The Panthers were pretty explicitly pro-China, pro-Vietnam, and pro-DPRK. That alone is enough for them to be smeared as “tankies” by Western so-called leftists.
Black Panthers supported community defense, being a community defense group themselves, and that’s not exactly on brand for Tankies.
It’s almost like it’s a snarl word that doesn’t actually mean anything and so can be deployed and retracted as required. Eldridge Cleaver explicitly described the Panthers as a vanguard in “on the ideology of the black panther party”, and I put it to you that if you read that, or any of the other literature written by highly ranked members of the BPP, it would never occur to you that they are anything but “tankies”. Unless of course you already knew it was by the BPP, who unfortunately now fall into Lenin’s category of great revolutionaries who were slandered in their lifetime but who are now canonized and their ideas bastardised to mollify the masses.
The Panthers were pretty explicitly pro-China, pro-Vietnam, and pro-DPRK. That alone is enough for them to be smeared as “tankies” by Western so-called leftists.
It’s almost like their early fund raising was selling Mao’s little red book to college students.
Black Panthers supported community defense, being a community defense group themselves, and that’s not exactly on brand for Tankies.
Marxism-Leninism absolutely supports community defense.
It’s almost like it’s a snarl word that doesn’t actually mean anything and so can be deployed and retracted as required. Eldridge Cleaver explicitly described the Panthers as a vanguard in “on the ideology of the black panther party”, and I put it to you that if you read that, or any of the other literature written by highly ranked members of the BPP, it would never occur to you that they are anything but “tankies”. Unless of course you already knew it was by the BPP, who unfortunately now fall into Lenin’s category of great revolutionaries who were slandered in their lifetime but who are now canonized and their ideas bastardised to mollify the masses.