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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35889 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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I'm curious what folks here think about tankies.

I remember seeing a twitter thread during the onset of the Ukraine war explaining why Russia and China growing powerful even to the point of imperialism is vital to combat western imperialism, "someone has to do it". Whether one agrees that Russia has been constantly provoked by NATO or not, its difficult to spin Russian actions as "anti-imperialist". Similarly, China's land and water disputes with its neighbours. It appears both these countries have become a sort of canvas to project their ideologies. They often call western conservatives "far right" and often attack their criticisms of feminism. But how do they explain China's own censorship of feminist activism, the fact that independent labour unions are illegal, the push for pro-natalism, the push for masculinity training, etc.? I've seen many articles countering the stories about Uyghurs, but not much on the above. What really makes the "tankie ideology" attractive? I can fully understand and even sympathise with their gripes over western imperialism and even Israel to an extent, but I don't get the narratives that its all the neoliberals and the "far right" against China, essentially projecting the whole issue as a new cold war of ideologies between neoliberalism and communism.

I think there's two main types, the first being ideological MLs, and the second basically being conspiracy theorists. Both types can be similar to online fascists, in that the appeal is mostly aesthetic and deeply contrarian -- imagine investing your time in vehemently defending the DPRK of all things. I think there's more of them than Noah surmises, unfortunately. There's little in the way of a firewall between leftist (as distinct from liberal) commentators/politicians/journalists and these conspiratorial elements, and it takes something like Ukraine to lay these bare. The Corbyns and Chomskys of the world are all too willing to break bread with Aaron Mate and the like, and as far as the former is concerned at least, pay a political price among normies accordingly.

Here's a rough list that might illustrate a more useful cluster than strict doctrinaire tankyism:

  • Aaron Mate

  • Max Blumenthal

  • Tulsi Gabbard

  • Caitlin Johnstone

  • Greenwald

  • Michael Tracey

  • Jimmy Dore

  • Kevin Gosztola

  • Richard Medhurst

  • Peter Coffin

  • Caleb Maupin

  • Katie Halper

  • Ryan Knight

  • Scott Ritter

  • Richard Sakwa

Unsurprisingly a lot of overlap with RT America, when that used to be a thing.

Tulsi Gabbard?

How so?

Boring proof of horseshoe theory. I have serious doubts that the sincere ones are numerous, but are instead larping just like a substantial number of terminally online fascists.

I used to hate them, now I admire them for their consistency. The Tankie doesn't hate on pharmaceutical companies one year and get Pfizer tattoos the next. The Tankie doesn't overlay the flag of whichever country experienced an atrocity over his avatar on twitter every month. The Tankie just hates. If you have values that are in contradiction with his, he will openly advocate for your harm, but then at least you know where you stand with them. Other internet users? Who knows.

I'm curious what folks here think about tankies.

I don't think about them at all.

The general sense I get from e.g. stupidpol is that they strongly dislike the reigning neoliberal order, and the neoliberal order is supporting Ukraine. The near-enemy is more salient than a distant entity, and so they perform their political identity by expressing skepticism of everything the near-enemy says.

China support is a bit more complicated and substantive, but it offers an alternative ideology that someone can map their own political values to with only a moderate amount of mental gymnastics and curated blind spots. It's comforting to imagine you have a powerful counterweight on the horizon to a political system you hate.

Most on-the-ground capital-C-communists are in it for the social clout and not for the ideological consistency. Calling the united states a fascist white supremacy makes certain women briefly forget about how much they're supposed to hate men. Calling china and russia those things doesn't get that reaction from college girls, so they don't. They also think that China will rule the world in the future, and they plan to be on China's good side, so they'll avoid saying anything one way or the other for the moment. One or two might be inept enough to let slip some outdated pro-russia content.

"Tankies" in the traditional sense barely exist any more. However, there's still plenty of generically pro-Russian Westerners. They tend to be right wing as other comments have pointed out, and they simply go through mental gymnastics of interpreting Putin's "denazification" of Ukraine as actually the complete opposite, i.e. it's it's a holy crusade against leftist elements, in particular immigration, feminism, and transgenderism. I have no idea how they resolve the cognitive dissonance between their own interpretation and Russian state narratives.

