Liberals just call anyone they don’t like a tankie!
This is often true. There has been regular red-baiting of mild social democrat Jeremy Corbyn, recently accusing him of being a spy for East Germany in the '80s. The right wing of the Democrats at one point was calling any Bernie Sanders supporter a Russian-influenced alt-leftist. William Gillis of the Center for a Stateless Society recently said of us 'Remember when libcom was about as tankie and class-reductionist as you would ever encounter in the radical left, and we all viewed them as evil suspicious bastards because they wouldn’t all outright id as anarchists? ’ presumably due to our hosting and promotion of anti-state and post-Leninist Marxists.
Therefore if someone is using ‘tankie’, they may be objecting to a specific leftist ideology that prioritisies geopolitics over class struggle, or they might just be punching left. When liberals have a go at ‘communism’ they often mean the Soviet Union (and let’s be honest sometimes it’s tempting to tell people they’ll be first in the gulags after the revolution when they do this, especially if it’s fucking Jordan Peterson).
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