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Meanwhile, Marx: "Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class"
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this post was submitted on 19 May 2024
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It's a new way of saying "commie", used because it doesn't instinctivelly make people think of McCarthism and the Red Scare as explicitly using words such as "commie" and "Communist" would.
In other words, rebranding, a Neoliberal speciality.
The Red Scare is not just a thing of the Fascist Far-Right over there: now that they're even cozying up to Genocidal Fascists, the Oligarchic American Far-Right (a.k.a. Neoliberals or just Liberals) are also starting to use the same framing of "Everybody to the left us are Communists" as the Fascists, though, granted, they're more modern and sophisticated than the Fascists and use focus groups and other market research techniques to evaluate the reception of their messaging, which probably showed that words such as "commie" don't go well with their target audience, and things like "tankie" yield much better messaging interiorization and viral spreading thanks the absence of pre-existing skepticism associations, unlike with "commie".
As more and more of the façade of Neoliberalism collapses and it becomes more and more obvious theirs is not a Political Ideology of Properity for the many, that their talk of Merit is complete total bollocks (every single one of the most celebrated "success stories" of the current Era were born rich) and that they're just a slicker, well-funded, marketing-heavy modern pro-Oligarchy Ideology, expect an increase in their demonization of any and all political opponents, much of it already visibily in many countries were Neoliberals call themselves "center" and "moderate" and call any political party who is not Neoliberal "extremists" - equally for leftwing or rightwing - even though the Overtoon Window having moved so much to the Right in 4 decades means most of those to their left who they call extremists defend policies that were considered center-left in the 70s (unions, universal healthcare, social security, progressive taxation, consumer protection, market regulation, nationalized critical infrastructure) whilst to the right of the Neoliberals there's just the Fascists.
Oh shut up and get off your high horse, Tankie was literally created by communist party members after the Soviets brutally crushed Socialist Democracy in Hungary in '56, and gained more use by communists after the brutal crushing of Socialist Democracy in the Prague Spring of '68.
For 60 years Tankie has been a term used against Authoritarian socialists by democratic socialists. Neoliberals have nothing to do with yall deep throating every autocrat than can say "America bad".
So "thankie" is now used in the US in the same sense as "commie" used to be used in the US: to imply that somebody is an authoritarian communist.
Which is what I wrote.
I never said or implied it the term was invented by neoliberals. I further never said it was used by neoliberals in the correct way, i.e. for actual authoritarian communists.
It's exactly the core of the problem that neoliberals use "tankie" in the same way that "commie" used to be used by old fashioned capitalist: to imply that anybody to the left of them aren't merelly center-right/center-left/left but actually the same as authoritarian communists.
It would be absolutelly fine if Liberals were using "tankie" to refer to actual authoritarian communists only, but that's not what's been happenning at least here in Lemmy: it's been progressivelly applied to those less and less to the left (authoriarian or otherwise) to the point that it's even used for people who disagree with Biden's support for Zionism (an ultra-nationalist etnic fascist ideology) and the Genocide they're committing, or in other words, against those who do not support an etnic cleansing by a fascist government (i.e- those to the left of a position extremelly far to the right of center).
This is similar to how in the old days "commie" was used for, say, people who were in favour of unions, though this present day usage of "tankie" is worse since back in WWII in American "commie" was not used to slander those that did not support the Nazis, though in Nazi Germany accusations of being a Communist were indeed used against anybody that disagreed with Nazism.
My complaint, which you basically brought up, but more specifically is the capitalist stooges are comparing militant communist of the cold war era to the people today that just want universal health care, more unions/stronger labor laws and better cheaper or god forbid free education.