Source https://sh.itjust.works/comment/21042568
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I never heard of tankies until I got to lemmy.
The first thing that I ever saw from them was a meme about how Joseph Stalin had very little in the way of material things when he died, despite the position he held.
And I was like Bitch, I care about Stalin’s earthly possessions in the exact same way that I care about Hitler’s painting with watercolors skill set.
This got me thinking about my western canadian upbringing through the back half of the Cold War. A steady stream of western indictrination and perspective. I recall zero words spoken about Joseph Stalin’s personal life or spending habits.
So who the fuck was that meme aimed at? Who is out there, just wanting to love Stalin, but can’t on account of thinking he lived in opulence? Who is out there heaping scorn on Stalin for what he owned or didn’t?
That’s when I realized that tankies are just a combination of Flat Earthers/Sovereign Citizens. It’s all bullshit, and the point is to be exceedingly difficult to talk to.
There are actually plenty of tankies on Reddit, but with Reddit you have to pretty much seek it out because of the massive user base
Legend goes that dessalines actually started Lemmy because their Reddit main got perm banned because he went a lil too tankie
I remember a huge dustup maybe 4 years ago where tankies infiltrated and tried to take over a bunch of left leaning subs within a few weeks. They do it regularly too. I’ve noticed quite a few db0 accounts that are around 9 months old spewing the usual tankie shit.
We’ve been noticing the same. your thoughts?
Pretty sure it’s just an attempt to normalize their talking points by worming them into discussions. Spreading to different instances is a reaction to grad and hex being largely defederated and ml names being a huge red flag for a bunch of people. I think the reality is that even if everyone defederates every tankie instance, they’ll keep creeping in through different instances. I don’t see a solution beyond simply keeping an eye out and tagging/moderating individuals as they pop up.
and what if they’re okay with those users and instances?
Who’s they? The broader fediverse or mods or both? I guess in either case the thing to do would be tag the users, downvote, and call out their bad talking points. Hopefully enough people pile on to show that we won’t swallow their bullshit.
It’s tough when they’re clever about it. It took me months to realize what cowbee was doing. Luckily most of them aren’t that clever.
Dbzer0’s instance, community members and admins
2017 killed LateStageCapitalism, all those mods got replaced with bad faith actors
I got permabanned for suggesting people assert their civil rights and learn about civil rights
Hey dessalines, care to chime in on why you are the way you are?
Tankies never venture into this community, despite this being a place where they can freely discuss their viewpoints. It’s because they know their positions don’t hold any weight, and they’re afraid of being scrutinised.
Funnily enough, for all of the prominent Tankie talk about not wanting to be an echo chamber and welcoming debate, .ml actually has this comm instance-blocked LMAO
Yeah. They’re as bad as MAGA with the snowflake hypocrisy.
i call them mirror image of conservatives. inverted image of conservatives.
Idk where here is referring, but memes is all tankies.
here this community
alot of tankies probably got banned from reddit for the same reason they are getting blocked/defederated here. plus we get conservatives too trickling from time to time.
I’ve honestly never seen a conservative on Lemmy. But then again I don’t tend to browse much of the fediverse as it’s all yankslop
tankies get astroturfed by right wingers so much they are pretty much invisible. and the ones on the “left” but not extreme left filters them enough for the same results.
What’s the “extreme left”? Anarchists? Why would they support authoritarianism?
Indeed as an Anarchist, tankies and maga conservatives are the mirror of each other, it’s just who holds the hammer and gun that differs.
You won’t see a tankie doing a nazi salute, but you will find them spouting the same antisemitism
Anti-Semitism as a phrase is broken, maybe you should find a new word to use that isn’t poisoned. Did you know that the Arab peoples are semitic?
what do you mean broken? what do you propose instead?
I guess he refers to the fact that the US/UK uses it to label human rights activism as terrorism.
Idk what to use instead but the Nazis busy accusing everybody opposing the Nazi shit in the Middle East right now of being anti-Semitic has ruined that phrase.
Ie, Israel’s others, forced into ghettos Israel controls where they control everything coming in and out, impoverishing the populations for decades, have after a ghetto Uprising embarked on a final solution, first for Gaza later for the ghettos in the West Bank.
