Oh it was awful. I was about your age back then, and I had been raised religious which I rebelled against by trying to be completely rational, to the point of trying to suppress all my emotions like a robot, which made me miserable. I had no self confidence, crippling social anxiety, and all sorts of bad ideas steering me in completely wrong directions.

I don’t think I had met any openly queer people at that point and the first time I did I was like, “I don’t get it, I would never express myself that way, because what would people think?” while of course completely sidestepping the question of how I actually felt or wanted to identify because again, suppressing my emotions. Spoiler alert: probably should’ve examined that!

The best decision I ever made in my life came a few years later when I studied abroad in Japan. It exposed me to a lot of different perspectives in the international house and also gave me interesting experiences to talk about which helped with my social anxiety (actively identifying and working on it with therapy techniques later on probably did more).

Politically, I had no real awareness of leftism and was into Ron Paul and libertarianism, because he was the loudest antiwar voice at the time. It’s also a great ideology for if you’ve never had a boss or a landlord. I was mostly just glad to be rid of Bush, and I had some hope that Obama would end the war, prosecute people in the Bush administration for war crimes, and stop mass surveillance. I was very naive at that time.

I feel like this was a time before a bunch of movements or cultural tendencies became associated with the right. The problems were still there, but there were also some non-shitty people included in them:

• It was before Gamergate, but there was a lot of sexism in video game communities.

• I remember being into “transhumanist” ideas that would these days be associated with Elon Musk and his sycophantic techbro fanboys.

• Many prominent “New Atheists” either had or would break right and support the wars in the Middle East, with logic like, “We’ve already fixed sexism completely here in the West (and the feminists who don’t agree with that are just a bunch of dumb broads), the big problem is Islam,” ignoring the threat of Christofascism at home.

• Even stuff like 4chan, I had friends who were on /b/ back in the day who turned out normal and chill. There was an element of rebelling against the Pat Robertson, stick-in-the-mud, “D&D is witchcraft” types, and part of that was reveling in rule-breaking, and so they delighted in shock images and made fun of anyone who cared too much about things in response to that.

I guess the positives were that people were less divided and it was easier to have hope for the future. But like there were reasons why those things changed, either movements/groups showed their true colors, or valid criticisms of those groups became more widely accepted. I much prefer the division and conflict that we have now compared to the “post-9/11 world” where virtually everybody was in agreement about slaughtering Muslims. And yeah I had more hope for the future but it was because I though technology would fix everything for everybody and didn’t understand how it could hurt workers and benefit capitalists, it was based on ignorance.

I believe in Live Internet Theory. The vast majority of people I interact with are real humans, bots are often easily identifiable, and even then there’s usually a person behind the bot.

I may be the dumbest man in Athens, but I still know a thing or two.

Does original sin exist?

What’s silly about it? Tankie is when you support using tanks, I don’t support using tanks in Ukraine so therefore I’m not a tankie. The people who want to send tanks to Ukraine are tankies.

Or we can recognize that that definition doesn’t reflect how it’s actually used. And the way it’s actually used is generally towards people who promote peaceful, diplomatic solutions over military ones.

Everyone believes their cause is just. Every conflict ever can be framed as defensive. The US has compared every major conflict since WWII to stopping Hitler, even cases like Vietnam. My mother once quoted, “All that’s necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing” in the context of supporting the invasion of Iraq.

If You investigate and deconstruct the concept of “defensive” wars (as You are so wont to deconstruct concepts) then You will find that they are entirely dependent on socially constructed ideas about “legitimacy.” If Switzerland does not have “legitimate ownership” of Zurich, then to station troops there or to fight against Zurich being occupied by foreign powers would make Switzerland the aggressor. It could be argued that, when the US invaded Vietnam, it was merely “coming to the aid” of the Republic of Vietnam, which had requested our aid (nevermind that they were our puppet). Likewise, in Ukraine everything about how you view the conflict is dependent on who you think is legitimate - the “consensus” interpretation in the West is that the central government is legitimate and the separatists are just Russian puppets, while the pro-Russia view says that the separatists are legitimate and the central government just Western puppets.

So V.I. Lenin observes:

…the bourgeoisie [of all the imperialist nations] are always ready to say—and do say to the people—that they are “only” fighting “against defeat”.

Funny enough, this observation was shared by Leo Tolstoy, the Christian Anarchist/Anarcho-Pacifist, who writes:

For ever since the beginning of the world, the use of violence of every kind, from the Inquisition to the Schlüsselburg fortress, has rested and still rests on the opposite principle of the necessity of resisting evil by force.

World War I is a prime example of how things can go wrong. There had been a major socialist movement at the time across every major country in Europe, and there had been a significant fear that, should the imperialist powers start a major war like that, it would lead to a coordinated revolution across all of Europe. But instead, when war broke out, the social democrats all found reasons to rally around the flags of their respective countries. They were committed to keeping their positions within the realm of acceptability, and the war narrowed that realm of acceptibility to the point that coordination with ordinary people of other countries (or genuine opposition to the war) was considered treasonous. So, all the social democrats of Europe rallied around their flags and drafted proles to go out and kill each other for no good reason.

