The whole article is quite funny, especially the lists of most used tankie words, or the branding of foreignpolicy as a left-wing news source.

  • throwhimintheriver@lemmygrad.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 year ago

    i’m thinking about their claim that “the predominant topic of discussion” among tankies is the uyghur “genocide.” like bro there’s 99 more percentiles of non-uyghur related topics. i see a post about xinjiang on here like once a month.

    • CicadaSpectre@lemmygrad.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Tbh, I see more posts on here about the war in Ukraine than Xinjiang lately. We only ever talked about it because liberals were obsessed with creating a genocide narrative. Now that their short attention spans have moved on to the next act of dehumanization, why would we bother talking about something we know isn’t real? The only reason we ever have to discuss half the mainstream topics about China is to deconstruct the myths around them.

      Not that these “researchers” would know that.

  • Water Bowl Slime@lemmygrad.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 year ago

    Whoever the people are that got their comments published on page 33 and 34 deserve a special flair (does Lemmy have those?)

    Also, it’s so funny how the authors keep calling the Communist Party of China the CCP instead of the CPC. For table 10 they had to switch between these keywords because the tankies community is the only one that can get the acronym right LMAO

    • Addfwyn@lemmygrad.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      I almost appreciate the CCP/CPC thing, because it gives me a shorthand as to know whether the upcoming argument will have any merit or just be bullshit.

      I still look at their actual argument on their merits, but 95% of the time it has gone exactly the way I expected.

  • rostselmasch@lemmygrad.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 year ago

    "Thus, tankie is now used to describe much more than the set of communists who supported specific events from the Soviet era. The term tankie now covers communists who support “actually existing socialist countries” (AES); especially those with a Stalinist or authoritarian leaning. Although there is not really a concrete definition, recent work by Petterson [ 94] provides a succinctdescription of tankie:

    Tankies regard past and current socialist systems as legitimate attempts at creating communism, and thus have not distanced themselves from Stalin, China etc. "

    Yes, well recognized, the term is vague and can mean everything or nothing. It does not make sense. There are people who see only the Soviet Union as a successful workers’ revolution, but not the rest. For some, China represents revisionism, so does Vietnam, or North Korea, or Cuba, etc. I’ve met people who are all about Enver Hoxha, everything else is revisionism. That is such an enormous range of different views, yet they are all tankies. I’ve witnessed Trotskyites beeing called tankies because they are against NATO.

    To work with such a stupid definition is absolute nonsense. I myself have been called a tankie often enough, because I keep pointing out that the term has no substance in historical and political discourse. I even never discussed something political. Pointing out, that this term is stupid is enough to be a tankie - my experience.