Because Putin doesn't believe that Zelensky who is a jewish comedian is an honest nazi. The Ukrainian elite is heavily influenced by neoliberal institutions and their end goal is to join NATO and the EU. The EU + NATO isn't exacly going to allow a nazi Ukraine. I am sure there are some Ukrainian nazis who think they are going to get a NATO backed fourth reich but they were mainly cannon fodder in Mariupol. The Ukrainian state's existance hangs on the support of the US government. They will not be having a white ethnostate for long.

The big issue here isn't Ukraine, it is neoliberal dominance of the world. Break free from neoliberalism and get the treatment that Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria or Yemen got. The US backs coups, bombs countries and financially blocks countries it doesn't like. No country in Europe is going to stray far from neoliberalism unless the power of the global neoliberal order is weakened. I support China, North Korea, communist Cuba and islamist Iran for the simple reason that they represent an alternative to the dominance of Washington. China just launched their C919 passenger jet giving us a path to a future in which a country doesn't have to bow to Washington in order to buy jets. I support Russia because I don't want a world completely dominated by Atlanticist elites but a multipolar world in which different countries and civilizations exists and can make deals with each other.

As for Ukraine, which part do you think will have the most third world migrants and gender studies in thirty years, the Keiv or Moscow controlled parts.

Are there really still left-wing tankies out there who are now in support of this invasion?

All of the Putin apologists I run across myself are right-wing. They have the same "the enemy of my globalizing enemy is my friend" justifications as a left-wing tankie would typically have had back when it was Hungarian blood greasing the treads, but these ones are clear that the type of globalization pissing them off is mostly LGBTQ+ ideology rather than capitalist ideology. (To be clear, most right-wingers aren't neo-tankies, and most left-wing thought I read from the Cold War wasn't by tankies, it's just that the exceptions were pretty one-sided in each case)

I don't know what to think of it, but I find it fascinating. I've barely gotten used to political principles "switching sides" in one direction, with left-wing beliefs like "people should be judged as individuals, 'blind' to their demographics", "electronic voting machines are an unacceptably insecure way to tally elections", or "people should be able to get and keep jobs regardless of their personal politics" that still seem smart today but that (sometimes after brief universal support, sometimes directly) changed to have right-wing valence. "Russian authoritarianism and oppression is bad" might be the first good right-wing idea I've seen move the opposite way ...

The ones in support of the invasion itself are fairly rare, but I've seen a goodly number of far-left-wingers whose viewpoint is essentially that West should drop all support of Ukraine due to escalation dangers and because Ukraine is too Nazi-friendly or corrupt for them. Not as much pro-Russia, but anti-anti-Russia. Of course, one might well argue that this position is objectively pro-Russia within the current context. Also, when it comes to subsidiary issues like NATO expansion and so on, I'd argue that within continental Europe that is still more opposed by the far left than the far right (both within countries currently applying for NATO, ie. Sweden and Finland, and outside of them).

Well, the Grayzone folk are still very sympathetic to Russia. Right wing culture warriors supporting Putin doesn't surprise me. As you said, they see the cultural establishment in the west as stridently opposed to them and their values, which they see closer to the vogue of Russian society, so they seek any disturbance to the status quo at home even if it may come from abroad. This isn't to say that I agree with them, just that I can at least rationalise their attitudes. As someone else had stated below, its not that I dislike left wing tankies, I'm just trying to understand their worldviews in their own ideological domain. China is hardly communist anymore, and sure we can go by the CCP's rhetoric that only "compassionate reeducation" is happening in Xinjiang for the sake of argument, but things like the crackdown on progressivism and "feminisation" of men are policies that the Chinese government (and western right wingers) openly and unapologetically espouses. What would a left wing tankie that laughs off Jordan Peterson's lectures (that is, the ideas of one pundit) on the crisis of masculinity say about China's own state guided programs to promote masculinity?

There was an amusing article linked on /ssc the other day (since deleted) which decried those who supported Russia's invasion of Ukraine as "brainwashed empire automatons" and "imperial apologists."

Whoops, I got that mixed up. The author actually meant that if you opposed Russia's war of conquest you were an imperial apologist.

All it is is that that some people hate western liberals (the people they know, and meet, and talk to on the internet) more than they do people committing war crimes. You've read the SSC essay.

