What always confuses me is when I see a queer tankie or conservative, it's like why are you shooting yourself in the foot
I'm a queer conservative. I believe in conserving indigenous sovereignty, the environment, pagan religions, labour regulations and the strength of unions, and our knowledge of history. I question these newfangled ideas like capitalism and binary gender because I think they're no good. Things were just fine when we had 10,000 genders and I don't see a need to change that!
Yeah, I know, it's not what's normally meant by the word conservative. But I don't see why we should have to give the idea of conserving things over to the right. There are lots of great things to conserve. And colonialism isn't one of them. Here in australia, we have a 60,000 year history that predates the right wing idea of conservativism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism
Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy that seeks to promote and to preserve traditional institutions, practices, and values.[1][2] The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civilization in which it appears.
The culture I belong to is the queer community. Thus, the tenets of conservativism, to me, center on the traditional institutions, practices, and values of other people in the queer community. We promote the traditional institutions that rightfully govern colonised land. We promote the traditional institutions of pagan religions. We promote the traditional institutions of labour guilds and unions. We promote the traditional practices of indigenous land management. We promote the traditional practices of nonbinary gender. We promote the traditional practices of the old gods.
The things I am interested in preserving are not the same things a white coloniser binarist capitalist is interested in preserving. And given that whiteness, binary gender, and capitalism have no ancient history and no recent history worth keeping alive, I consider their conservativism far less legitimate. There is a whole lot more to conserve on the left.
You may be a conservationist but not a conservative. You sound like a leftist, and most leftists beleive in conservationism, unlike conservatives.
No it isn't. Naturel conservationism is about conserving nature political social conservationism often generally just shortened to conservatism is about conserving and preserving political and social power. Nothing more nothing less they are identical just about different topics.
There are people who call themselves "conservative anarchists". Conservative as in "we know it worked before and this is how it worked"
People want a good team to root for. They want simple answers instead of the truth. You can just say your nation or other nations are great and must be defended from justifiable criticism because an attack on them is an attack on your own identity.
Serious question: Why are far-left idealogists being labeled anti-queer? I've simply never heard of this before.
Conservatives (U.S. politics) are 100% in that bucket... But most of them are far-right at this point (and patently nuts.)
tankies actively prop up anything anti-west, and since the west is leading the charge in embracing the queer community, they tend to attack that too. doesn't help that the two regimes they like to prop up the most, russia and china, also have extremely anti-queer policies
Ahhh, I understand then. We're thinking of entities like the CCP when we think of "tankies", or the far-left. This makes perfect sense to me.
It's a really strange dichotomy to witness far-left countries like China, and then the "far-left" political spectrum here in the United States. Socialism within each of these contexts seems very different. Like, yes, there are some similarities, but LGBTQ+ folks are treated completely opposite based on my exposure thus far to both of these geopolitical belief structures.
yeah, that's why left/right is super reductive imo. whenever dealing with tankies i tend to refer to the two-axis political compass because tankies are authleft, while the US far-left is libleft, which is a huge distinction. but political opinion is not a scalar, and neither is it a two-element vector, it's a very complex thing, the left/right distinction only works as long as you're discussing a singular country and sometimes not even then. (for example, a lot of european countries have a lot more than two parties in their political spectrum, it's not as simple as a democrat/republican alignment here)
the west is leading the charge in embracing the queer community
Cuba has the world's most progressive and inclusive legislation affecting lgbt people as of reforming their Family legislation actually.
While historically, and contemporaneously, communist countries have been harsh on homosexuality, surely next time the gays will be safe!
Show me where it says that anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment or indeed any intolerance is inherent in communism rather than just the backwards thinking of bad leaders. Correlation does not equal causation.
It’s not inherent, but it’s ubiquitous nonetheless. Consolidating power necessitates an “other” and lgbtq+ tends to be part of that other due to the disproportionately reduced population impact. It’s just harder for them to have kids. Unless the one consolidating is simultaneously a literal and metaphorical maniac like Pol Pot, in which case absolutely everyone is an other. It’s unrelated to communism in the same way that trans rights are unrelated to republicans; it’s just a convenient subsect to oppress for a politically savvy despot.
Only demagogues need an other to consolidate power, and even if that wasn't the case, every left wing ideology already has the mother of all "others" in the billionaires that literally seperate themselves from the society they (mostly, but not always) indirectly dictate the rules of.
