• Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    I keep hearing this but I almost always see the word used correctly for communists supportive of authoritarianism

    • frezik
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      5 months ago

      Ironically, they’ll call you a “lib” for holding any position in between “we should revoke Obamacare” to “it’d be nice if we could organize more unions”.

    • volodya_ilich@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      You’re literally looking at a post with the word “leftists” to talk about people who support Putin, do you really not think there hasn’t been a slide of what “tankie” means to the point that now some people like OP will use it indistinguishably?

      • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        The use has expanded but I haven’t seen it used as a general term for the left, if that’s what you mean.

        The term is now extended to describe people who endorse, defend, or deny the crimes committed by communist leaders such as Vladimir Lenin,[9][10] Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. In recent times, the term has been used across the political spectrum and in a geopolitical context to describe those who have a bias in favour of anti-Western states, authoritarian states or states with a socialist legacy, such as Belarus, Cuba, China,[4] Syria,[11] North Korea, and Russia. Additionally, the term pejoratively describes political activists who are said to have a tendency to be favorable towards non-socialist states and political groupings with no affiliation to socialism if they are opposed to the United States, regardless of their ideology, such as Iran or Hezbollah.

        Can be pretty vague but doesn’t really label all leftists as tankies, rather those that are authoritarian or apologists for authoritarians. Last part is pretty vague though, but I haven’t seen it used like that iirc.

        • volodya_ilich@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          I didn’t mean that they’re using it to describe the left, I meant that OP is using “the left” to talk about tankies.