Anarchism

First thought: Mattias Desmet's book The Psychology of Totalitarianism, may offer some insights.

... Oh, I thought I was going to have a long list of thoughts about this. But none better not already covered in that^ are yet springing to mind.

As a couple of poster here are already demonstrating, they discover that western nations have lied about communist nations, but they don't learn the more fundamental lesson that they shouldn't trust everything a nation says. So instead of adopting a nuanced view, they just counter believing everything a western nation says with rejecting everything a western nation says and instead believing everything a communist nation says.

People deify their favorite State and overlook the bad it does. All States commit atrocities so it is easier for everyone to look away rather than say "I like x about how y nation handles z" and be specific about it.

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.

It's a tiny fringe, just here on Lemmy they can be quite noisy 🤷

it's the same mindset that has "good cops" backing "bad cops" no matter what. the idea that someone like them can be wrong is an affront to lots of people, because it makes them face the reality that they could be wrong some day as well. and nobody enjoys admitting they're wrong. so instead of thinking critically, they circle the wagons and reject anything that criticizes anyone like them.

Tribalism

They opposed one tribe so they joined another

why one would deliberately praise any authoritarian system this hard.

To quote Bertrand Russell: "Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power."

To put it simply, a lot of tankies crave power but just don't want to admit. They are simply faux concerning for their own ulterior motive. I saw a meme from one of the .ml instances stating that communism simply "wants to improve" society. But I was like: didn't you guys suppress free elections and speech and persecuted anyone who simply disagrees at the slightest?

It's not uncommon for many authoritarian communists to eventually become fascists, especially after the end of the Cold War. The ex-leader of Red Army faction became neo-fascist in 2000s. A local politician in my country ran on xenophobic platform, but was a member of a Marxist-Leninist party in the 1970s. All that said, it means these people simply run on whatever ideologies, so long as they can attain power for power's sake.

Edit: grammar

Actual answer: It's pretty much just teens who get radicalized by youtube channels such as wow_mao, yugopnik, hakim, badempanda and most notably thedeprogram podcast, and young students joining ML/Maoist book clubs in their unis though that's more of a hit and miss since some book clubs actually read Marx and Lenin. They have audiences in the hundreds of thousands, sometimes even millions so it's not a "small, underground current".

Through these communities and channels they learn what I'd describe as "falsified pop theory" that usually manifests as exclusively Stalin/Mao and out of context quotes from actual Marxists like Lenin. This results in uncritical support of China and other ML countries like Vietnam and Cuba (all of whom are bourgeois states and literally nothing about them resembles DOTP), embrace of nationalism, maoist third-worldism which is where the "unlimited genocide on the first world" comes from and just endless moralism that you've heard time and time again which is explicitly anti-marxist. At times, they might also show support to Islam for some reason.

If my tone sounds a bit harsh, that's because they've completely bastardized marxism and just continue being more and more annoying with their "agitprop" (making communist memes and throwing them into social media void to spread "marxism" or something, revolution through reddit and lemmy), quote farming, absolute glazing of certain historical figures and just dogshit takes in general.

Some people just have a Right Wing mindset. They're drawn to concepts like loyalty & obedience to authority and gravitate to political doctrines that stress those values. If Communism makes economic sense to you but you're politically uncomfortable with shallow/non-existent hierarchies or don't feel that everyday people can be trusted with political power you gravitate towards being a ML. If you're willing to force those views on others by threat of state violence you're now a Tankie.

Tankie brigade incoming in 3... 2... 1...

They can't see that any government is going to create corruption so they picked the government they have the least experience with to side with. Of course at the heart of the tankies is a huge amount of fud being generated by russia and the ccp.

Too often these criticism's of "tankies" involve calling questioning blatant cold war lies as tankie behavior and very often i get accused of being a tankie by both liberals and "anarchists" because i oppose the democrats its far past time to retire the word.

I am all for letting people believe what they want

Until those beliefs attempt to control others who don't share the same beliefs. That's the limit. I don't understand why it's so difficult for certain groups to leave people alone.

Pretty standard radicalization pipeline stuff I think. Groupthink gets enforced by mockery and removing dissenting views, accessible memes to get new people interested, sense of community and belonging that is conditional on being uncritical about the dogma. Everything gets framed as being about which side you are on, and discourse is seen as a means to advance the cause and not a way to consider what is true. They are visibly criticizing the US empire, people recognize that as correct and unfortunately buy into the idea that the other side must be the good guys.

Edit: The amount of conjecture and thought terminating cliches in this thread is through the fucking roof lmfao. Peak reddit.

A lot of tankies are actually posting how and why they believe what they believe. If anyone's seriously interested in an answer look at this thread from https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/60633370?scrollToComments=true

There are 206 comments in total at this time.

My journey started here:
https://hexbear.net/comment/3763871

How they piqued my interest:
https://hexbear.net/comment/5606499

The reason I switched:
https://hexbear.net/comment/5355388

It was a combination of them just not being horrible "redfash" monster everyone says they are, them being able to consistently back up their seemingly "obviously wrong" takes and me and seemingly no one else being able to come up with better answers.