The modern far left is in favor of radical equality, considers (especially social) progress much more important than tradition, considers diversity a strength and doesn't consider procreation a holy duty.
All of that is incompatible with anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination and also the opposite of Republicans who ARE inherently anti-trans BECAUSE of their fascist ideology.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you entirely, buuuut somehow nearly every major communist revolution has involved immeasurable suffering to the masses via oppressive dictatorship. To bastardize a quote, the flesh is willing but the spirit is weak. The system is always corrupted by those at the top. The closest to functional communism to my recollection were Yugoslavia, but that collapsed pretty hard once the threats did, and cuba…ish. I’m really not a student of politics, but detecting patterns in history isn’t quite as difficult.
Now with all of that said, if a non-hierarchical communist revolution takes place, send me a message and I’ll still happily fire up the industrial sausage maker for a bit of rich cuisine. Just be sure to watch out for any missed jewelry, wouldn’t want to chip a tooth.
As I see it, one of the main problems is that of suitability: the people suited to win a revolution, which is basically a war, with all the strict hierarchy that entails, are rarely as suited to administrate an egalitarian society in peacetime. It's sorta like putting Michael Phelps in charge of the gymnastics team 🤷
A good (and entertaining) primer on revolutions is the now completed Revolutions podcast. I think you'll find revolutions more complex than that simplistic characterization. Most violence in a revolution happens during the counter revolution.
Raising the spectre of possible revolutionary violence ignores the violence of the current system. Can you imagine the world overcoming climate disaster, with all the carnage it will bring, while under the rule of capitalism? Any revolutionary violence should be compared against the ongoing and future violence of capitalism, and its interconnected systems of white supremacy and patriarchy.
Edit to add url for podcast: http://www.sal.wisc.edu/~jwp/revolutions-episode-index.html
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/revolutions/id703889772
The solution that I personally like is the EU model as a stepping stone. The gradually increased power of a tested system provides resistance against collapse under singular entities. Political metamorphosis can involve bloodshed but doesn’t necessarily have to, which skips over some potential pitfalls while creating some less dire ones. Though it’s slow and bureaucratic. Still, nothing preventing someone from opening a ritzy little butcher shop on Fleet Street in the meanwhile to expedite the process.
If nearly every communist leader has been anti LGBT maybe they were all just bad leaders which makes it seems largely inherent to its ideology.
Capitalists just reflect the views of their customers. When society was anti-LGBT, so were they, now LGBT people are accepted by the public, the capitalists are falling over themselves to get a float at Pride.
Lots of capitalist leaders (or at least leaders of capitalist countries given the difference in state involvement) these days are LGBT friendly (T admittedly not as well supported by some). How many currently Communist countries are?
Considering every "communist" nation is actually authoritarian I don't think communism is inherently homophobic. Also every one of those leaders are bad, they run authoritarian countries.
Again, correlation doesn't equal causation. If every fascist leader had been left-handed, that wouldn't make left-handedness inherent to fascism.
Communism is about radical equality. That many leaders have been anti-LGBTQ+ hypocrites doesn't make it part of the ideology.
After the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, homosexuality (as well as abortion) was decriminalized.
It was only after Stalin's counter-revolution that gay sex (and abortion) were made illegal. People spoke out against it, including queers and feminists in the Comintern. Again, wtf are queer (or feminist) tankies thinking?
Are tankies really that big of a problem? No one worth their weight (or not chronically online) actually uncritically worships former socialist projects, the whole point is to study and preserve the nuance of what occured in former socialist projects for future socialism. Tankie is such a chronically online term that kills any discussion of former socialism whenever I see it in service of avoiding it altogether. 196 having it in its community banner screams of insecurity.
Terfs on the other hand have serious intitutional power and have actually shaped international politics in their rhetoric. A few weirdos on an online discussion webpage does not compare to an international counter revolutionary bloc of fascists who have already enacted harm. It's telling when there has already been an incident of terf-adjacent transphobia in this community than a "tankie infestation."
Yeah, the lemmy devs/admins of lemmy.ml are tankies. Someone further down in this thread posted a link to an essay of dessaline's (a lemmy dev and admin of lemmy.ml) full-on denying the Uyghur genocide.
