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The part about it basically being a social hierarchy is so accurate, and such a good analysis of so many movements.

Antifa, Proud Boys, Tankies, Bugaloos... I think the media (left, right, mainstream) takes these movements to seriously... or more seriously than they should. I'm sure there are "true believers" in each of these, but for the most part, I assume its mostly made up of insecure kids, often with that anti-establishment personality.

We had these types in the 80's... vast majority of them outgrow it as they mature. My sister (who happens to be black) was married to a dude that use to be in a skin head gang.

Like you say.... social media gives power to vocal minorities... while all us normies are pretty much silent.

The exception is the Trumpers/Anti-Coviders ... way more of these people than is healthy. I have no explanation for them. I really downplayed the "election is rigged" crowd. I know quite a lot of them in real life and they are all talk. They bitch about it... rant about it... but they aren't out in the streets in mass like the pussy hat crowd was back in 2016-17. Basically they are bluster.

However.... the fact that some significant minority of House of Representatives is willing to entertain this foolishness to vote against ratifying the electoral college vote... that is some scary shit. Very depressing.

Also... the anti-coviders/vacciners... man... they are also frightening... the internet has enabled dumbasses to be fooled into thinking they are smarter than scientists.

Anyway... Happy New Year.

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Jan 1, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

"But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao / You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow..." - John Lennon

"Among the political right, William F. Buckley Jr, an arch-conservative, wrote approvingly of the song, only to then be rebuked by the far-right John Birch Society's magazine."

"Student radical Hoyland criticised Lennon for continuing to espouse an ideology the Beatles had expressed in "All You Need Is Love" when, in the context of 1968, "In order to change the world we've got to understand what's wrong with the world. And then – destroy it. Ruthlessly."

Before writing a reply, Lennon met with two other students from Keele University at his home in Surrey, on 3 December. Referring to Hoyland's letter, he said that a destructive approach to societal change merely makes way for a destructive ruling power, citing the Russian and French revolutions; he also said that the Far Left's complaints demonstrated their "extremer than thou" snobbery and their inability to form a united movement...

"Another influence on Lennon was his burgeoning relationship with avant-garde artist Yoko Ono and her espousal of sexual politics as an alternative to Maoist doctrine and other hardline philosophies adopted by the political left."

Ahh...the good old days....

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Jan 2, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

"She describes a process by which people with some justifiable anger against America... slip into a deep and monomaniacal hatred in which America defines evil and anything that opposes America is defined as good."

So, they're the left expression of the same impulse that drove Ayn Rand; [system/nation] hurt me, so it's bad, and the opposite of bad is good, therefor the opposite of [system/nation] is good.

Sigh. I hate politics written in crayon. It's so destructive.

-- Steve

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Hey Noah,

Very interesting article! I do disagree with some points made, but overall I think this is a fantastic analysis. I also noticed you focused nearly entirely on Twitter. there are also massive tankie subcultures outside of Twitter that you may want to check out. Of course there are the tankies on Reddit, tumblr, Instagram, the rest, but there is also a small Chan website called Bunkerchan made up of tankie-type refugees from when 8chan closed down. They have a board on their site called “leftypol” (a play on the /pol/ board of 4chan) which does have some anarchists and bordiga-style leftcommunists, but is mostly made up entirely of tankies,

or Marxist-Leninists and Marxist-Leninist-Maoists as they often call themselves. There is even a sub-subculture there orientated around Albanian Marxist-Leninist dictator Enver Hoxha and his bunker building. If you’re interested in diving a bit deeper into tankie culture and seeing just how crazy tankies can be, especially when they have their own isolated site, I suggest you check out bunkerchan and leftypol. They often have holodomor denial threads, Stalin apologia, and PRC support.

https://bunkerchan.xyz/leftypol/

(Side note, there was recently a controversy among the mod team, leaving some users to leave bunkerchan and go to https://leftypol.org/leftypol/)

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How do Tankies tend to square the circle with regards to intra-communist-regime-wars? Like, do they support the Soviets or Chinese in Cambodia? Support Vietnam or a China in that war?

