“The workers were really in the saddle then...during the revolution. Communists killed it long before Franco got there.”
— Old Anarchist from “Slacker”
In 1956, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in order to crush a revolution against the Soviet-supported regime. Some members of the Communist Party of Great Britain supported the invasion. These pro-Soviet leftists were derisively labeled “tankies” by other British leftists, for the tanks that were used against the Hungarians. Twelve years later, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia to suppress the Prague Spring, and this time a smaller faction of hardline British communists supported it. The term “tankie” was again applied. “Stalinism” and “red fascism” are generally synonymous terms.
But these British communists were hardly the first pro-Soviet leftists with an authoritarian bent. In the Spanish Civil War, the Republican (left) side was eventually taken over by the communist faction, which took its orders from Moscow. It ruthlessly purged and persecuted many other groups of leftists, implemented authoritarian policies, and then proceeded to lose the war to the Nationalist right. These events are well chronicled in Antony Beevor’s The Battle for Spain, and George Orwell gives an up-close and personal account in Homage to Catalonia.
So as long as communism has existed, there have always been a few leftists who sympathized with brutal violence by authoritarian great powers as long as those empires had communist flags.
The Soviet Union is long gone, of course. But now, with Chinese power on the rise and lots of entrepreneurial Twitter shouters looking to capitalize on leftist energy among the youth, social media has been seeing a rebirth of tankism. It’s sad that we have to trot out (heh) this ancient pejorative term to describe a modern social movement, but this is the age of Twitter. So, as an amateur anthropologist of Twitter Tankies, let me share a few of my observations.
Some people casually apply the word “tankie” to any extreme leftist, and/or anyone who defends the People’s Republic of China. But this is sloppy. There are other kinds of extreme leftists, including:
Anarchists, who have no use for authoritarian regimes
Very fired-up “Berniebro”-type socialists
Non-tankie Marxists or Marxist-Leninists, sometimes called Trotskyists or Trots
Various other very small factions that may or may not still really exist
Furthermore, though most tankies defend China, not everyone who defends China is a tankie. Some PRC defenders are rightists. Some just happen to like China a lot. Some are just worried that criticism of China will increase racism in America. And so on.
So in my opinion, “tankie” should be limited to people who:
Are communist (usually calling themselves “Marxist-Leninist”)
Tend to support authoritarian, repressive, and/or militaristic actions of the People’s Republic of China and/or Joseph Stalin
(To complicate the matter, there are apparently some highly esoteric disagreements among tankies over the PRC, with a few holding the position that it has abandoned the pure and noble legacy of Mao, blah blah blah. But I think it’s fair to call both PRC-supporting and PRC-rejecting tankies by the same word, unless otherwise necessary.)
On Twitter, tankies often use the hammer-and-sickle emoji ☭, the red pennant emoji 🚩, and/or the flags of the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea. They often call themselves “Marxist-Leninist” in their bio, though as mentioned above they are not the only ones to use this term. Since “tankie” is a pejorative word, you will only occasionally see tankies using it to describe themselves; it’s more of a “you know them when you see them” sort of situation.
At this point you might be saying “OK, so show me some examples of what you’re talking about.” To which I respond: “Nothing could give me more pleasure, except possibly dripping habanero juice into my eye.” But anyway, here are some tankie tweets, starting with the all-time greatest.
This tweet really embodies the essence of tankism. It styles China as “anti-imperialist”. A Chinese flag represents “decolonization”. The irony was not lost on the internet, who attacked Rainer Shea so badly that he eventually deleted the tweet.
But he remained one of Twitter’s quintessential tankies.
Here are a few more examples.
Anyway, if you managed to read all of those, you’re starting to get the idea of what tankies are all about. And you can see that some of these tweets, such as the last one, have somewhat high levels of engagement!
You can already see the basic outlines here. Stalin did nothing wrong. Gulags and concentration camps are actually education and jobs provision programs. China is a virtuous pro-worker state, and its repressive acts are Western lies. Etc.