Anyone calling this for what it is is accused of anti-semitism. And every organization has been bullied into accepting it as a valid criticism, from social media companies to political organizations to universities. So I don’t know what a replacement phrase should be, but that phrase I believe is broken.
Same here, never heard of them before Lemmy. I was shocked by their illogical statements and behavior. I couldn’t believe anyone could hold such inconsistent beliefs and not just melt their brain, by so many mental gymnastics and plot holes. I still can’t. It just makes way more sense that they are all done kind of weird Russian ai experiment.
They kind of betray each other a lot of the times where some say that tiananmen square massacre didn’t happen and others saying that they are color revolutionaries and absolutely deserved it.
I personally know a born-and-raised Chinese person who’s loyal to the regime. Not even he denies the Uyghur genocide. He just admits that he thinks china should be an ethnostate. I think about that every time I see some keyboard warrier say the genocide is western propaganda.
asians are pretty hardcore conservatives, at least for the older generation. vietnam, china,etc. thats why you seem them “rallying” with right/white supremacists quite often, also older millennials(35+) tend to gear towards conservatism more than progressivism/left leaning ideology. Or at the most they support some left leaning, but does not like things gay marriage,weed,drugs,etc. i know people that are this way. also notice asians that have at least some religious upbringing, either christianity or buddhism(funny enough) and left the religion partially, but became more right wing when trump came around. i knew someone early in college that was a vietnamese immigrant, he was very PRO-BUSH,war. and yes i am asians.
you’re vietnamese or?
I’ve found it very curious how Tankies will apply a coat of liberal paint to authoritarian states like China, Iran and Russia. They don’t realise that diversity and the freedom of self-expression they so love are all largely suppressed in these states.
very much a chickens for KFC scenario.
I’ve seen them saying it was fine because the students wanted to be killed. Insane
Yeah, just bizarre.
I was willing to listen to them until I was the target of completely unfounded censorship. I figured, meh maybe they have a few nuggets of wisdom. They called me a racist and a xenophobe for a meme I made that neither contained racism or race.
That’s all they do, is engage in name-calling. Nothing actually productive. They’re just a bunch of name-callers.
can you link that comment? did ya get banned?
Think it was deleted, but it was the guy checking out another girl meme and the one with him I wrote “my 4080 RTX gaming rig” and the one he’s looking at was “my Steam Deck” I posted with a filler title of “rice” because it’s a required field and that’s what swipe spit out.
It was considered racist to use the word rice.
whaaat? can you find that post? that’s wild
I can’t see it in my history anymore, not sure if it’s because I blocked the instance or they deleted/removed the post.
You can read the follow up discussion on this thread I posted awhile back.
https://lemmy.world/comment/10193954
should post your experience over to !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com
i wish all the stupidity i see in the world was the result of russian misinformation, but that’s almost too optimistic a position to hold in my eyes…guess we’ll see if/when russia collapses from fighting ukraine, if it all just dries up.
putin is funding the troll farms personally, i think it will be the last to collapse before russia does unfortunately.
Yes, and he uses slave labor for them as well
It’s not just Russian troll farms now. Russia, China and Iran have combined their troll farms, and it’s just steamrolling through social media.
And India and Iran, all BRICS countries. You can follow via the crypto tickers sometimes, as crypto is intrinsically tied to these bot (human slave) farms - it’s their funding.
lol lusty argonian
NPR did a story on this, most bots are actually human slaves in giant networks working together
I too, have never heard of tankies before joining lemmy.
Imagine my surprise, when i, a guy from a post-soviet country, where the fans of soviets are endangered species, see them all fanboying over dictators of the past century over here lol
The best part they’re from countries that never even remotely experienced soviet horrors. The lead tankies are from Netherlands and many other appear to be from flyover states of the US lol
and obvious it’s invaded by ruzi bots
i wouldn’t call them horrors per se. something was bad, something was good, something was brief, something still lingers around with its lasting consequences smacking people’s asses. The same could be told about USA, or any other country, and to be frank, judging from the height of my sofa, i’m happy enough with what i have.
I think, it’s a good habit i’ve developed recently — to stop spiraling about all the bad things happening near me to take a good look at what I usually take for granted. Ambitions are good, but i can’t stress enough how tiring they are to have.
