I'm not one to post often. I'm not really one to rant to strangers online often, even. But, after migrating from r*ddit to lemmy, I've had this on my mind and this seemed like the place to vent.
I see discourse about tankies constantly on Lemmy. This struck me as odd. Why are these so called tankies such a threat? Why do I see people calling themselves left-wing and attacking tankies more voraciously than neoliberals and, sometimes, even fascists?
I think I know the answer, just as well as most people who will read this. These are the Zizeks of the world: people who do indeed think in a left-wing oriented way, but fail to recognise that they're also Western to the core and the biases that come with that.
I sincerely care about this much less than the actual reason I'm making this post. That is: why don't these people notice that their talking points, left-oriented as they may seem, always end up supporting US allies or attacking US enemies? I mean, do these people not see that Ukraine winning the war is a boon to the US, regardless of who is "right" in that conflict? Many other such cases, but I think I've made my point, or, rather, my confusion, clear.
That's it. That's the post.
People who leave behind terrible world views often don't leave behind the thinking. For example, consider protestant Christianity. A lot of atheists in the US were originally protestants. But we've all seen the internet atheist Islamophobes turn into little Richard Dawkins muppets. They have identified their religious beliefs as being wrong, but they haven't stopped thinking in terms of protestant work ethic, prosperity gospel, homophobia, and so on.
I think the anti-tankie crowd is the same way. They've correctly identified capitalism and the US is wrong, but they still believe in American exceptionalism, Cold War propaganda, white supremacy, misogyny, and all the other ways of thinking. If they had a socialist way of thinking (i.e. being against unjust hierarchies, using material analysis, etc.), they would stop with the anti-tankie rhetoric.
and the good ones are still VOTE libs like... eh y'all don't care about some irrelevant bloggers i stopped following years ago
I think the anti-tankie crowd sees tankies as being this. They see chuds saying shit like "Hitler did nothing wrong" and denying the holocaust, then see MLs (a good portion of whom in the west are former chuds) denying the alleged communist crimes like the "Holodomor" and Uyghur genocide, and defending infamous communist leaders like Stalin and Mao (whom the libs see as being at least as bad Hitler, if not moreso), and they understandably come to the conclusion that tankies are red fash and not to be trusted.