In discussions tankies were the only ones who had good faith discussions, obviously they didn't always, but if it wasn't just an internet slapfight the tankies were the ones citing sources and having incredibly nuanced understandings while me and the other libs didn't really. All I ever saw was a "nuh-uh" backed up by "obvious" claims that "everybody" knows like your "mao zedong was the worst mass murderer".

There is a post I could make about this "black book of communism" statistic now, having read about these sorts of claims, but not on my phone.

There is no one answer. Dr. Bob Altemeyer‘s book “The Authoritarians” sheds some light on the psychology.

Regardless of what you think about vanguardism as a means to leftist ends, they also seem to miss the logical point that vanguardism and the state are meant to wither away. It is a theoretical rightist means to a leftist ends, it is not itself leftist.

But again, if you read The Authoritarians you find that logic and reason do not matter to them. Trying to reason with an authoritarian is pointless.

For the same reason people fall into fascism. Capitalism is putting the screws to people. Rent is too high, food is too expensive, people are on a treadmill, and dissatisfaction hangs in the air like miasma. People are mad, and they don't know at what. They sense something is rotten, they dont have the words. Fascism co-opts leftist talking points, but pulls a bait and switch with the Jews and migrants and whoever.

Tankies also start from this choking miasma, you look at Tankie propaganda, its compelling. The US commited genocide and war crimes, and is more racist than you know. Capitalists are terrible, yadda yadda you know it. Tankie propaganda also frames politics as a team sport. When you look at the US (or you can look at it as the "Nato Empire," which can be an interesting way to think about it), as the ultimate evil, can be easy to see anyone opposing them as good or worth supporting.

I empathize with some of the thinking, but I don't necessarily agree with it. To keep it simple, imagine how many different world powers are working to sabotage openly Socialist and Communist governments. What kinds of tools and resources might these world powers have at their disposal? I can't imagine being part of a disfavored leftist government and not becoming haggard and paranoid beyond reason.

it's easier to believe in a fantasy than deal with the complicated reality

Well for sure one of the reason is that even in non marxist communities they show up and write comments in a style that many people resonate with. I mean using citations, good grammar, appealing to logic, (seemingly) good argumentations etc.

This makes them look reasonable and even if you do not read all their sources, you might remember their comments and talking points in a pretty positive light.

I dont want to say this style of arguing is bad, but I think it gets valued higher than arguments based on intuition and emotion with a less "scientific" style, because that is what many people are taught when growing up, going to school etc.

Also I would like to say, in some cases this "showing up" is done in a way that feels invasive to (parts of) communties. Like an online version of Jehovas Witnesses.

same way people fall into conservative mindset, propaganda. you hear a little snippet of here and there, and ragebaiting or drama, add in a little racism and authotarianism, which both extreme loves. you fall on either opposites of the spectrum politically. they also dont bother to research on the actual material of being "hard left"

Propaganda and self interest. Pick whatever story is being told that you feel like picking and that's it.

I wouldn't describe myself as a tankie, but I do think I am more sympathetic towards the various communist projects that have been tried in one way or another. The difficulty talking about this is that there is all sorts of misinformation, so it can be hard to have a complete, coherent discussion on these issues. (and of course I know it can be coming from both sides, so it really makes things confusing) What's more important to me though are the interpretations people have of these issues and how that informs their politics in the context of the real world that we live in.

What do I mean by this? While of course it's important to critique past and current governments, it should be so that we can learn from their mistakes and do better in the future. I don't really want to be defending some atrocity or failure of a state. I want to have an honest and productive talk about it. But in the context of living in the west, and especially the US, the propaganda line is to treat these governments as a complete and unique evil in order to justify both imperialism abroad and suppression of the left at home. They make it sound like their actions are just a continuation of our role in WWII fighting against fascism for freedom and democracy. But clearly that's not the case. The US does absolutely awful shit all around the world and is buddy buddy with various oppressive/undemocratic governments. And this isn't whataboutism. I'm not saying "well we did awful shit so it's ok when they do it too." What I'm saying is that by overly focusing your ire on these left wing governments, you reinforce the idea that the US is the good guy for fighting against them, that even if you have problems with the US, the other guys are way worse and it's worth supporting US military interventions because of that. With that mentality, the military budget keeps growing, we keep bombing people who didn't deserve it, we continue to justify our own authoritarian measures as being necessary for fighting against these existential threats. etc.

I'm sure for most on the left, especially anarchists, who participate in this, that isn't their intention. They just want a better, fairer world and want to recognize injustice regardless of who does it. But the effect is still unfortunately to feed into the more right wing position on this. You're working in an environment where the average uninformed person you talk to will at best not care about any atrocities the US has committed and at worst will view you as a crazy conspiracy theorist for telling them about publicly available information. Meanwhile they'll gladly join in on getting angry about anything you say about a place they've been told is evil, even if it is a conspiracy theory. You have to consider that when you decide what to spend your limited time and political capital on.

That said, I don't really know what to do with all that. I don't think it's right to go out of your way to lie about or defend actual atrocities, but how do you manage to do that without contributing to the oversimplified narrative of these places being cartoon villains? How do you get people to not fall for the manufactured consent for war time and time again while still acknowledging the things people treat like original sins that can never be atoned for?