About a decade ago I read a history of the Third Republic and found myself bemused that there were so many French who hated the opposing political faction that they would very literally prefer a German or Russian takeover (and the ensuing bloody purge of their rivals) than trying to work together and prosper. Now I don't find it so amusing.

So, were you bemused ("puzzled, confused, or bewildered") or amused?

I was bemused, and subsequently not amused.

The pro-surrender side which says the West and Ukraine need to capitulate ASAP to avert a nuclear war, really, really needs to address the problems that incentivizing nuclear blackmail this way are guaranteed to have. I've seen plenty of articles and posts like the one you listed, and none of them get into this issue despite it being extremely important and despite it being brought up as a response to basically every one of these articles. It's getting aggravating at this point. It's not like there are no responses at all, but the pro-surrender side just blissfully pretends like the issue doesn't exist and that nobody has even thought of it before.

I don't think the Ukranians should surrender. If someone was invading California, I like to think that I would be brave enough to volunteer to fight. I do think that the U.S. needs to take escalation concerns seriously when analyzing the risk-reward of providing various weapons systems, information, training, or support to the Ukrainian war effort. It's not as simple as "oh, someone waggled a nuclear dick around, they automatically win" - its a question of determining whether what we expect to reasonably be able to achieve by the desired policy is proportional to the risk being run of nuclear or other serious retaliation. And that determination requires (1) a clear statement of what the U.S. expects to achieve from its policies, (2) an evaluation of how important those goals are worth, and (3) an analysis of whether those goals are worth the potential costs imposed by Russian countermoves, up to and including nukes or other action targeting civilian infrastructure in the U.S. or in vital partner-countries/treaty partners.

This type of post sounds good and all, but runs into issues when it comes to actual implementation. It reminds me of the abortion debate we had on the motte a few months back when people were saying stuff like "the father should have a say when it comes to decisions regarding abortion". There are two parents involved in making a kid, so this type of thing sounds good, right? Certainly the man shouldn't be excluded from the process... except it runs into the issue that abortions are a binary (yes/no) issue. You either implement a patriarchal law which gives the father functional veto over the mother's right to choose whether to abort or not, or you don't do that and the father's wishes remain completely ignorable, i.e. the status quo. There are a few sticky compromises in some cases (legal paternal surrender if the man wants to abort but the woman doesn't), while there are outright none in others (if the man wants to carry the child to term, but the mother wants to abort).

Bringing this back to Russia, the issue is that Putin seems to be entirely willing to suicide the Russian nation to chase his revanchist dreams. He keeps doubling down every chance he gets: Crimea in 2014, invading in 2022 instead of remaining with the frozen conflict, mobilizing what'll probably amount to over 1m soldiers, formally annexing large swathes of another sovereign state, bombing his own pipelines (if that was indeed Russia who planted the bomb, which it probably was) which is akin to Cortez burning his ships, etc. The US has remained remarkably restrained in the conflict so far, only giving intel/training support and equipment, and even the equipment is limited to not be too escalatory (e.g. no jets, no long-range missiles, not even Abrams tanks so far). If Biden wanted to, he could do what the US did in Syria and Libya and declare a No Fly Zone, start using NATO planes to bomb Russian targets, and have the conflict cleaned up before Christmas. But Biden doesn't need to do this, because even just lend leasing some equipment is enough to get the Russian army to disintegrate as it's doing right now. Now, wars are highly unpredictable and it's not outside of the realm of possibility that mobilization lets Russia restabilize the front, but if Russia keeps losing as it's doing then we're going to end up seeing whether Putin's nuclear threats are credible, and at that point we only have the option to acceded to Putin's demands and let him blackmail us with nukes to a major degree, or call his bluff and risk nukes going off.

In short, we're barreling towards a situation where there might not be any wiggle room to do what you're saying we should.

Oh psh, we get blackmailed all the time. Its why we haven't reunited the Korean Peninsula, and energy blackmail is a decent explanation for half the horrifying shit we do in the middle east, like arming and funding the Saudi's quasi-genocidal conflict with the Iranians. Which, btw, is just as revanchist as anything Putin is doing, with an added soupcon of ethnic and religious bigotry tossed on top for fun. We also generally support Israel annexing other people's land too, so that's clearly not an American ethical red line either.