One additional note: Tankies have a strangely puritanical streak, sometimes calling for harsh crackdowns on drugs and denouncing sex workers. This fits with their general authoritarian bent.
For many many many more of these tweets, check out the Twitter account @HotTankie.
Some people think that the tankies are astroturfed by Russian trolls or China’s famous “wumao”. Others blame the rise of The Grayzone, a publication with strong tankie leanings that has been vigorous in denying the existence of concentration camps in Xinjiang. But while there are probably a few Russian and Chinese trolls skulking about, and while Grayzone does have a decent Twitter presence, tankism is more likely simply a faddish edgelord youth movement feeding off of the general leftist energy released by the politics of the last few years.
Since I’ve only interacted with tankies on Twitter, I’ll defer to the perspectives of non-tankie leftists who have encountered the movement in real life.
In one thread, socialist @QueenSorviaV recounts her time in tankie culture.
💜 Sorvia 💜@QueenSorviaV
A thread that serves as a brief reflection and observations from my days (about a year) as a Tankie:
2:49 AM · Jul 16, 2020
13 Reposts · 91 Likes
She depicts tankism as an ideology defined fundamentally by anti-Americanism. She describes a process by which people with some justifiable anger against America — due to its treatment of minorities or overseas military actions — slip into a deep and monomaniacal hatred in which America defines evil and anything that opposes America is defined as good. As she describes it, these people then cluster into a close-knit, highly paranoid, almost cult-like subculture:
💜 Sorvia 💜@QueenSorviaV
This anger also became directed towards individuals. The obsessive paranoia of the “deep state” led to a resurgence of democratic centralism. A need to police views. Power struggle for ideological control within the group. Pretty brutal stuff for social media
2:49 AM · Jul 16, 2020
44 Likes
Meanwhile, anarchist @rechelon describes some of the same social dynamics among tankies, but attributes their emergence less to burning rage than to a kind of social media entrepreneurialism. Here are a few excerpts from his thread:
William Gillis 🏴@rechelon
My sincere answer for why tankies reemerged five years ago is that movements are social hierarchies and newbie teens don't want to compete for status in existing illegible/inaccessible spaces like anarchism, so they resurrected a dead/empty scene that had trappings of status.
Sadie Farrell 🏴 ↙️↙️↙️ @Marusya_1312
Google's having trouble answering my question https://t.co/Wio3MMZmsO
10:51 PM · Aug 16, 2020
293 Reposts · 1.52K Likes
William Gillis 🏴@rechelon
Leftism exploded in social cachet for a variety of reasons, and newly minted leftists needed to slap an identity, a brand, a flag of status and association on themselves. "Stalin did nothing wrong, USSR looked cool" is a quickie that requires no work or long acculturation.
10:53 PM · Aug 16, 2020
27 Reposts · 509 Likes
William Gillis 🏴@rechelon
When I first started hearing whispers of anyone under 50 actually defending Lenin it was newly minted trans girls in abusive cult collective houses. They weren't like getting this shit from contact w/ actual leninists, they were inventing a new social milieu from whole cloth.
10:57 PM · Aug 16, 2020
19 Reposts · 386 Likes
William Gillis 🏴@rechelon
I mean literally we're talking about people who had been Bernie Bernie Bernie liberals and then the moment prospects for further standing in that scene fell out with the collapse of his campaign they turned on a dime and got into Stalin did nothing wrong, Castro's a hero, etc.
11:17 PM · Aug 16, 2020
15 Reposts · 279 Likes
William Gillis 🏴@rechelon
They were DESPERATE for belonging, status, identity, etc. Particularly that which could be gotten from behind a computer screen by joining like a discord or fb group or watching a few youtube videos. Anarchism was simply inaccessible by comparison.
