I’ve been on Lemmy for over a year, where I learned that there’s some difference between liberals and leftists, though what those are, I don’t know. I also had never heard the term tankie before Lemmy. I’ve never cared to look any of these terms up though. Probably makes me one of them…
If you were a tankie you’d open your comment with a 7 paragraph on why you’re not a tankie, followed by a dissertation that would make a HD2 autocannon proud by deflecting so much
There is a simple test to determine if you’re a tankie, specifically.
Did Tiananmen Square happen? Specifically, was it bloody, consented/orchestrated by the CCP leadership, and resulted in the deaths of unarmed civilian protesters?
Was it wrong that it happened?
If both answers are yes, you’re not a tankie. You believe that oppressive regimes are evil regardless of which side of the political spectrum it spawns from.
Bonus points if you think Stalin was anything but benevolent. If you think his methods were “tough, but firm,” then you’re a tankie.
Wasn’t tankie originally cold war British Communist slang to refer to people who agreed that the Hungarian revolution of 1956-1968
Was funded by the CIA and that rolling the tanks in was as such an appropriate response
(No I don’t have this memorized so I had to double check but that was the original meaning)
Tankie is a derogatory term used to left-punch against those who support socialist countries that opposed US+EU hegemony and colonialism.
Leftist is a generic word to talk about everyone who considers themselves progressive and wants things like a welfare state, but it’s a relatively umbrella term that includes or not socialdemocrats (pro-capitalist reformists) depending on who you ask.
Liberal, in the English language and due to US influence, is generally used in a derogatory way to refer to western progressives who believe capitalism can be stewarded and reformed into social justice. In the rest of the world it’s a word more often used to refer to people who believe capitalism is best left untouched and it will take care of itself.
Liberal is used differently in different places, which causes a lot of the confusion. Kind of like how conservative sometimes means resistant to change and sometimes means regressive depending on who has adopted the label.
The oversimplified pattern that I see for a linear political spectrum, which is too simplified to be accurate when one gets into the weeds but easier to explain conceptually is:
Leftist – Liberal – Centrist – Conservative – Far Right
In the US liberals are called leftists by the conservatives who are actually the far right because our overall spectrum is shifted pretty far to the right. Centrists aren’t really in the middle as much as they are trying to appease both sides. Again, this is very oversimplified but when you hear that liberals aren’t really leftists they are basically saying that liberals are not nearly as far left as they claim to be.
The right-of-center factions seem far more definitionally fleshed-out in the public mind. (In the US at least.)
I’m in my 30s, and a news and politics junkie (a very cursed special interest to have in 2025) and I’m still trying to figure out where the dividing lines are on the left. It also seems like right-wingers either get slowly pulled right with the Overton window, or just stay where they’re at for life. Whereas us lefties can have a tendency to hop around, trying on different ideologies like they’re Linux Distros.
There’s nothing innately wrong with that (unless you get sucked into problematic beliefs/behavior). We just tend to be perennially unsure about “correct” beliefs, which may contribute some to the division and the somewhat blurry lines between factions on “the left”.
For being so anti-US, tankies keep.on repeating the us-centric, capitalist rebranding where neoliberals, democrat party, right wingers who have no support for liberal principles of emancipation, rights and freedoms etc are claimed as libs. It’s like they want to surrender what leftists strive for and support right wing newspeak.
It’s really worth taking the time to understand different political ideology from a historical perspective. And an especially important one, liberalism, is basically the water in which we swim, so it often goes unnoticed.
It’s common to try and put things on a spectrum and say this is left and that is right, but this form of reductionism really doesn’t match history or practice.
Yeah, I get called a tankie on the regular now, just because my user account is on .ml and I still don’t actually know what it’s supposed to mean. Apparently, I’m supposed to have political opinions on topics that I’m significantly more ignorant on than the people who call me that.
When the Hungarian workers revolted against the Soviet Union with demands like a minimum wage and the right to strike, Stalin sent in the army with tanks to put down the revolution. Many Stalin supporters said this was justified.
A tankie is one of those supporters who will make excuses for the use of tanks to suppress rebellion.
When you make an account on any social media moderated by someone else, you’re putting them in a position of power over you. We haven’t yet figured out a technology for social media without these hierarchies, and until we do, the only choice we can make is who to give power over ourselves.
