Why not both? I just found the meme in the wild

This is usually how users that use the 'tankie' as a pejorative out themselves as anti-leftist or just plain uninformed. There's already a term for those who support that kind of fascistic rhetoric: Nazbols.

Either they don't know the term, or they do and choose not to. The former owns up quick, the latter digs in and keeps on a grudge about it.

No surprises here.

All tankies are campists, but not all campists are tankies. There is a distinction.

Intolerance as in authoritarianism is bullshit.

Yeah, not a tankie but the PRC and the USSR were huge in lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty and generally creating stability in parts of the world that effectively still practiced feudalism.

Doesn't make them anti-imperial or excuse their more disastrous/evil decisions either.

Could have moved that knee around 1970 to the left a decade or two if Mao hadn't caused the greatest manmade famine in human history

You'll see the same thing in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea

your definition of imperialism is wrong if you're simping for putin and xi and think you're anti imperialist

Many leftists in position of privilege should reevaluate the discrepancy between their idealism and their lack of support for material changes to the present material reality. Sure, it is easy to be part of the global north and believe in their own "freedom" (mostly the absence of violence afflicted to their socioeconomic class), while at the same time being part of exploiting and bombing the global south.

If we are going to be idealists, ask this: How many lives are lost every day due to the free exploitation of labour? How many people starve in a world of plenty or are outright killed in conflict over ownership of resources? Opposing material change is the idealist condoning murder of the innocent proletariat due to the aesthetics of action looking bad. This is the liberal perceived moral high ground.

Everyone has an ideology and values. Some are aware of it and reflect on them, others aren't able to do so. The latter group includes both tankies and neoliberals among others.

How can class consciousness develop at all without collective beliefs being forged and tested dialectically within the material world? workers organize around demands like freedom, democracy, and labor unions using them as stepping stones to human emancipation.

Leftism isn’t virtue signalling.

So the characteristic tankie prediliction for personality cults isn't virtue signalling? TIL.

Yeah who cares about what you want or how you think the world works/should work. The real test is who your friends are.

So in a Marxist world nobody has any rights.

And we wonder why people recoil from it.