Not at all, completely different political beliefs, and in all fairness I've never seen a far left person call got anything like concentration camps. However I do think there's a degree of anti-Semitism there quite possibly related to the association lots of people make between Jews and the financial system playing into the natural far left opposition to capitalism. Also there's the seeming obesession with Israel over other similar conflicts and issues around the world, at least in the British far left.
They are both authoritarians who claim to be socialists. And they both spew reactionary rhetoric under the guise of progressivism
That's a little reductive. As most things in history, it's a bit more complicated than that. Ernst Rohm, leader of the SA, represented the socialist side of the Nazi Party. Without him it's very unlikely that Hitler would've rose to power as he wouldn't have had the working class vote. The Night of the Long Knives in 1934 lead to the execution of Rohm and every other leader in the SA that supported the socialist side of the national socialist movement. Then they rounded up known communists and executed them, too. Hitler only claimed to be socialist until he had all the socialists killed.
Stalin on the other hand, did some fucked up shit. But, overall, he defeated the Nazis and lifted millions of Russians out of poverty. It's important to weigh the good deeds with the bad. The only good deed Hitler did was make the trains run on time. Stalin did like 70/30 good deeds to bad deeds. We have plenty of US presidents that can't stack up to those numbers.
Holodomor was caused by the Kulaks burning all the grain and slaughtering all the livestock because collectivization threatened their profits. Stalin didn't burn all the grain and slaughter all the cattle, the Kulaks did.
Either I've aged really fast, or you guys are speaking a new language, can someone explain what any of this means?
TERF = Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism
Feminists who also don't like Trans people, especially trans women.
Tankies = people who support rivals to Western power, usually saying they support communism but they actually just support whatever Russia and China do. Some are state propagandists, some are just edgy teenagers.
TERF (trans exclusive radical feminists) are basically transphobes who say "trans people are bad for women rights".
Tankies are a bit more vague in usage. But basically these are self proclaimed socialists who are actually more into authoritarian leaders. They will appreciate Stalin for everything he did and defend North Korea's political system. Sometimes even praise China and Russia for being "anti-imperialist". So they have all the social backwards ideas, even more so than TERFS because why would they be feminists.
Yes, Russia is being extremely anti-imperialist in Ukraine, and it's also China's anti-imperialism that's threatening Taiwan. Tankies just hate the west, they don't have principles.
To be more precise it is anti-US-imperialism and hegemony, which itself is a fine sentiment but when you're willing to let any right wing dictator lead that fight you've really lost any credibility as a leftist.
I would argue that Russia was imperialist during the tsar empire, the Soviet union and today. It just never stopped exploiting their colonies (at least everything east of the Ural are colonies inhabited by indigenous communities not recognized in their fight for freedom) and the Soviet union smashed all the attempts to create a socialist community that was beyond bolshevism like the black army in Ukraine or the anarchosyndicalists in Spain. As a leftist myself I don't see any reason to have solitary with Soviets and people who refere positively to them.
yeah, makes sense, but exactly like you said, credibility is important. being anti-imperialist in general with a focus on us imperialism is very different from being against only american imperialism while actively supporting the imperialism of other countries such as russia or china
Tankies just hate the west, they don't have principles.
They do have a principle: "The cruelty is the point". This is usually used for far-right groups, who use conservatism as an excuse to hurt people, but it applies just as well to those who use anti-US sentiment to hurt people.
Tankies are a derogatory term for any Communist government that has a large military force that they use. Basically, if any Communist country uses it's military power, they're tankies. It's western propaganda to make every Communist nation look evil. It started with the Tiananmen Square riots and the picture of the guy standing in front of the tanks leaving the square the day before the actual fighting happened. It's also used to pretend that countries like North Korea or China are somehow more violent and authoritarian than the US.
Your bias is showing, lol.
Tankies are generally anti-west authies that root for self-proclaimed "communist" systems like China (which is state capitalist) or Russia (which is an oligopoly, the exact thing late stage capitalism devolves into). They generally spew the exact authoritarian and bigoted bullshit as the alt-right but do it under a different flag that historically opposed nazis, which is why they constantly claim that they're somehow completely different and even more, "opposite" to nazis. Lemmy unfortunately has an infestation of them because the developers are tankies, which often shows on lemmy.ml (the instance said devs run).
