dagblog - Comments for "Tankies!"

Leftist ideology - Monkey

PeraclesPlease — Sun, 03 Jan 2021 00:12:18 +0000

In reply to Well Heck... The leftwing

Leftist ideology - Monkey Jesus

(Darwin pleasing everyone, even Scopes)

Well Heck... The leftwing

oldenGoldenDecoy — Sun, 03 Jan 2021 00:08:07 +0000

In reply to Western leftism flirts more

Well Heck... The leftwing grifters...

Nothing's new under the sun in our type of culture and economic system.

The lefties are still selling these for 50 years and pissing off the right wingers at the same time.

~OGD~

meanwhile, right wingers

artappraiser — Sat, 02 Jan 2021 21:49:42 +0000

In reply to Tankies!

meanwhile, right wingers thank BLM every single day for the DEFUND word, which they use to reinforce stereotypes about Democrats as like, Marianne Williamson & Tulsi Gabbard combined:

TODAY: Campaigning in Georgia, Kelly Loeffler says Chuck Schumer wants to "defund our military."

YESTERDAY: Chuck Schumer voted with 80 other senators to approve a $741 billion military authorization and override Trump's veto. Kelly Loeffler missed the vote.
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) January 2, 2021

the mayor of Portland isn't

artappraiser — Sat, 02 Jan 2021 20:53:29 +0000

In reply to Tankies!

the mayor of Portland isn't talking about "tankies" but he IS finally using the words "antifa" and "anarchists". Had enough, no more of this shit, finally cracking down hard, take your show elsewhere:

Erdogan backed Turkey away

PeraclesPlease — Sat, 02 Jan 2021 20:52:00 +0000

In reply to Whoa... neo-tankie shmankie..

Erdogan backed Turkey away from NATO with Putin's encouragement, but nullifying a recent Istanbul election may have been a bridge too far.

China's running out of money, so dial back all those huge game-changing alliances and infrastructure projects.

Putin has a reckoning coming.

Whoa... neo-tankie shmankie..

oldenGoldenDecoy — Sat, 02 Jan 2021 19:42:00 +0000

In reply to Needs to be careful -"neo

Whoa... neo-tankie shmankie...

That urban dictionary stuf is not my second language.

And all these 60 years I thought Turkey and NATO together were working for peace and security.

And while people are diverted to the area of the Xinjiang/Asian sea... ol' China and Iran have now entered a massive 25-year strategic partnership in trade, politics, culture, and security.

Plus...

It's been 5 years since Russia launched its first airstrikes in the Syrian war around the city of Homs, Russia’s intervention in Syria enters its second half-decade, what can we say about the conflict so far?
"...political stabilization, as well as social and economic recovery, of the Middle East that Putin promised look as far off as ever. Syria’s civil war is far from over.

Reconstruction, meanwhile, remains a distant dream. Despite continued Russian promises of economic help, Syrian citizens continue to suffer immensely. And Russia has put little money toward rebuilding the country, hoping that the West would eventually foot the bill to avoid further refugee flows to Europe.

~snip~

The point of Russia’s military intervention is to assert the Kremlin’s presence in the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean. In that, Putin has obviously succeeded. If the war in Syria ever ends, it will only happen with Russian assent. The Kremlin has made itself a key player in other regional disputes, too, including over the gas fields of the Eastern Mediterranean and in Libya. linky pinky [Foreign Policy]

Rinse and repeat every decade...

Oh and HAPPY NEW uh uh uh...

Fuggetaboutit.

~OGD~

Western leftism flirts more

Orion — Sat, 02 Jan 2021 19:10:34 +0000

In reply to excerpt including mention of

Western leftism flirts more with Trotskyism and anarchism (who both look at the Spanish civil war or Rojava as a model). People from Russia or China largely seem reluctant to talk about politics the way we do here. It seems very easy to become a dissident out there. So a lot of political movements emanating from there could have an astroturf element.

