this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2025
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What you are seeing in 'tankie' and “read theory” communities is an anti scientific epistemic style that treats ideology as a filter that outranks evidence. When they say the reasons are “complex” and involve propaganda, they are not doing ordinary source criticism that checks documents, reconciles contradictions, and updates beliefs under constraint.
In the sciences, “theory” is a deliberately fragile summary of what has survived contact with data, it must expose itself to being wrong through clear predictions, and good practice means you actively cultivate the ability to withhold belief when the evidence is thin or messy; in a lot of sociology, and especially in Marxist derived subcultures, “theory” often functions less like a falsifiable model and more like a lens, a vocabulary, or even a doctrine that tells you ahead of time what counts as evidence and what must be discounted as “ideology,” which flips the direction of inference so that evidence is recruited to serve the framework rather than constrain it.
Tankies are invoking a built in rule that inconvenient data about a favored regime can be dismissed as structurally tainted by bourgeois institutions, Western media, liberal academia, or intelligence services
That move makes the worldview functionally unfalsifiable, because counterevidence is reclassified as propaganda while any supportive anecdote is treated as proof. Historically this connects to Marxist Leninist political practice where the vanguard party claims privileged access to historical truth and where “correct line” competes with open inquiry, so truth becomes something defended for its political usefulness rather than tested for its correspondence with reality.
The Cold War did involve real propaganda and information warfare on multiple sides, and that kernel of truth gets inflated into a blanket permission slip to disregard any hostile reporting and to treat doubt as ideological contamination. Online this becomes a status ritual in which fluency in canonical texts substitutes for empiricism, and where moral anger at capitalism plus anti imperial identity incentives push people to defend any state positioned against “the West.”
The result is that atrocities are minimized, rationalized as necessary, or outright denied, not because the evidence is genuinely ambiguous but because the community’s habits convert theory into a replacement for falsifiable claims.
While your prose is a little embellished, I think it's a good diagnosis of the situation.
One thing I'll say is that your appeal to the sciences might not be the most persuasive. Science can certainly inform the realm of philosophy and ideology, but I don't believe that it's equipped to answer the sorts of questions the latter broach. Axioms cannot be proven in the real world.
It's funny though. I know .world blocks hexbear, but even in this thread, I've seen Marxist-Leninists call themselves materialists/empiricists - just as you claim them to be dogmatists.
I always appreciate seeing discussion on Lemmy with MLers tho. I'm apprehensive to adopt their ideology in full, but as someone who's American Gen Z and growing up in the decline of an Imperial Core nation, I'm looking for ways that can get us out of this real, perceivable, falsifiable hellscape of a country. American Conservatives can't do it, American Liberals got us here via the Rachet Effect. The only other option is Left, but I see dangers in moving that direction as you have to avoid falling into the same traps that fascists do.
Yes, every tankie tells me facts are 'propaganda'. and 'everything is propaganda'.
Which is, as you said, a worldview in which there is no such thing as truth, facts, or objectivity. Everything is ideology and nothing can exist outside of it. It's a form of relativism, wherein mass atrocities, oppression, and violence are totally cool, as long as it's your side that is doing it. If the other side does it, only then is it 'bad'.
That's a very long and convoluted way of saying "tankies treat communist theory as dogma". As a tankie: I didn't become a tankie by reading theory, I became a tankie by reading demonstrable facts.
I don't support the Soviet Union because "it followed Marx and Lenin", I support the Soviet Union because it provided universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, it abolished unemployment, it guaranteed housing and abolished homelessness, it created the lowest levels of economic inequality seen in the history of the region, it defeated Nazism and saved tens of millions from extermination, it almost tripled life expectancy and saved tens of millions from abject poverty, hunger and disease, and it gave support to emancipatory anticolonial projects everywhere in the globe. Running the numbers is not "atrocity minimization" as you claim, it's pragmatic experimentalism.
For me, it's actually backwards: it just so happens that the projects that in my view have achieved the most liberating and emancipatory goals in history were following Marxist doctrine, which for the unfamiliar, is explicitly materialist and experimental in nature.