People want you to make an informed and measured choice on who to give power over yourself.
The literal definition is someone who unquestionably supports anyone who waves a red flag. In practice, it means anyone who ever acknowledges a good thing done by a socialist state, or even refutes misinformation about them. If you say, “Cuba had a successful literacy program,” there are people who will call you a tankie, even though it’s just objectively true.
Crazy to see this accurate comment downvoted even though it explains it perfectly. That’s the difference. Liberals are race reductionist right wing capitalists who are occasionally sympathetic to limited social democracy.
Neoliberal means pro capitalist, but with a fe social safety nets. Neoliberal and liberal are often used interchangeably adding to the ever increasing list of definitions for liberal.
I came here for funny memes and shitposts. Now I’ve got to answer for choosing the wrong instance because apparently it is run by tank enthusiasts who we all hate for reasons I don’t understand.
Dessalines and Nutomic, the two lead lemmy devs, think that Tianenmen Square didn’t happen. They think the genocide currently going on in China of that particular group of muslims (Uighyur or something like that, I can’t spell it right) is actually a social program for their own good. They think that Ukraine is legitimately filled with Nazis in their government and military and that Russia is rescuing the poor populace from their oppressors.
Effectively, China and Russia can do no wrong. Dessalines in particular regularly bans people from lemmy.ml who say otherwise.
The term “tankie” is in reference to the tanks China drove over people during the Tianenmen square massacre.
Edit for the sake of jackasses:
Better explanation of the term “tankie” from another commenter here. And it’s spelled Uyghur.
So to be clear, your answer is “No, I don’t have anything beyond a weak as hell ad hominem based off of entirely imagined character traits and motivations.”
What are you actually trying to say when you claim I have a lack of curiosity in the matter? Don’t be chickenshit. If there’s something you believe is false about what I said, be out with it.
Someone’s pissy. Two main points of disagreement, let’s start at objectively wrong. From wikipedia:
The term “tankie” was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defence of the Soviet use of tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions.
So Tankie has never been about Tianenmen square, but it is the sort of lazy take one might land on when they don’t have much curiosity about history and do their best to connect the dots high school gave them.
To the more misleading wrong:
They think that Ukraine is legitimately filled with Nazis in their government and military and that Russia is rescuing the poor populace from their oppressors.
Russia is not a communist country, and hasn’t been in 30+ years, this is important to remember because too often people act as though Tankie’s reverence for the USSR applies at all to Russia, it does not. Broadly the tankie take on Russia/Ukraine is that fundimentally NATO is a militaristic arm of western Neo-colonialism, and that after encroachment Russia started the war. Then during the Biden administration in particular, the US used this as a proxy war against Russia, and like with many of it’s proxy wars, the US funded and armed politically radical groups. It is very much a view of there are no good guys in this war. I don’t even really fully agree with this reading but again, my point was more that you don’t really look into what your arguing and the laziness shows most notably in your guess about the history of the term tankie, and an apathy to even run spell check.
You’re the type of person that drives people from social platforms or, at the very least, calm conversation.
The person you responded to made a statement on wanting to join Lemmy for fun discussion/humor and you responded with a politically fueled response that really had nothing to do with their post.
Like, just chill for five seconds and have a normal conversation with people looking for the same…
The heat was directed at a different user and added via an edit after the initial comment was made, because that other user threw vague ass shade instead of saying what they meant to begin with (that I was wrong about the origin of the term tankie and that it was lazy to not check my spelling, so clearly my point amd that of others saying similar wasn’t worth anything).
One of the core tenets of getting a good lemmy experience is to block early and often. If you think my response of describing what people mean when they call the main devs tankies was somehow too political, then please block me. And memorize where that button is, because I guarantee this is nothing compared to the folks actually trying to make points politically around here, lol.
Apologies. My misunderstanding from your original comment and edit. Thought you were coming out with the heat over a basic comment, but now see the follow discussion you’re talking about. Thank you.
Left and Right are terms coined to easily differentiate between which side of the aisle you say in the French parliament and also which brand of American politics you were into at the time.
The left was championing the American liberalism that was coming out of the Age of Enlightenment and the Revolution, the right was …. Well the right.