11:25 PM · Aug 16, 2020
11 Reposts · 284 Likes
If Gillis is right, then the emergence of tankies is one result of the failure of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Bernie’s whole sales pitch was “political revolution”, and when it became clear on Tuesday, March 3 that a political revolution wasn’t happening anytime soon, some of the young people in the movement either moved toward the idea of actual physical revolution (anarchists, tankies, Trotskyists) or away from the idea of revolution and towards the hope of political evolution (social democrats).
But like their long-ago predecessors in the Spanish Civil War, today’s tankies are specialized not in actually bringing about revolution, but in infighting against other types of leftists.
Tankies fight a lot with some other leftist factions. Though they view Bernie supporters as a pool of potential recruits, they rail against Bernie himself, constantly calling him an imperialist and a false standard-bearer for the left. They fight incessantly with social democrats, and reserve their utmost disdain and fury for anarchists (who don’t much care for them either).
Here’s a tweet where you can see socdems and anarchists fighting with tankies in the replies.
Comrade Waluigi ☭🚩@Comrade_Waluigi
Tankies aren’t real. You just don’t like Communism.
2:37 AM · Dec 27, 2020
215 Reposts · 2.63K Likes
And anyone who would be tempted to call Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a “tankie” — please don’t. The tankies despise her.
And when AOC spoke up for Tibet, the tankies launched a massive Twitter assault against her. Ditto the activists in Hong Kong:
sameera khan@SameeraKhan
AOC expressing support for Hong Kong separatism/terrorism and encouraging rioters/terrorists to stand up to Chinese state (left-wing market socialist) while simultaneously refusing to challenge US state (right-wing capitalist shithole) and enabling US imperialism. Some socialist. https://t.co/ujX3X1BzGu
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC
Organized, civil, & massive nonviolent pro-democracy direct actions have been happening in Hong Kong, too - in this instance, to expand civil liberties & demonstrate against an extradition bill. Pay attention. These are hundreds of thousands of people organizing & showing up ⬇️ https://t.co/UxELVqhJam
9:01 PM · Dec 24, 2020
162 Reposts · 1.11K Likes
Remember, tankies are optimized for infighting. Anarchists are their chief rival for the mantle of revolutionary vanguard (and a far more credible bearer of that mantle, since anarchists actually fight in the streets while tankies’ idea of revolution is to plant a Chinese flag in front of a courthouse). Bernie and AOC are popular, which makes them appealing targets; tankies can get attention by attacking them. And social democrats, to tankies, are merely capitalist pigs who happen to wander into their mentions.
Naturally this makes the tankies plenty of enemies, but that’s what they thrive on.
Oh, and tankies HATE George Orwell. Burning, seething hate.
Tankies are not a danger to the Republic. Although anti-American sentiment has grown in the U.S., it’s nowhere near the point where an ideology that paints America as Great Satan will have broad appeal. Nor are social justice-minded American activists likely to embrace the memory of Joseph Stalin. No politician in the U.S. federal government has ideas that could be even remotely described as tankie. Even when Stalin himself was going around looking for tankies to promote, he found only a few outside of situations of desperate civil war.
Believe it or not, most can easily recognize that empires with red flags are still empires.
In fact, in the U.S., tankies are primarily a threat to the newly emergent American left. Not only do they take up the left’s time and energy with constant infighting, but they give the entire left a bad image in the eyes of the general public. The average normie Twitter user probably only very dimly understands the difference between tankies and other leftists, and conservatives are happy to conflate the two. Just as center-left liberals often spend our time getting pincer-attacked by socialists and conservatives, now socialists must spend their time getting pincer-attacked by tankies and conservatives. Whee!
Tankies do illustrate some of the ways that Twitter hurts political discourse, however. The fact that a couple thousand people can terrorize large segments of left Twitter demonstrates that the discussion platform is a huge force multiplier for loud extremists with lots of free time. A couple thousand people is absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of electoral politics, but when they’re all screaming at you in your mentions, it feels like a vast army. Twitter’s political function is to gather bands of like-minded crazies from all over the world and concentrate them directly into the mindspace of journalists and politicians. We should really have a deep and long conversation about whether this is a healthy thing for any society.