If Your “anarcho-antirealist” stuff is supposed to have any merit at all, then it ought to allow You to recognize that the concept of “defense” is largely arbitrary - or are You seriously of the belief that national borders have some inherent natural truth when even the law of gravity does not?

The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On.

OK, next time someone calls me a tankie, I’ll just say, “Actually, I don’t support sending tanks to Ukraine” and I’m sure that’ll clear things up and convince them I’m not a tankie.

WHAT?

YEAH, I LOVE BEING HERE WITH THE PEOPLE I’M WITH TOO

I had a part time job at a UPS warehouse in Tennessee when covid hit. We got a new manager, and so they gathered everyone in the warehouse together into a small break area, everyone was right next to each other and nobody was wearing a mask, and the manager gave us all a speech about how much he cared about our safety. There were TV screens in the break areas that had been set to display information about covid safety guidelines that were being blatantly violated.

The same day, my supervisor informed me of a new policy: they’d had too many people “faking” being sick and calling out, so from now on you have to come into work even if you’re sick, and they’ll decide if you’re sick enough to go home. I with I had gotten it in writing because what she told me was definitely illegal, I actually called OSHA afterwards but it was my word against theirs. This was the only time I’ve quit a job with no notice, I remember it clear as day, I told her, “People are dying” and she replied, “I have a business to run,” and I said, “I don’t care.”

I wanted to set the damn building on fire. I was fortunate to have saved enough to take time off work because I lost all confidence that there was anywhere around me that would be a safe place to work.

Don’t judge what a tankie or Nazi is by insults on the internet, hyperbole and bullshit rule.

Words are defined by common use. If the common use of the word “tankie” is to throw it at people who oppose war, then that’s what it means now. You can say it’s defined as being pro- war, but I’ve never seen it used that way.

Back in the day when word originated they loved the T-34 tank and Russia in WW2 and so on.

Well sure, WWII is basically the go-to example of a necessary and justified war. There was a time in my life when I labelled myself as a pacifist and the counter-example that everyone always brought up was WWII.

At that time, my position was that that was one exception from like 70 years ago and we shouldn’t make a rule from the exception considering how many unjustified wars have been fought since then. Now, my position is a little bit more flexible and moderate to account for that and a handful of other cases: now I say, “no war but class war,” and WWII was a class war.

However, my position hasn’t actually changed much in practice since those days. The vast majority of wars and violence are systemic and fought for bourgeois interests, so I still oppose them. Only very rarely does violence happen in the opposite direction, for example if we compare the death tolls of Luigi Mangione to Brian Thompson.

And what do you think the “tank” in “tankie” comes from?

It comes from accusing people who oppose war of supporting the other side’s tanks, as I just explained to you in my previous comment.

Name one piece of misinformation I posted. You’re just lobbing baseless insults again.

Having a different ideology or perspective from you is not misinformation. I said nothing that was factually inaccurate.

Not my fault this is the only level of discourse y’all are capable of. I tried to have an intelligent conversation with you, you just started slinging random insults based on nothing.

But you don’t.

Yes I do.

You subscribe to a pro-war, pro-colony ideology

And you poop out of your mouth, see I can make shit up based on absolutely nothing too.

You’re thinking of social democrats.

Non sequitur.

Case in point: Anyone who wants to stay out of conflicts automatically supports Russia. My actual reasons and motivations are totally irrelevant. Thank you for proving my point.

You’re thinking of liberals.

Not everyone the term was or has been applied to supported them. But regardless, they still used whatever influence they had to push for fewer tanks.

If I’m an American and I’m out protesting the Vietnam War, and I say that we should end the war and stop building tanks, and that the Vietnamese communists were justified in rising up against the colonizers, does that make me pro-war? Does it make me pro-tank? Is the “peaceful” stance the one that says the Vietnamese were not justified so the US should stay in the war? That’s nonsense.

But that’s the exact same logic you’re applying here and everywhere else. If someone supported peace and deescalation with the USSR during the Cold War, then they’d be accused of supporting or not sufficiently condemning how they handled the Hungarian uprising. If someone opposes the war in Ukraine, they’re accused of supporting or not sufficiently condemning Russia. If someone opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they were accused of supporting or not sufficiently condemning 9/11 and Al Qaida. And so the peace advocates are always depicted as being violent, and it works the exact same way every single time. War is Peace.

At this point, I accept that it’s always going to happen that way and that I’ll always be “the bad guy” for opposing war. I used to be a “terrorist sympathizer,” now I’m a “tankie” in another ten or twenty years, I’m sure I’ll be some other horrible thing. Who cares.

Actually, I do. That’s completely consistent with my point.

The people who coined the term wanted to take a more aggressive approach to dealing with the USSR. They were particularly concerned that tensions might deescalate due to the change of leadership from Stalin to Khrushchev and the explicit foreign policy approach of “peaceful coexistence” with the West (contrary to some strains of communist thought that had called for expanding the revolution to other countries). Those in the West who supported deescalation and refused to take a hard line in support of the Cold War were labelled as “tankies” for their insufficient hawkishness.

The Western leftists and peace advocates the term was created to condemn obviously had no control over the policies over the USSR. To the extent that they could influence the policies of their home countries, they pushed for deescalation, for building fewer tanks. It was the “anti-tankies” who wanted more tanks, as they always do.