The term Tankie has a clear definition that Cowbee likes to ignore:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those > who support or defend acts of repression by such regimes, their allies, or deny the > occurrence of the events thereof.

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  • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    20 days ago

    Liberals believe in a hypothetical good communist that would not qualify as a tankie. This imaginary communist was cooked up by liberals out of first principles for how they believe a communist should act and behave, because the core instinct of the liberal is to accuse their enemies of being secret right-wingers who are lying about their intentions. The hypothetical good communist would have ideals that we would say are similar to an ultra-leftist, or the completely fictional “patriotic communist” thing. As in:

    • rejection of association with any current socialist state
    • rejection of militant organizing
    • rejection of any intermediary stage in the progression towards communism. Immediately abolish the commodity form
    • complete agreement with the western world order

    So under their metric for a non-tankie leftist, Che Guevara would be a bad communist because he seized state power and used violent means. Whereas a good communist would be someone like Vaush, an internet streamer who advocates for the election of Democrats to public office.

    • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      20 days ago

      Right and Vaush is just Destiny dressed up in red and black. Not a leftist but a liberal claiming to be a leftist but everything they advocate people do is just liberalism.

      Their non-tankie is just a liberal pretending to be a communist. Every communist that actually poses any argument to liberals and opposes action that reinforces liberalism is a tankie.

      Therefore every communist is a tankie. Therefore tankie just means, communist.

      That’s not even getting into the fact that the very definition itself applies to all communists. Let’s go through each group:

      MLs: Support all AES. Tankies

      Trots: Support Cuba. Authoritarian state. Tankies

      Maoists: Don’t support China. Support USSR. Tankies.

      DemSocs: Support Cuba. Some support USSR (jeremy corbyn and all Euro DemSocs for example). Tankies

      This effectively amounts to 95% of all people that call themselves communists. Going into increasingly more niche sects of communist is pointless.