It's been fun to watch the tankies dribble in and do exactly what they are accused of. Thanks for going along with it and making everyone here's point for them.
Your original comment (translated to understandable English from your pompous-ass style): "tankies treat theory as dogma, disregard empirical evidence and data as propaganda, and mold their worldview as a contest to see who's more anti-western".
My reply: "me being a tankie is actually the result of data comparisons between capitalist and AES states for the measurable empirical improvements in quality of life and the reduction in victims, together with the support for emancipatory projects elsewhere"
Your reply: "tHaNkS foR pRoViNg My PoInT"
Imagine unironically typing like that, lmfao
do you often make a habit of mocking people for how they talk or communicate? Not very proletariat of you, elitist scum.
Surely the proletarian way of writing is overly pompous using obscure latinisms?
And no, I don't make a habit of mocking people for how they type, my original response was detailed and serious, but when the commenter above decided to become a smug shit, I lost any reason to respect them.
I mean, yes, actually, the pseudo-intellectualism that people like me demonstrate, (which maybe includes a pompous vocabulary to you "actually educated" folk), is the proletarian way of writing. Surely you're not implying that someone privileged enough to get a college education AND spend their time online demeaning people is the proletarian speaker in this conversation?
You lost any reason to respect them? Crazy low barrier. You sure are a person of the people.
See, I'm guilty of that kinda stuff, too. And I'm annoying and preachy like you, too.
Disengage
CS undergrad I bet, they all talked like that when I had to share lectures with them. It's just funny that this particular specimen is waxing on about data and evidence based thinking and not just doesn't present any but actively ignores it since it's in this very thread 🤣
What do you think a tankie is?
It used to mean a communist who supported the USSR’s decision to send in tanks to Hungary to protect the revolution from reactionary forces, but now it’s just a thought-terminating straw man for the modern red scare.
I wasn't talking to you
lol comparing being a genuine communist during the red scare to your plight of being trolled on the internet by actual working class people is so out of touch.
What part is out of touch?
A red scare is manifestly happening - see Maduro being kidnapped this morning. Trump constantly talks about jailing and deporting socialists. And online, the term tankie is being used as a way to discredit and slander all communists. People are very serious about their tankie hate here.
And it’s 2025, things that happen on the internet have real impacts on IRL society.
I get that you’re just trolling me (great SLAM, btw), but if you’re actually a leftist, you might want to think about who you’re serving when you try to undermine other leftists.
The out of touch part is that you feel comfortable posting your thought crimes online while simultaneously trying to push a "tankie is the new red scare :<" narrative.
There is so much wrong with this I don’t even know where to begin. Why wouldn’t I publicly push against a the beginnings of a red scare? Especially in a leftist space?
I suspect you’re just a troll though, so I’m going to stop feeding you now.
Yeah, feel free to crawl back into your hole.
Let me break something down for you, lil guy.
You have two choices.
You can do your best to prove me wrong and submit a better argument. I'm not revising anything I said, because you still sound like the dipshit in this scenario. You gotta try again.
Or you can back off with the cop-out "not feeding the troll" after failing to provide even a single shred of an attempt to defend your position. To everyone watching: you lost. Your side: foolish. Optics: bad. Potential comrades: pushed away.
So if you're right, why don't you fucking tell me how, dipshit? Because to everyone watching, you just said some dipshittery.
Btw: tankies aren't leftists. They are authoritarians. That's not leftism.
Go read "on practice" and "on contradiction" by mao zedong. Hilarious conjecturing based purely on vibes, nothing to back anything up. The fact that you're waxing on about tankies getting radicalised by ignoring data while ignoring every "tankie" telling their story about radicalisation in this very thread and not presenting anything to back up your steep claims makes it pure comedy.
They really keep doing this and then wonder why no one likes their tired repeated points.
More data for you to ignore I guess lmfao
absolutely no self awareness bud
Award for least self-aware lib of 2025 goes toooo....... It was a hotly contested category folks but TropicalDingdong was able to snatch it with seconds to spare