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I don't know if I have more or less authority saying this, but @HotTankie is probably my favorite schtick account.

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Workers World and The Party for Socialism and LIberation are tankies (although they try to hide it) and deliberately try to attract POC, gay, trans.

Brown-red alliances and sympathies go back decades, to the Strasserites in the Nazi Party, and before that too.

Seriously researched and informative article about it.

https://ravingsofaradicalvagabond.noblogs.org/

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Jan 1, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

Michael Huemer effectively sums up the communist tankie worldview:

https://fakenous.net/?p=327

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Jan 1, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

Thank you for the primer on tankies. Was not familiar with that term before.

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Jan 1, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

Tankies, also (sadly) known as a nice chunk of the Latin American Left.

Seriously, on some countries their political position are as strong or stronger as that of the libertarians in America.

That makes me a bit skeptical about the idea of tankies as would-be Bernie fans. Perhaps they've always been there but never have a megaphone until now.

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It seems that tankies are more attached to states than to policy and theory. Some will claim any criticism of Marxist or Leninist theory to be "revisionism" in which "revisionism" is a code word for "against the revolution." In addition, most tankies I've talked to are kids from my high school that, when they talk about socialism, don't really go into detail and instead go off of cheap one-liners by Twitter users. Something else that tankies always resort to is whataboutism. For example, if I criticize the prison systems and suppression of people in the USSR and USSR-backed states like East Germany and Ethiopia, they will point to the U.S. prison system and say that I can't criticize any others.

I am a Titoist who despises U.S. imperialism, but even I know that the enemy of my enemy is not always my friend. Any socialist who is against self-determination for all people as working-class members is not a socialist.

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Hi folks. Caitlin Johnstone sent me: https://consortiumnews.com/2021/04/06/tankie-other-popular-terms-of-narrative-control/

"What these pejoratives accomplish, as Noah Smith is well aware, is the ability to inoculate the mainstream herd from the wrong think of anyone to whom that label has been applied. That way they never have to engage the argument or the evidence that gets laid out contradicting the official imperial line; as long as they can convince enough people to accept their pejorative as legitimate, they have a magical phrase they can utter to dispel any anti-imperialist argument which appears anywhere in the information ecosystem.

This is a major part of an imperial narrative manager’s job these days: smearing anti-imperialists and critical thinkers as untrustworthy. The debate is never to be engaged and counter-arguments are never to be made; why engage in a debate you will probably lose when you can simply explain to everyone why nobody should listen to the other side?"

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"If Gillis is right, then the emergence of tankies is one result of the failure of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Bernie’s whole sales pitch was “political revolution”, and when it became clear on Tuesday, March 3 that a political revolution wasn’t happening anytime soon"

Quick note: I think Gillis attributes the emergence of neo-Tankies to the failure of the Sanders '16 campaign ("five years ago"), which was also more of a drawn out process with quixotic fantasia ("here's how Bernie can still win!"), culminating of course in the horror of Nov '16, which would have been a very favorable environment for the emergence of new radical views and a commitment to the US as the geopolitical villain.

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Its the same the whole world over,

It the poor wat gets the blame

And the rich wat gets the gravy

Ain't it all a bloody shame!"

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Tankies are poisonous for the left. They should drop their intense hatred of the United States and join the good folks at the DSA in their endless struggle to hijack the Democratic Party. Bernie lost twice, which means there's nowhere to go but up.

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Politics in the USA are fucked up. Here in spain everyone who considers themselves as a leftist, except anarchists, support lenin as an icon of revolution. Not the same with stalin though.

We don't care that much about blacks, trans, gays etc, we focus on the working class (Although lately, due to american politics, these thoughts about minorities have come to spain). We leftists in spain, even the social democrats, don't like capitalism.

The situation is better in some parts of europe such as greece, where the KKE is strong.

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