Also, while I don't doubt that we could achieve rapud significant conventional superiority over the Russian forces in a direct engagement, I do not trust that we could neutralize their nuclear forces immediately. Given that direct US armed involvement is likely to trigger general hostilities with Russia up to and potentially including a "fuck you" countervalue strikes, your "home by Christmas" glibness is, frankly, horrifying.

The Schelling point on nukes so far is that they can be used as a defensive deterrent, but they can't be used for offensive actions. Allowing Russia to use them for its offensive actions in Ukraine is what everyone is worried about. Nothing else about ethics (e.g. US supporting Israel or Saudi Arabia) matters compared to whether Russia gets to break the nuclear norm in Ukraine.

What do you mean "gets to?" They can decide to use a nuke or not, at which point we would have to decide how to react. And given that the Russians have agency, shouldn't it behoove us to, y'know, treat them seriously even if it means doing somewhat distasteful things? Given that question, why are people on the NATO side whipping up an anti-Russian crusade? Seems like a nation that is the target of a crusade, even if in the wrong, is more likely to do wild and unpredictable things - possibly including unwise things with nukes - than one which is being dealt with as a regional power.

By "gets to", I mean that they do it without sufficient deterrence by other powers such that the original Schelling point is broken. If that happens then all non-nuclear countries will now have significantly more incentive to get their own nukes, as they'll know they can extract significant concessions from great powers since the US just proved it works, and as a result any nation that's threatened by a potential new nuclear power now knows they have to get nukes themselves to have any chance at defense.

You either implement a patriarchal law which gives the father functional veto over the mother's right to choose whether to abort or not, or you don't do that and the father's wishes remain completely ignorable, i.e. the status quo.

There are 4 weakly increasing (so that more parents agreeing with an outcome doesn't lead to the opposite one) symmetric (to treat both parents equally) functions on two boolean variables: false, true, or, and. Applied to the abortion debate these correspond to: always abort, never abort, abort only if both mother and father agree to, abort if at least one parent wants to kill the fetus.

Which of these strikes you as "patriachal"?

Which of these strikes you as "patriachal"?

Letting the man have unilateral decision on whether the woman decides to abort or to not abort is patriarchal.

You haven't answered, you were asked about 4 options and what you say is none of this

I did, it just seems like you didn't like the answer.

More comments

I think there's simply widespread disagreement about the validity and brand of used game theory. Some people really do conceptualize their behavior with causal decision theories and some with timeless/functional kinds.

I'm not sure exactly what you're saying. Are you implying they don't think acceding to nuclear blackmail will have any major implications for proliferation? If so, they should state that explicitly and give some evidence to back their claim.

I think they see the immediate round of the game and their actions as influencing only or primarily the outcomes of that round, yes.

A Western dissident could plausibly find stories of Western war crimes (publicised against all odds and under much establishment wailing and gnashing of teeth) more believable than stories of Russian ones (publicised and signal-boosted by authorities who have the motive, means and, in the dissident's view, track record to make things up). They don't need to believe that their outgroup is worse than being a war criminal; it is sufficient to believe that their outgroup are the worst war criminals around.

This hilarious Noahopinion essay says that modern Tankies are about 2000 people on Twitter who get more attention than they deserve because they are so good at trolling other prominent left-Twitter factions.

I don't know about the 2000 Twitter trolls theory, but I agree with Noah that the root cause is anti-Americanism taken to the level where the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

I think the same applies to the increasingly numerous "right-Tankies" (such as the one who took over the CPAC twitter account), who see the American government and American-led alliance system as part of the woke enemy. I am not sure what you call right-wingers who express Tankie-like sentiments - Quisling seems unfairly harsh, although this really is the kind of sentiment that enabled people like Quisling and Petain in WW2.

A clever crypto-tankie and a guy who reflexively takes the anti-american position sound pretty much the same. Add some ironic Komrade-Posting and now they're larping as a Tankie, at least from the outside. "Non-tankie" Marxists still have to do a lot of mental heavy lifting to ignore all the horrific authoritarianism and mutilation of the human soul that happens every single time Marxists gain power. For people who say That Wasn't True Communism, Though, they sure do seem to be big fans of those regimes, which do much worse things than all the things they call the west a capitalist white supremacy for.