Tbh, i feel reluctant to call them bots, I’ve met a bunch of agressive and confused people, and i can’t say there’s any difference. That way, everyone can be a bot
I would call raping, torturing and destroying cultures of the occupied countries quite horrible, no? gtfo with this bullshit my dude.
“raping” is something i’m not aware of, sorry, you’d need to elaborate.
Torturing? I mean, sure you can call it that, not the word i’d personally choose to describe it, but yeah, the harm was done.
On the topic of cultural destruction, i need you to elaborate as well. While i’m aware of supression of regional smaller cultures, i’m not aware of any that actually died out, (or died out by force, rather, Eskimos cultures were more-less tribal, and those never stay around without a proper isolation), even though some of them suffered stagnation. The latter was always considered by me as an inherent casuality of progress and overall globalisation tendencies. I guess more-less direct analogy would be the American “Melting Pot”.
I think, further proof of my hypothesis could also be the modern state of the smaller cultures I’m familiar with:
modern Ukrainian culture is still pretty stagnant, and more-less follows the modern intercultural tendencies inhereted from the western culture, with an additional blend of rejection of the soviet past. The stagnation part is due to opression, you might argue, but…
I got to live several years in Czechia, and i can’t say, that there’s a much more developed and unique modern culture, despite far less pressure from the soviets, purely due to how far off it is. The only prominent difference i can see, is that in the culture of the, for instance, second half of the XX century — while 95% of Ukrainian arts and crafts were soviet-centric, Czech ones stayed more autonomous, even though still were heavily swayed, but in their cese by the western culture. But in exchange for that, Ukraine has a very bright cultural past in the late XIX — early XX centuries, while Chech were basically a part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Dozen of, now reverered as Czech, authors, for example, wrote their studies and fiction in German. No one seem to mourn that fact though.
My point was, and being, while, like any of the red dictatures of the XX century, USSR was far from being a utopia, lots of people were opressed, but we still should consider the fact that our modern view is still biased by the propaganda of the western side of that period, as, obviously just as the modern culture, modern view of history is just as well western-centric.
To give you a perspective, the soviet regime, while being strict and opressive, managed to raise pleades of world class scientists and managed to build world class infrastructure of that time, despite WWI and then the revolution, that left the historical region in ruin. I literally write it as i reside in a now-Ukrainian clinic, founded in the 30s by a soviet scientist (born at the territory of modern Russia), that is still one of the leading clinic in Europe, curing eye-related diseases.
What are you even on about. I grew up under soviet occupation. Not even going to entertain your troll attemps when you’re questioning whether torturing and raping happend. Maybe start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Gulag_camps
not questioning. Merely asking to educate me on the matter by providing some examples.
As far as I am aware, those labor camps, despite the associations, were far from being similar to what the nazis did, and, to be frank, i can’t say that modern penitentiary facilities in most countries progressed in terms of humanity in comparison.
They were absolutely the same as nazi camps minus the ovens just because freezing people in Suberian winters was cheaper. You should really educate yourself because this ignorance is incredibly disrespectful for the survivors. Asking someone to spoon feed you in Lemmy comments is not the way.
And then killed some of them once they were no longer useful to the state, and continued to ignore scientists’ warnings about the instability of USSR infrastructure
give me a few examples please. The only stories of that kind I’ve heard, where of Prokofev and Theremin, but otherwise, i’m not well aware of the matter.
You can look at Chornobyl as an example, granted that was near the end of the soviet union
Re: rape
https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/03/1161281
Edit also
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/30/ukrainian-men-face-sexual-torture-in-russian-detention-centres-un
those are the modern events I’m aware of. We were talking about the soviet opression.
Right. That’s also well documented. Go look at the sources.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_crimes
This is so relatable. I’m from a former communist country. The first time I encountered a large group of tankies was on Reddit around the TikTok ban. It was stunning. It had me thinking “My god, the far-right will put us all in the same boat as these weirdos and sink the boat”
sorry you have to experience that
It’s interesting how almost all Tankies come from the US
nothing to be sorry about, every society has their own weirdos
Here’s my 2¢ on how that kinda post might’ve been effective propaganda on me if I just saw it in the background long enough.
