https://lemmy.ml/comment/16125064
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this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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Conservatives and other right wing that's who. That's why you hear tankie leadership saying it.
Tankies are anti-lgbtq at their core. Anything to simp for totalitarians.
Maybe this is just an online thing? IRL I hang out with quite a few Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, and other folks who'd usually get categorized as tankies and I don't think I've heard them be bigoted towards queer people during the years I've known them. I'm also openly queer so it's not like I'm just an "ally" saying that they don't see bigotry happening just because they ignore it.
These same folks are also organizing most of the pride events around here and running volunteer security for protests and drag shows, so I'd have a hard time believing that they're secretly bigoted while spending a lot of their time, money, and taking personal risks to foster a queer community and keep it safe.
I think this scenario highlights the difference between communists and tankies. Tankies are a subset of communists (or at least claim to be) but not all communists are tankies.
I'm sure it'll be hilarious when I explain to my co-organizers that the Stalinist in our group isn't a tankie because they support LGBTQ+ rights
What I mean is that, lacking any other info, communist does not automatically equal authoritarian. There is a tragic amount of overlap between those two Ven diagram circles but it is not an intrinsic thing is all I'm pointing out. Of course I know nothing about the specifics of this situation in particular, and I'm not so arrogant as to talk as though I do. I'm just making a general point.
Makes sense, and thank you for the clarification!
How old are these IRL people, just out of curiosity?
They're between 20 and ~40 years old, and about 25 people in total in my close circles
Well I suppose you could have not seen it.
However, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Considering the big-tent-tankies quite openly discuss (or refuse to discuss) the issue leaves me with ample proof of the movements leadership holding a certain position.
Actually, most of the people who'd normally be described as tankies (Stalinists, Marxist-Leninists, CPUSA members, other flavors of communist that want to seize state power and use it against the capitalist class) that I've met are some variety of queer themselves. In my organizing circles usually the queer folks outnumber the few token cis-het people, so again, it could just be that my IRL circles don't represent the norm.
For context, I'm usually organizing at the local level. I know that things suck at the national level in a lot of orgs like IWW and CPUSA, there's toxic leadership in there that have seized power in order to keep their own positions and are really ruining the image and functioning of both orgs. Yeah, CPUSA leadership might suck, but your local communists that you might write off as tankies might actually be really caring people.