As a white nationalist and traditionalist who is more likely to undermine the ethnic homogeneity of my country and the traditions of my people, the Chinese, Putin or the people at Davos? Why would I feel loyalty to the same people who push critical race theory, want to deconstruct my culture and openly push migrants into my country while having killed millions of people in wars in the middle east? I am not a traitor when I support China since the group I would supposedly be betraying are people who want me banned off the internet, fired from my job and who want to force my future children to go to woke schools. China isn't my friend but I don't see how they or Iran are hostile to me.

As a Christian conservative in mid-20th century Europe, who is more likely to undermine the godliness of my country and the traditions of my people, Hitler, Mussolini, or the local Social Democrats and their friends in Moscow? Why would I feel loyalty to the same people who push secular education and republicanism, want to deconstruct my culture, and openly push rootless cosmopolitanism (and rootless cosmopolitanism) into my country while making nice to the people who killed millions in the Ukrainian genocides? I am not a traitor when I support Hitler since the group I would supposedly be betraying are people who want to behead my King and eject my God from the schools.

Vidkung Quisling is signing off.

I have lived through two constitutions, and my grandfather through three. I don't live in the same country as my grandfather was born in, yet I live in the same city. Institutions come and go, they are nothing but tools to organize a society. If a tool is extremely destructive and no longer serves a purpose, it should be tossed. I am loyal to the people, the nature, the culture and the traditions. Bad leaders and governments have been tossed out plenty of times throughout history. I can feel a strong loyalty to leaders that are good, I see no reason to follow destructive ones because of sentimentalism.

Wouldn’t you be worried about your ethnic group being subordinate to the one that wins the power contest?

The risk of China steamrolling through Western Europe is exceedingly low, and I live in a city that is a quarter muslim far away from Russia. The muslim population has a higher birthrate than the natives and brings in more of their relatives through migration. Russia isn't going to steamroll Europe and occupy us. If we are going to be taken by foreigners, those foreigners will be let in by the same people who blasted the migrant's homelands through wars and then wanted to take the refugees.

Even if worse comes to worst almost all parts of Europe have been occupied at some point and recovered. Finland is finish even though it was occupied for 800 years. Poland is fairly polish, most of the Balkan retains its culture despite the various ethnic groups seldomly having a country of their own. If Russia through some miracle managed to take western Europe they wouldn't be able to hold it and after a while it would go down in history as one of many wars in Europe that ultimately didn't destroy it.

If we end up like the Greeks in Turkey or the Greeks in Lebanon, there is no recovering.

If we end up like the Greeks in Turkey or the Greeks in Lebanon, there is no recovering.

Or like the Germans in Königsberg? Russia is one of the worst offenders in this respect.

Given how many of the more prominent figures in today's dissident-right/intellectual dark-web come from very left-wing/progressive backgrounds start I kind of suspect that it's less an issue of "left tankies" and "right tankies" so much as just "tankies" simping for whoever happens to be playing the role of Uncle Joe, and the politics are an affectation adopted after the fact.

I just yesterday saw this blog post on the curious little "MAGA Communist" groupings on... well, Twitter, mostly. These guys are often called tankies, but they seem different from "traditional tankies", who would usually be orthodox Marxist-Leninists, in that they combine Soviet-style trappings to agendas that aren't all that radical when you look at them - China-style state-oriented capitalist economics, anti-interventionism, and anti-liberalism of the sort that leads to appeals to the right wingers (who, of course, are usually flabbergasted why someone claiming to be a communist would see a common cause with them).

I think that it's important to try to figure out what the Soviet trappings - and sympathy for countries like China, Russia etc. - specifically represent here. This requires an intra-left perspective since, like it usually is when someone adopts a melange of views that looks like odd or contradictory, it's about various ways to create your own niche and self-representation within a certain ideological movement. What I think that the Soviet imagery often represents, within a left-wing context, is:

MASCULINITY: It's not exactly a particularly new observation that, whereas traditional socialist imagery was highly masculine, representing buff workers hitting anvils, aggressive strike action, guerrillas fighting imperialism with a rifle in hand etc., modern left-wing imagery is likewise rather more feminine. Indeed, up until 1970s, men were more likely to vote for socialist parties than women, and women preferred conservative parties. People who wish to return to a more manly left find Soviet imagery a good point of reference.

