this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2026
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"Tankie", as used in online discourse, just means "person to my political left making an argument I can't refute".
That is completely false and you know it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
It is about shilling for authoritarian dictatorships like Russia and China.
Sure, if your definition of "shilling for" is "rejecting US State Department narratives about".
Otherwise, it's like I said, it means "person to my political left making a point I can't refute".
https://welshundergroundnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/blackshirts-and-reds-by-michael-parenti.pdf
No, it means someone who would really love living in a dictatorship as long as the dictator was Xi Jinping, Stalin, or Kim Jong Un.
Yes, that's the hyperbolic slander it tries to assert when in reality it is just a buzzword for imbeciles to use when they want to stop engaging with the argument.
Authoritarians are authoritarians, they just like different flavors of boot.
Authoritarian is a useless word. The US is far more authoritarian than anybody those supposed "dictatorships", but the serious people in suits you've outsourced all your thinking to would never say it out loud.
See, that's the classic tankie shit I'm used to. Whataboutism and defending dictators.
And there's the ShitLib thought-terminating cliches we know and love.
Once you've called them "Tankie" you don't have to engage with any actual arguments they made, you can just dismiss them! And obviously any comparison between evil Tankie dictatorship and glorious free democracies is just "whataboutism", so you don't have to think critically about it at all!
https://welshundergroundnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/blackshirts-and-reds-by-michael-parenti.pdf
Parenti wrote about you thirty years ago. Chapter 3 of that book is all about you.