Shockingly both sides didn’t actually care about people but rather their side gaining power
I say this because left and right are relative to whoever is measuring them, most on the left do not consider American liberalism to be the left anymore than an American liberal would think those on the left represent them.
didn’t downvotes you, but broadly speaking the way liberal gets used by Marxists/anarchists, it’s referring to the people who still think we should have/reform capitalism. social Democrats are the left wing of that.
‘leftist’ is bit of a squishy term because it doesn’t actually distinguish people’s position on the political economy
Liberal is an actual ideology. A hallmark of liberal thought is that business can do things better than government.
Leftist thought starts at capitalism is bad, and is much deeper than you think.
Democrats of all types are liberal. The kicker is so are the Republicans.
It’s one reason that Republicans are able to push the Democrats to do anything they want. They don’t fundamentally disagree on things.
Even the compass is flawed, though it’s somewhat better than the linear representation. I feel like, though the average person may mostly inhabit a particular quadrant, the majority will have something they resonate with in at least one of the other 3 quadrants (even if they won’t admit to it, haha).
My instinct, though, is that we should spend less energy squabbling about classification and more on getting along and lifting each other up. Expressing that, though, will in itself earn you the label of either a “commie libtard” from the right or “not a real leftist” from the tankie crowd (which is pretty rich coming from them lol). It’s a game that can never be won.
I was a liberal up until this year and I’ve been radicalized pretty hard but that also means I fucking despise the people who are hardcore haters of liberals. They’re on the right side, just need more pushing.
I’ve been on Lemmy for over a year, where I learned that there’s some difference between liberals and leftists, though what those are, I don’t know. I also had never heard the term tankie before Lemmy. I’ve never cared to look any of these terms up though. Probably makes me one of them…
If you were a tankie you’d open your comment with a 7 paragraph on why you’re not a tankie, followed by a dissertation that would make a HD2 autocannon proud by deflecting so much
There is a simple test to determine if you’re a tankie, specifically.
Did Tiananmen Square happen? Specifically, was it bloody, consented/orchestrated by the CCP leadership, and resulted in the deaths of unarmed civilian protesters?
Was it wrong that it happened?
If both answers are yes, you’re not a tankie. You believe that oppressive regimes are evil regardless of which side of the political spectrum it spawns from.
Bonus points if you think Stalin was anything but benevolent. If you think his methods were “tough, but firm,” then you’re a tankie.
Fish. Not fish.
Tank autism is cooler then train autism. There i said it. I regret nothing.
LEICHTER PANZERSPÄHWAGEN
*PANZERSPÄHWAGEN
Wasn’t tankie originally cold war British Communist slang to refer to people who agreed that the Hungarian revolution of 1956-1968 Was funded by the CIA and that rolling the tanks in was as such an appropriate response
(No I don’t have this memorized so I had to double check but that was the original meaning)
Pretty much that, yes.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tankie
Mildly amusingly… it is apparently also a slang term for a tank engine, as in, a steam powered train.
Choo-Choo!
Tankie is pretty clear.
The whole liberal/leftist thing is… a bit manufactured edgelord wankbait.
All of the terms are clear.
Tankie is a derogatory term used to left-punch against those who support socialist countries that opposed US+EU hegemony and colonialism.
Leftist is a generic word to talk about everyone who considers themselves progressive and wants things like a welfare state, but it’s a relatively umbrella term that includes or not socialdemocrats (pro-capitalist reformists) depending on who you ask.
Liberal, in the English language and due to US influence, is generally used in a derogatory way to refer to western progressives who believe capitalism can be stewarded and reformed into social justice. In the rest of the world it’s a word more often used to refer to people who believe capitalism is best left untouched and it will take care of itself.
Liberal is used differently in different places, which causes a lot of the confusion. Kind of like how conservative sometimes means resistant to change and sometimes means regressive depending on who has adopted the label.
The oversimplified pattern that I see for a linear political spectrum, which is too simplified to be accurate when one gets into the weeds but easier to explain conceptually is:
Leftist – Liberal – Centrist – Conservative – Far Right
In the US liberals are called leftists by the conservatives who are actually the far right because our overall spectrum is shifted pretty far to the right. Centrists aren’t really in the middle as much as they are trying to appease both sides. Again, this is very oversimplified but when you hear that liberals aren’t really leftists they are basically saying that liberals are not nearly as far left as they claim to be.
The right-of-center factions seem far more definitionally fleshed-out in the public mind. (In the US at least.)
