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William Gillis 🏴

People are going to be pouring into radical spaces in the next few months looking to get involved, and the grifters and tankies are going to come out of the woodwork to try to eat them.

Every infoshop and org should be mass printing warnings about tankie cults:

antidotezine.com/2024/07/01/zi

@rechelon Could you tell us foreigners what a tankie is please?

@anne_twain

An authoritarian communist. Leninist, maoist, trot, etc.

@rechelon skimming this and as a cult survivor it’s very accurate. Keep an eye out for this shit guys, these groups don’t have your good in mind

@rechelon @evdas
because Leninism is a policeman’s ideology.

@rechelon This is a bit generalizing, as here locally in Norway there are two separate groups that call themselves maoists and while one aligns very close to the dangerous practices you note in the article (they're also MLM-Gonzalo thought), the other one seems to be very committed to bottom-up, democratic structures (and still call themselves maoists). This is just my experience coming from an anarchist background, I sympathize much more with the latter group and they have made me reconsider my own categorization of ideology into "authoritarian" and "anti-authoritarian".

@rechelon
eerie how similar the tactics are worldwide. until i got to the specific groups to watch out for i thought this was about the UK tankie scene.

@rechelon @floppyplopper same here in Germany. Tbh every time I come across this zine I kind of want to translate it and adapt it for the German political landscape, but I’m probably not the right person to do that because I’m not the kind of person who is very good at keeping track with all the tankie groups (though I definitely think “mlpd is a tankie cult” should be common knowledge, and it is, but not necessarily among people new to activism/left-wing spaces, and those are the people most vulnerable to their recruiting)

@rechelon I’ve seen some call anyone who supports Palestinian rights a tankie. Brianna Wu for example. It seems to be a problematic and lazy way to draw lines instead of being specific about unacceptable behavior.

@amerpie

You do get how that's an absurd critique, right? Like the right often calls feminists "fascists" but that doesn't mean we stop using the correct definition of fascist to refer to a set of our enemies.