GROWTHISM: Yes, it might seem odd to associate Soviet Union with economic growth, considering the stall in growth before the fall of Soviet Union, but one thing that attracted people powerfully to communism in the 50s was the idea and promise that it would create more growth than capitalism. References to Soviet Union (or modern China) as engines of growth aren't meant to convey as much a belief to goodness of state economies in themselves but a rebuke to "degrowth" mentalities among the modern left, and an ideation of a return to an industrial, material-goods-oriented model; this is also why the MAGA Communist types seem to be enchanted with LaRouche Movement, which likewise talks a lot about reindustrialization and vast, Promethean projects.

ANTI-ANARCHISM: Modern leftist movements often refer implicitly or explicitly to anarchist goals and ideas (ie. Occupy was replete with anarchist symbology, the whole police abolitionist agenda is straight out of anarchism etc.) This reference to anarchism originated in the 90s as an explicit rebuke of Soviet times. People who don't like anarchism and anarchist for ideological or aesthetic reasons, or because they just see it as utopian and unworkable, then refer back to the Soviet imagery to try to "banish" this anarchist influence.

ANTI-LIBERALISM: There are people who explicitly gravitate to radical left because they find one or more aspects of liberalism to be wrongheaded. Maybe it's the technocratic, there-is-no-alternative rhetoric often associated with modern liberalism, maybe it's because they have social conservative impulses they do't even recognize themselves, maybe it's just contrarianism against the current hegemonic ideology. Soviet Union, of course, represented anti-liberal leftism.

ISOLATIONISM MASKING AS ANTI-IMPERIALISM: For people my age (ie. 30s to 40s), particularly Americans, political understanding was often formed in the crucible of the Iraq War era, which has left many left-wing people with a strong isolationist strain, as a reaction to the lies and bloodshed associated with the Iraq War and an automatic rejection of all American interventionism everywhere. If one ends up on the socialist far left, this can then often be represented as a principled anti-imperialist strand of thought.

In many ways, these sort of "tankies" are another representation of what I've called "ossified progressivism"in reference to TERFs; a progressive movement of a previous era is taken as a lodestone in a quest to bring clarity to spats and differences within a current left-wing movement. While it's not conservatism in itself, there's a certain conservative impulse in this attempt to preserve "the wisdom of the earlier movement", and thus it's not a wonder there's also an unstated belief there is a connection to actual conservatives here.

To continue to riff on this a little bit, it strikes me there is already a more established Western intra-left movement that offers "traditional" left-wing causes like welfare state, trade unions, managed capitalism etc. while being more masculine than the current progressive left, patriotic, pro-economic-growth, sort of appealing to social conservative tendencies (less in the sense of religious conservatism and more in the sense of "why are we talking about gays and stuff when we could we talking about actually important things like economy and foreign policy?"), willing to "get hands dirty to get things done" etc, willing to work with the right when needed.

People supporting such things could be found in the Social Democratic parties of Europe, generally on the right wing of such parties. For instance, in Finland, such right-wing social democrats were the bulwark of Cold War era municipal governance in major industrial cities, forming "brothers-in-arms" coalitions (referring to the idea of class cooperation arising from the conditions of WW2 era fronts) with the Finnish right-wing on the shared cause of car-friendly, "YIMBY" urban policies designed to house the newly urbanizing workers and give them the comforts of modern life while also ensuring that businesses got their piece of the pie.

Of course, one thing that makes it unappealing or impossible for the tankies who might actually find it otherwise more to their liking is that the traditional right-wing social democracy was strongly pro-Western, pro-NATO and anti-Soviet, serving an important role in the Cold War coalition. In the US, these ideas were found in the part of SPUSA that eventually became Social Democrats, USA, which, as far as I've understood was then basically killed by Vietnam War making it toxic among American left. Many right-wing social democrats eventually became neoconservatives.

However, this "traditional right" social democracy was one of the victims of the Third Way, which subsumed it to general technocratic neoliberalism which, while sharing many similarities, was still different enough, particularly in class composition, to eventually lead to the development where the conservative parts of the working class that had found traditional social democracy much to their liking started shifting to right-wing populism, which has often recast itself as the new defenders of the welfare state and the working man (gendered term very much intended).

The most charitable interpretation I can wring out of what you wrote about them is "sour-grapes edgelording." LARPing as Stalinists to own the (neo)libs, never mind whether or not the actual regimes wouldn't have also made them disappear. Not unlike Neo-Nazis, to some degree.