I grew up in America in a conservative area and everyone saw wealth as success and legitness. I now find myself beliving that if you live in excessive luxury that you are part of the problem. I can see how learning Stalin didn’t have much when he died would appeal to a certain leftist in me and changes the emperor tone I originally picture him with.
I have other issues with Stalin, but maybe if I’d’ve lived on .ml long enough those kinda posts could’ve slowly changed what comes to mind when I think of him.
Conservative estimates state that Stalin was directly responsible for twenty million deaths.
There is no charm offensive that will “slowly change what comes to mind” when thinking of Joseph Stalin.
Well I’m no historian. I didn’t have that number. My point is that I don’t think about Stalin that much, and, without grounding, posting about how minimalist Stalin was sounds like a decently effective way to change how I view him.
It sounds like you’ve got a much more detailed understanding of Stalin than I do.
Anyone my age range or older would have no excuse for not knowing what kind of monster Stalin was. Anyone who has spoken to survivors who escaped his regime would never have the fucking audacity.
By comparison, Pol Pot was responsible for the killing fields in Cambodia. His murder spree is just a rounding error in Stalin’s body of work.
it’s very much a us-centrism position that most people from the US, meaning tankies, see Stalin. They don’t care for the Holodomor, most have never heard of it.
What about liberal estimates?
Triple that.
Isn’t that like ten holocausts?
and how many of those were invading nazis?
Stop trying to put lipstick on a pig.
“Don’t believe the victims!”
Isn’t the part of a winning charm offensive.
Any quibbling you attempt in an effort to massage the numbers just dies, when you consider that the numbers you want to fiddle with are in the fucking millions.
My point is if they have to pad the stat with millions of dead nazis, what else are they willing to lie about?
https://cla.umn.edu/chgs/holocaust-genocide-education/resource-guides/holodomor
This definitely happened and killed millions.
Kind of likewise; coming from Reddit the political weirdos were American conservative types, “Jesus needs more guns to shoot the gays and the poor and the blacks” sort of folks. The idea of fervent fucking Soviets on the English speaking internet was new and instantly boring.
There is a funny story about the real currency of power that involves Stalin. The story goes that Stalin and his party officials came upon a beggerwoman on the side of the road. She asked them if they could spare some money. In a rare moment of generosity from Stalin he went for his wallet, only to find it empty. He asked the officials if they had any money, but all of their purses sounded empty.
Those in power do not need money, as everything they ever want will be given to them.
I envy you. I live in Hungary, and for a long while the only leftists I knew about were tankies. They’re just as annoying offline as online.
My first interactions on lemmy here were with a large pod of tankies on memes of all places.
It was not clear to me they were anything but super politically correct Americans so I argued with them for like a hundred different replies before one of them told me, then they kept brigading me and following me on to other posts and such.
Then my phone started acting wonky and I got afraid I was getting hacked by them so I made a new account, I do not know if they can find you from Lemmy but I still have both.
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Based on how fucking bad they are at peddling their shit, my alternate theory is that they’ve been funded by some western democracy foundation, with the brief of making anything that is Warsaw Pact scented as unpalatable as humanly possible.
Like PETA working overtime to get people to hate Vegans.
Or Elon getting people to hate Dems
opensecrets.org/news/2024/10/pro-trump-dark-money-network-tied-to-elon-musk-behind-fake-pro-harris-campaign-scheme/
tankies seems to boost conservatism idelogy more than they do for the “left”. because they have the same messaging and values.
well yeah they want to conserve authoritarianism
they’re the result of a psyop instead of directly being one.
Some people have made arguments that the leadership of the USSR simply replaced the old capitalist/aristocratic class and had access to their wealth through the levers of state power. I have not investigated the truthfulness of this claim, but I’m guessing this was a response to that talking point.
If they don’t have their name written on it, just use the estates and other expensive things all their life it’s technically not theirs. This is the tankie argument
“The people’s presidential ballroom”. Funny how well aligned out current capitalist leaders and the so-called communists can be.
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i heard it on reddit first surprisingly enough. i always suspect it means extreme belief of whatever sub they were in.