Needs to be careful -"neo

PeraclesPlease — Sat, 02 Jan 2021 09:17:41 +0000

In reply to the term also has an entry on

Needs to be careful -"neo-tankie" stands to be used by people critical of any military capability or war-making for good reason. While people can justly criticize the NATO operation in Libya and it's assumption, it's hard to fault it as a coalition of European states and agreement with Arab states for both goals and limits - roughly what worked for Bush Sr. in Gulf War I, and what worked for Obama in carrying out the successful 5-forces effort against ISIS. As soon as Biden said something about the US leading again, the fatalists started criticizing that the US shouldn't lead anything, that we don't have the moral blah blah blah, but nature abhors a vacuum, and we're the only ones with big enough capacity, balls/don't give a shit, and reasonable enough morals to do it. It's not perfect, and the coalition/agreement approach should limit the worst excesses, but overall it's better to leaving the field to Putin in Syria, China in Xinjiang/Asian sea, Turkey in Azerbaijan, etc.

the term also has an entry on

artappraiser — Sat, 02 Jan 2021 06:43:07 +0000

In reply to Tankies!

the term also has an entry on Wikipedia, including this section on "Neo-tankies":

"Neo-tankies"[edit]

Satirist Martin Rowson observes that the hardline, black and white, authoritarian outlook of the far left has often been preserved by some of its former members, even when other aspects of their leftism have been shorn by experience or ideological shifts:

"John Lloyd is one of those pro-war lefties or ex lefties, whom I prefer to call neo-tankies, who've dragged their Manichean mindset from the Cold War and insist on seeing the final battle between good and evil just round the next corner." [16]

He says:

"I came up with this word to describe Lloyd, Hitchens, Aaronovitch and the rest of them … It honours the pro-war ex-left's origins by acknowledging the neo-conservatives, that bunch of ex-Trots who believe in the violent export of democracy throughout the world on the back of the US-military industrial complex, and the tankies, the old diehards of the British Communist party who supported Stalin or Moscow's line at every turn, above and beyond accepting unquestioningly Soviet tanks trundling through Budapest or into Czecholoslovakia"[16]

and in The Urban Dictionary

excerpt including mention of

artappraiser — Sat, 02 Jan 2021 06:34:49 +0000

In reply to Tankies!

excerpt including mention of The Greyzone:

[....] Tankies are a trendy youth movement

Some people think that the tankies are astroturfed by Russian trolls or China’s famous “wumao”. Others blame the rise of The Grayzone, a publication with strong tankie leanings that has been vigorous in denying the existence of concentration camps in Xinjiang. But while there are probably a few Russian and Chinese trolls skulking about, and while Grayzone does have a decent Twitter presence, tankism is more likely simply a faddish edgelord youth movement feeding off of the general leftist energy released by the politics of the last few years.

Since I’ve only interacted with tankies on Twitter, I’ll defer to the perspectives of non-tankie leftists who have encountered the movement in real life.

In one thread, socialist @QueenSorviaV recounts her time in tankie culture.

A thread that serves as a brief reflection and observations from my days (about a year) as a Tankie:
— Sorvia (@QueenSorviaV) July 16, 2020

She depicts tankism as an ideology defined fundamentally by anti-Americanism. She describes a process by which people with some justifiable anger against America — due to its treatment of minorities or overseas military actions — slip into a deep and monomaniacal hatred in which America defines evil and anything that opposes America is defined as good. As she describes it, these people then cluster into a close-knit, highly paranoid, almost cult-like subculture:

This anger also became directed towards individuals. The obsessive paranoia of the “deep state” led to a resurgence of democratic centralism. A need to police views. Power struggle for ideological control within the group. Pretty brutal stuff for social media
— Sorvia (@QueenSorviaV) July 16, 2020

Meanwhile, anarchist @rechelon describes some of the same social dynamics among tankies, but attributes their emergence less to burning rage than to a kind of social media entrepreneurialism. Here are a few excerpts from his thread:

[.....]

If Gillis is right, then the emergence of tankies is one result of the failure of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Bernie’s whole sales pitch was “political revolution”, and when it became clear on Tuesday, March 3 that a political revolution wasn’t happening anytime soon, some of the young people in the movement either moved toward the idea of actual physical revolution (anarchists, tankies, Trotskyists) or away from the idea of revolution and towards the hope of political evolution (social democrats).

But like their long-ago predecessors in the Spanish Civil War, today’s tankies are specialized not in actually bringing about revolution, but in infighting against other types of leftists.

Tankies don’t get along with other leftists

[.....]