"tankies" is a wrong way to think about it.

the best way to think about those ideologies, and the history of those ideologies, in Russia and China, is that they are explicitly nationalist ideologies.

The Chinese revolution and subsequent takeover of the country by the Communists was a direct, slightly delayed response to the failures of the previous governments during the century of humiliation. The failure to properly defend and secure the country against foreign influence and invaders is considered a primary motivation for the revolution, not some great victory of the proletariat over the robber-barons.

The Russians considered the Soviet Union an extension of Russian empire, as the Soviet Union was Russian-dominated for the longest time. The democratic revolutions and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union are strongly linked to nationalism, with states wanting to call themselves anything other than 'comrade'.

If you're asking about why the "tankie ideology" remains popular, just go on a western college campus and talk to some humanities students for a few hours. If in a capitalistic system your worth can be measured in terms of cold, hard dollars, and your worth is intrinsically tied to the worth of the goods and services you can provide others around you, and for whatever reasons you are non-competitive...

...well, then, that's not exactly an incentive to have a pure, perfect capitalist market, is it?

I see them as perhaps the most ideologically confused people on the spectrum today. They wear the cloak of socialism while extolling authoritarian dictatorships, their words are like those I'd expect from Soviet career-bureaucrats with the KGB breathing down their necks. Because what else could possibly keep all these self-contradictions together?

It's not just that I disagree with them, I don't get them. I get why a dedicated right-wing culture warrior in the US today might support Russia's invasion, their reasoning is at least coherent. The only way I can make sense of tankies doing the same is if their fundamental moral axiom is just "USA bad", but that seems excessively uncharitable.

This is an extremely small number of people, and you can find an extremely small number of people Unironically supporting just about anything for just about any reason.

Why we pay so much attention to modern day tankies I don’t really know. But it’s not a mystery to me that some small number of people believe a contradictory narrative for no real reason- they just do.

One factor that should be acknowledged is that "We are alone. We are not represented anywhere" is a painful thought to have.

Yeah, looks like every political tribe has some level of "intersectionality" mentality hoping that the "smart outsiders" would support them.

My thoughts exactly.

I view them as not noticeably different from neo-Nazis. Both are inclined to romanticize the worst ideological failures of the twentieth century, and while both can find grains of value and/or justification here and there, the Everests of skulls suggest to those wiser folk that the search for meaning will be more fruitful elsewhere.

(Also, both groups have their LARPing edgelords and their true believers. The mix is likely similar.)

What's also noteworthy is that a huge section of the "far right" actually idolises Russia and China for the reasons I'd described above: they see the west as a decadent civilisation spreading wokeism worldwide, while those two are "strong, confident societies" resisting it and that their hegemony would end progressivism altogether.

I wouldn't say I idolise them in the slightest, but, say, if my country were ever to go to war with them and enact conscription, I would absolutely refuse to fight. Why would I want to fight for a country that despises me for being a white male? No, I think I'll just sit back and hope that you all wipe each other out.

Well, because the other would despise you for being an American. Because they'd kill you and take your stuff.

Idolizing Russia and China seems weird to me as a descriptor- the far right is pro-Russia to an extent and generally opposed to US foreign policy, but very anti-China and mostly only supports Russia to a point, not all the way. IRL far right wing groups more or less have the option of moving to Russia and building their own societies in the woods somewhere; it’s telling that none of them have taken it.

This whole war in Ukraine has definitely been interesting in the sense of what it has done to fringe online political communities, watching them turn on one another and split in what on the surface would seem to be unexpected ways.

Tankies supporting a right wing authoritarian invasion, Neo-Nazis cheering in support of the de-nazification of Ukraine, that sort of thing.

Tankies supporting a right wing authoritarian invasion, Neo-Nazis cheering in support of the de-nazification of Ukraine, that sort of thing.

These are precisely the things I would have expected, though. I suspect your problem is a surplus of gullibility -- thinking people mean what they say and are fundamentally honest.

If, like me, you interpret tankie to mean "fundamentally just hates America and western hegemony", it makes sense. If, like me, you think Putin is full of shit about the Nazi thing, and he's actually just mocking the west with that particular casus belli, and the Neo-Nazis are aware of it, their response makes sense.

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