Asking because some of them supported Cuba a few weeks ago but now Cuba is enemy #1 and the US just killed 32 Cuban officers who were directly defending Maduro as his personal guard.
It kinda seems like you can’t be an enemy of Venezuela and also a supporter of Cuba so like… Are there any states left that these self-identified leftists still support at all?
I get where you’re coming from. I don’t mean it as the anti ML pejorative like people who’ve bought into red scare propaganda.
I define it as the people who deny any wrongdoing by governments and call anyone who does liberal.
Edit- Looks like we’re on the same page meow. We seem to mostly have had an issue with semantics.
The ever shifting goalpost of tankies. Somewhere between all people left of Bernie Sanders and the last USSR hold-out soldier hidden in the bunkers of Siberia surviving off of 40 year old rations resides the true meaning of “tankie” within the Liberal mind. Shifting back and forth between the two as convenient for the current argument. Get cornered by someone asking specific definitions? It’s the holdout soldier only. Vaguely attacking all anti-imperialists in comments online? Back to everyone left of Bernie Sanders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
It’s motte-and-bailey fallacy you’re doing, probably unintentionally. I encourage you to shed the last vestiges of Liberalism that you hide inside. If you are “against tankies” at the end of the day you’re still on the Liberal side of the line. Hop sides. Switch to the side of socialism and the proletariat, not Liberalism and bourgeois optics and lies.
I see.
The thing is that there really aren’t any people that fit that. No really. That’s not a particularly common position among any communists at all. At most it occurs when a communist is particularly fed up with a person’s behaviour as most conversations tend to occur in bad-faith and at that point they default to a sort of “fuck you stalin didn’t throw enough nazis in pits” sort of attitude.
For the majority of communists, Stalin is like, 70 good 30 bad. Similar situation with Mao, in fact that’s the official position of the CPC as well.
My experience with people throwing the word tankie around is they actually just tend to mean any communist, and when you ask them to clarify further the goalposts continually move around to a degree where basically any communist falls into the definition. That does not seem to be the case in your example, but I would argue that, generally speaking, you’re not anti-communist at all in any way because the “tankie” that you oppose is a boogie man that doesn’t actually exist outside of weird situations or examples of teens being teens.
To add on, I think you should really look into why certain revolutions are considered “authoritarian”. Firstly, a quick point - it’s almost always non-white countries. The more white-adjacent they are (Cuba has a large population of white latino/a, Fidel Castro was white Latino) the less “scary” they appear to the Liberal hivemind. African, Middle Eastern, Central Asian and East Asian revolutions always get called “authoritarian” even when they are doing the same things that Cuba did, or even less in some cases.
Hence this meme:
Yeah, I get it. I don’t like that meme.
why don’t you like that meme, elaborate. It has scare quotes around “tankies”, it’s a tankie meme pointing out that these are all communists. Self-proclaimed Marxists and Leninists and Marxist-Leninists and USSR sympathizers. People that the average western “leftist” likes to think positively about but not learn too much about. “Tankies” as they would be called today, or “pinkos” or “commies” or “reds” as they would be called decades ago. Tankies is a way of carrying on the anti-communist name slinging to people who consider themselves “left” and think they are “the real socialists” despite them being a new flavor of leftoid (2000-2026) and coming in and trying to take over the domain of “tankies” (historical communists).