I’m in my 30s, and a news and politics junkie (a very cursed special interest to have in 2025) and I’m still trying to figure out where the dividing lines are on the left. It also seems like right-wingers either get slowly pulled right with the Overton window, or just stay where they’re at for life. Whereas us lefties can have a tendency to hop around, trying on different ideologies like they’re Linux Distros.
There’s nothing innately wrong with that (unless you get sucked into problematic beliefs/behavior). We just tend to be perennially unsure about “correct” beliefs, which may contribute some to the division and the somewhat blurry lines between factions on “the left”.
For being so anti-US, tankies keep.on repeating the us-centric, capitalist rebranding where neoliberals, democrat party, right wingers who have no support for liberal principles of emancipation, rights and freedoms etc are claimed as libs. It’s like they want to surrender what leftists strive for and support right wing newspeak.
It’s really worth taking the time to understand different political ideology from a historical perspective. And an especially important one, liberalism, is basically the water in which we swim, so it often goes unnoticed.
It’s common to try and put things on a spectrum and say this is left and that is right, but this form of reductionism really doesn’t match history or practice.
Yeah, I get called a tankie on the regular now, just because my user account is on .ml and I still don’t actually know what it’s supposed to mean. Apparently, I’m supposed to have political opinions on topics that I’m significantly more ignorant on than the people who call me that.
When the Hungarian workers revolted against the Soviet Union with demands like a minimum wage and the right to strike, Stalin sent in the army with tanks to put down the revolution. Many Stalin supporters said this was justified.
A tankie is one of those supporters who will make excuses for the use of tanks to suppress rebellion.
deleted by creator
Hmm, interesting, thanks!
You’re welcome!
When you make an account on any social media moderated by someone else, you’re putting them in a position of power over you. We haven’t yet figured out a technology for social media without these hierarchies, and until we do, the only choice we can make is who to give power over ourselves.
People want you to make an informed and measured choice on who to give power over yourself.
The literal definition is someone who unquestionably supports anyone who waves a red flag. In practice, it means anyone who ever acknowledges a good thing done by a socialist state, or even refutes misinformation about them. If you say, “Cuba had a successful literacy program,” there are people who will call you a tankie, even though it’s just objectively true.
Liberal: means of production should be privately owned.
Leftist: means of production should be publically owned.
It really is that simple.
Crazy to see this accurate comment downvoted even though it explains it perfectly. That’s the difference. Liberals are race reductionist right wing capitalists who are occasionally sympathetic to limited social democracy.
Neoliberal means pro capitalist, but with a fe social safety nets. Neoliberal and liberal are often used interchangeably adding to the ever increasing list of definitions for liberal.
I came here for funny memes and shitposts. Now I’ve got to answer for choosing the wrong instance because apparently it is run by tank enthusiasts who we all hate for reasons I don’t understand.
It’s not hard to understand.
Dessalines and Nutomic, the two lead lemmy devs, think that Tianenmen Square didn’t happen. They think the genocide currently going on in China of that particular group of muslims (Uighyur or something like that, I can’t spell it right) is actually a social program for their own good. They think that Ukraine is legitimately filled with Nazis in their government and military and that Russia is rescuing the poor populace from their oppressors.
Effectively, China and Russia can do no wrong. Dessalines in particular regularly bans people from lemmy.ml who say otherwise.
The term “tankie” is in reference to the tanks China drove over people during the Tianenmen square massacre.
Edit for the sake of jackasses: Better explanation of the term “tankie” from another commenter here. And it’s spelled Uyghur.
Happy now?
It’s very telling the commitment people have to this conversation before they form strong opinions.
I’m so sorry that the lack of two ddg searches ruins my argument for you.
It’s even more telling that your only counter to my comment was to attack minor problems.
Edit: I’ve edited my comment. Do you have anything of actual value to say now?
My point wasn’t really to ‘counter’ anything, especially when you don’t seem to have enough curiosity in the matter to double check even spelling.
So to be clear, your answer is “No, I don’t have anything beyond a weak as hell ad hominem based off of entirely imagined character traits and motivations.”
What are you actually trying to say when you claim I have a lack of curiosity in the matter? Don’t be chickenshit. If there’s something you believe is false about what I said, be out with it.
Otherwise you’re welcome to fuck off.
