this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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I swear I've never heard "tankie" before a week ago and now I'm on Lemmy I read it 50 times a day.
Tankies are usually characterised by their willingness to defend the use of tanks to crush civilians who speak out against authoritarian communist governments.
I feel this should have been part of my beloved "Trotskyist insults" stamp set I was gifted many years ago.
I still don't understand what it means. From the context, I assume it's bad to be one, but I have no idea why.
Tankie is a term invented by anti Stalinist Marxists in Britain used against the people who followed the marxist-leninist line and supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary where the USSR send in tanks to violently crush reformist uprisings. It has since been used as a pejorative for Stalinists and soviet-apologists, mainly by other leftists.
Let's be real, it's mostly used as a pejorative for "leftist I don't like" these days.
now, why is this phrase so common on lemmy all of a sudden?
Because the main developers of Lemmy are concerningly biased. Luckily the project is open source but unfortunately it does appear that the lead developers are into defending the crimes of the CCP mainly through moderation on their own platform (which of course is their right). They strongly dislike discussion of CCP crimes on their platform and ban users.
I unfortunately don't have the links but there are 3 threads you can pull on to kind of paint a picture of what the lead devs opinions are.
His moderation tendencies on lemmy.ml.
His GitHub compendium on communism and Marxism and how they didn't necessarily fail.
A breakdown of everything on Mastodon by what appears to be a slighted user. This is the personal vendetta they are talking about in the most recent blog posting.
Ironically enough I kind of dismissed the twitter drama as drama until I read the most recent article the dev team posted and their denial caught my eye. Especially how they said it wasn't worth addressing. Didn't sit right with me and I saw some others feeling the same way posting about it.
People are also pointing out that prior to the influx of users from Reddit the Lemmy ecosystem was 'red' in a sense but it's largely been suppressed by the sudden popularity.
Do I think any of this matters? Honestly, yes I do.
Only because, of course, the lead developers opinions matter and will influence the features the project will incorporate as time goes on. A recent example that comes to mind is the PolyMC controversy where the lead dev went rogue and denounced LGBT or something. The team all quit and ported it over to Prism Launcher.
Instances like that can happen and come up. You never know what might happen. Anyways it's not affecting anything right this moment so it might be a sit and watch scenario.
Grab some popcorn I guess.
Oh and for anyone curious I think socialism is awesome and I live in Canada so I'm not some kind of capitalist romanticizer. I think a mix works best but ultimately capitalism will collapse under its own weight. Especially if left unregulated.
Iโm all for socializing a lot of things. Infrastructure, healthcare, education, etc. But even my lefty ass raised some eyebrows when I saw that one of the developers has a massive Git repo of communist essays and commentary on hundreds / thousands of communists articles on the web. Seemed like a bit much.