[dude with glasses in a communist t-shirt, arguing] I'm the only leftist here, your opinions are TRASH
[dude holding a theory book on smug, arguing] Read theory you losers, you're all WRONG
[dude in an anarchist hoodie, arguing] Nuh-uh, I'm the only leftist here, you're SHITLIBS
[the three dudes are now caught in a cartoon fight, glasses gone flying, punches everywhere, while a firing squad of nazis are targeting them with rifles]
[a confused nazi asks] Why… why are they still arguing?
This thread keeps popping up and it just clicked and I had to ask:
Is the guy in the red shirt supposed to be Vaush?
It's the factory preset look for these pseudo-tankies that show up in my local activism group every now and then.
Always the big earring, unkempt beard, this specific shape of glasses, and the cheap aliexpress t-shirt with a political message on it.
Not my fault Vaush stole the look!
I'm not even sure whether this is supposed to be an insult anymore. Is a "tankie" better or worse than a "fake tankie"?
In a thread complaining about leftist infighting, there's a special irony in liberals singing out a leftist who is simultaneously too far left and not far left enough.
It's a specific type of leftist we have in my country, french communists are a… special breed, let's say.
In the 1980s our communist party bulldozed a migrant worker dormitory because they hated migrants that much. Red MAGA or something. The party recovered from that era, but french communists are still chauvinistic, xenophobic, and strangely not that much into anti-imperialism (which is meant to be the redeeming quality of tankies). They do however share with tankies the traits of applying "class first" logic to a lot of conversations, which makes them deathly allergic to intersectionality, and being terminally online and way into infighting. Thus they usually end up booted from actual activist groups, since they tend to hold us back and prevent us from actually getting shit done in the streets.
Hence me calling them pseudo-tankies because it's hard to label them. We just call them tankies here: they're members of a party that supported the crushing of the hungarian uprising with soviet tanks, and is ambiguous about tienanmen (no denying it happened but very alt-history about it), so pro-tanks they are.
I have an easier time getting along with the average online american tankie than with our local communist party's members.
Sounds like Nazbol to me.
Yeah, that's been a problem in the US as well, under "Patriotic Communism". But it's also largely artificial - a product of party decay to the point that fascists can sock puppet the leftist labels without actually pursuing leftist policy.
One problem that really does plague leftist organizing is state espionage. It has become almost a running joke that half your local DSA meeting is going to be NYPD and FBI informants fighting for front row seats.
But that's also more a legacy of Nixon/Reagan Era COINTELPRO, with the modern state security forces scrambling to invent incidents to thwart from whole cloth.
What I see labeled "Tankie" in the modern moment is anyone championing AES. For some reason, the greatest betrayal of any kind of revolution is... winning? So every socialist politician from Fidel Castro to Hugo Soto-Martínez is doing authoritarian stateism by being inside the halls of power, rather than outside waving a paper placard.
That's a shame.