Someone’s pissy. Two main points of disagreement, let’s start at objectively wrong. From wikipedia:
So Tankie has never been about Tianenmen square, but it is the sort of lazy take one might land on when they don’t have much curiosity about history and do their best to connect the dots high school gave them.
To the more misleading wrong:
Russia is not a communist country, and hasn’t been in 30+ years, this is important to remember because too often people act as though Tankie’s reverence for the USSR applies at all to Russia, it does not. Broadly the tankie take on Russia/Ukraine is that fundimentally NATO is a militaristic arm of western Neo-colonialism, and that after encroachment Russia started the war. Then during the Biden administration in particular, the US used this as a proxy war against Russia, and like with many of it’s proxy wars, the US funded and armed politically radical groups. It is very much a view of there are no good guys in this war. I don’t even really fully agree with this reading but again, my point was more that you don’t really look into what your arguing and the laziness shows most notably in your guess about the history of the term tankie, and an apathy to even run spell check.
You’re the type of person that drives people from social platforms or, at the very least, calm conversation.
The person you responded to made a statement on wanting to join Lemmy for fun discussion/humor and you responded with a politically fueled response that really had nothing to do with their post.
Like, just chill for five seconds and have a normal conversation with people looking for the same…
They said they didn’t understand, so I explained.
The heat was directed at a different user and added via an edit after the initial comment was made, because that other user threw vague ass shade instead of saying what they meant to begin with (that I was wrong about the origin of the term tankie and that it was lazy to not check my spelling, so clearly my point amd that of others saying similar wasn’t worth anything).
One of the core tenets of getting a good lemmy experience is to block early and often. If you think my response of describing what people mean when they call the main devs tankies was somehow too political, then please block me. And memorize where that button is, because I guarantee this is nothing compared to the folks actually trying to make points politically around here, lol.
Apologies. My misunderstanding from your original comment and edit. Thought you were coming out with the heat over a basic comment, but now see the follow discussion you’re talking about. Thank you.
Left and Right are terms coined to easily differentiate between which side of the aisle you say in the French parliament and also which brand of American politics you were into at the time.
The left was championing the American liberalism that was coming out of the Age of Enlightenment and the Revolution, the right was …. Well the right.
Shockingly both sides didn’t actually care about people but rather their side gaining power
I say this because left and right are relative to whoever is measuring them, most on the left do not consider American liberalism to be the left anymore than an American liberal would think those on the left represent them.
a liberal is probably your average usa democrat that is considered conservative by european standards
a leftist is anyone that democrat might consider too radical (like bernie sanders who, for a lot of leftists, might just barely be considered leftist)
edit: i’m being downvoted - am i wrong? i was under the impression that this was the difference between a liberal and a leftist
didn’t downvotes you, but broadly speaking the way liberal gets used by Marxists/anarchists, it’s referring to the people who still think we should have/reform capitalism. social Democrats are the left wing of that.
‘leftist’ is bit of a squishy term because it doesn’t actually distinguish people’s position on the political economy
The term leftist is a bit blurred as it’s used to describe anything one micron to the left of fascism today.
Liberal is an actual ideology. A hallmark of liberal thought is that business can do things better than government. Leftist thought starts at capitalism is bad, and is much deeper than you think. Democrats of all types are liberal. The kicker is so are the Republicans. It’s one reason that Republicans are able to push the Democrats to do anything they want. They don’t fundamentally disagree on things.
the problem with left and right is that there is more than one dimension they’re being used in. for instance see the political compass.
also the most basic definition of liberal is unregulated. it doesn’t necessarily mean just economic. could be drug use or gun posession etc.
Even the compass is flawed, though it’s somewhat better than the linear representation. I feel like, though the average person may mostly inhabit a particular quadrant, the majority will have something they resonate with in at least one of the other 3 quadrants (even if they won’t admit to it, haha).
My instinct, though, is that we should spend less energy squabbling about classification and more on getting along and lifting each other up. Expressing that, though, will in itself earn you the label of either a “commie libtard” from the right or “not a real leftist” from the tankie crowd (which is pretty rich coming from them lol). It’s a game that can never be won.
Pretty decent description.
I was a liberal up until this year and I’ve been radicalized pretty hard but that also means I fucking despise the people who are hardcore haters of liberals. They’re on the right side, just need more pushing.