Like most reactionaries, tankies have no principles either, just a group they hate and they will twist their ideology as much as it takes to get you that end result. For tankies, that group is "the west". They will coat their bullshit in opposition of the ultra-rich (which most of us can agree on) but make no mistake, as long as you live in a western nation they want you gone, or at best subjugated. This is currently the most apparent in their support of Russia's genocidal war against Ukraine, because it props up a power that they perceive as "friendly" to them, but you might also catch them supporting the Uighur genocide and respond with extreme amounts of whataboutism every time such a take is brought up, essentially detracting from any problem in world powers they align with with counter-accusations of "the west".
Example: this gem - https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/socialism_faq.md#whats-going-on-with-the-uyghurs
What are you posting from?
Edit: Just learned that he was behind Jerboa, that shit getting teeth. Excited for Boost and Sync for Lemmy
This mindset blinds you to the ideology though. It blinds you to the idea of an economy controlled by the working class. Sometimes you need to set your feelings and opinions aside and examine history and economics by their material conditions.
There are many requirements to having an economy and society controlled directly by the working class. You need enough infrastructure, resources, and technology to support a truly democratic country with a totally socialist economy. Prior to the revolution, Russia was a mess. There were regular famines and over 90% illiteracy. Lenin's plan was to lift the people out of poverty, develop infrastructure, educate everyone, and lay a foundation for a country controlled by the working class. Even before Lenin died, he was ceding power to the worker's councils. Then he died and a huge power grab ensued. A lot of murdering and assassination occurred within the government and Stalin won the killing game. Then he took a very isolationist viewpoint. Instead of the international proletariat, he wanted to shut Russia off from the world. He took power away from the worker's councils to help build a mighty superpower to be threatened by no one. It worked out because they defeated the Nazis, but it still took power away from the people none the less.
My point is that every country that's had a Communist revolution, started under some tyrannical Monarch in which living and working conditions were unbearable. The people cede power to the State to develop the country and rapidly improve living and working conditions. Then the state fails to cede power back to the people once economic development has reached decent conditions. China is at that point right now. They've rapidly developed the country enough that it is now time to cede power back. Establish a direct democratic government and socialist economy, or face internal collapse like all the others.
The US needs money for funding the military industrial complex. They need fear mongering to sell weapons. They need wars to sell weapons. They need propaganda to sell weapons. Any support of Russia is mostly due to a portion of leftists being confused by their anti US imperialism and rooting for whoever the other team is. There's also plenty of evidence supporting both sides of the war and it may just be two superpowers playing with Ukrainian lives for money.
Ah yea, that's why they executed the anarchists that wanted democracy and worked with them the moment they had power.
Because anarchists want anarchy. Often after revolutions, anarchists get upset at the existence of government and threaten to destabilize the new government.
Origin of the term didn't originate with China and the Tiananmen square massacre...
From wiki:
The term "tankie" was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defense of the Soviet use of tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring uprising, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions.
Shit, I forgot about that. Khrushchev era Soviet Union isn't my strong point for history. It's commonly used these days in reference to China but I forgot it's older than that. My bad.
it started with the Tiananmen Square riots
It actually started with British Marxist-Leninists who criticized the USSR's use of tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and the communists who defended the USSR's imperialism were called tankies.
It started as a way to call out people who call themselves communists but nonetheless engage in or defend imperialism, and to this day that remains the meaning of the word. There are some liberals out there who use the word against all leftists, as a way to imply that leftism is inherently authoritarian. But that is not largely how it is used online, and it's definitely not how OP was using it.
The horseshoe theory is bullshit not because tankies and nazis don't behave similarly, but because they're not the two logical extremes of the same spectrum. You can be far left without being a tankie by just not being a bootlicker, and you can be far right without being a nazi by (you guessed it) also not being a bootlicker. Even with how many boots you lick the left/right division of the political spectrum is still horribly reductive, but it's super important to split the axis of authoritarianism vs liberalism out of it when addressing tankies, because they have a lot of colloquially left beliefs with the authoritarianism and anti-progressivism commonly associated with the right wing.
I don't buy that they have the same beliefs, but it's interesting how the methods have some similarities — the stances definitely have significant enough differences though.
Wow, hold on, you're saying people who want to change society in some way have similar methods? And that these methods are different from people who don't want to change society? Crikey, I'm gonna need you to slow down, these ideas are just too complex, man!
It's in the encyclopedia of political fallacies somewhere between "it isn't corruption if it's legal" and trickle down economics.
Nah I've met some that genuinely believe the stuff they're saying. Definitely there's a lot of people just bullshitting to create outrage though.
