#tankie

Pretty hard to tell them apart sometimes.

But the main thing is that I think even many other leftists seem to misunderstand our politics, not to mention liberals and conservatives

One particular issue is the issue of imperialism. I say this because I saw a communist on here talk about how tankies support Russia’s “imperialism” because we believe it’s not as bad as US imperialism. I have problems with that assumption and framing ofc, but I think much of the imperialism discourse comes from the fact that we are operating on different definitions

To most people, imperialism refers to the exertion of political or military or economic influence by any nation. This is the wikipedia definition, it is the mainstream definition

Marxist-Leninists of course use Lenin’s definition, which is entirely different. We may understand a country’s foreign policy as exploitative, aggressive, or generally problematic, but that does not necessarily equate to the Leninist definition of imperialism. If we claim it’s not imperialism without specifying that, it just sounds to others like we condone everything basically

I think us tankies have got to get better at clarifying our theory and our perspectives, because a lot of the hate comes from severe misunderstandings of what we’re talking about

Sometimes just out of curiosity I look up anti tankie tags on tumblr and 99% of the time the criticism is targeted at things that most of us don’t believe