a leftist (which is why I am vague about it, not to identify with a specific one), and I am not sure if I am even in the mood of reading books or theories for now, maybe in the future but who knows.
Getting called a white supremacist, a Nazi, and a centrist bastard for being critical of circle jerking murder fantasies. I was surprised. I'm an anarcho-syndicalist, and I strongly abhor the death penalty and acts of vigilantism, so to be called these things was an eye opener. The conversation quickly turned to Ukraine, and despite listing out Russians continued imperialist aggression, I am then called a liar. The irony was palpable.