Someone Made A Study About Reddit Tankies
Whoever told libs about 'horseshoe theory' needs to face the wall
Yes, you read that right. An ‘academic’ study about reddit tankies was recently released, authored by three American university researchers. Here it is (PDF warning):
A Data-driven Understanding of Left-Wing Extremists on Social Media
UTKUCAN BALCI, Binghamton University, United States
MICHAEL SIRIVIANOS, Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus
JEREMY BLACKBURN, Binghamton University, United States
Tankies. Reddit. Reddit tankies. The terminally online. Am I one? Sort of. I will admit, reddit was an essential tool in my radicalization. I remember being a succ-I mean socdem (but not identifying as one) and doing gig work for food delivery companies. I was posting on a subreddit dedicated to gig workers about a week where I worked 80 hours and made a net total of less than $5 CAD per hour. I was an anti-capitalist, and the post was a critique of gig work under capitalism. Someone in the comments told me to crosspost it to /r/LateStageCapitalism (LSC). This was my first introduction to actual leftism on reddit.
LSC used to be better than it is now, unfortunately it’s been recently infested by libs. They still have a pinned comment on every post talking about how LSC is run by communists. The leadership is based, but with a huge portion of libs joining in on the discourse, it can be hard to keep it on track and keep out the libshit. The comment section on many posts on LSC are battlegrounds between libs spouting state department propaganda about AES states and the ever smaller portion of ‘tankies’ pushing back on it. There is a reason LSC wasn’t featured as one of the main tankie subreddits of this study that I’m about to dismantle. Every subreddit that grows to a certain size on reddit will eventually be conquered by libs, unless the mod team rules with an iron fist and bans libs on sight. But, I digress.
LSC was a gateway for me into far leftism and into other far left subreddits. I found some of my favorite leftist online spaces through it, which I still patronize to this day despite being perma-banned from reddit for over 2 years now. I have tried to make new accounts. The admins find me every time. But alas, even though I can’t post or comment, I can still consume.
A few of my favorite ‘tankie’ subreddits are featured in this study. /r/GenZedong (GZD), which started from Gen Z folks who are fans of the People’s Republic of China’s former Chairman, Mao Zedong. /r/sendinthetanks, which I only recently discovered, focuses more on anti-NATOism (or, anti-NAFOism) and the Russia/Ukraine conflict. Also /r/InformedTankie, which I’ve been to but don’t frequent because it’s more of a 101 subreddit for baby leftists.
Some of my other favorite ‘tankie’ subreddits didn’t make the cut. /r/TheDeprogram, which is a subreddit for fans of the podcast starring SecondThought, Hakim, and Yugopnik, were upset that they weren’t mentioned in this study (that’s how I found out about it). /r/ShitLiberalsSay (SLS) is probably the biggest and most active ‘tankie’ subreddit and also wasn’t mentioned. SLS helped me realize and filter out a lot of my previous persistent liberal thought and radicalize me more and more. I was banned from SLS once for spreading libshit, and with the clarity of retrospection, I definitely deserved it.
There are two other tankie subreddits that this study focuses on that I don’t/haven’t use(d). /r/asktankies and /r/bunkertube. They’re small, and mostly inconsequential. Finally, this study covers /r/GenZhou, which is now banned, and has been for over a year (start of Russia/Ukraine conflict). I’m guessing it wasn’t banned when they started this study, although it was only published this month (July 2023). They’ve been working on it for a while I guess. That’s a bit embarrassing, to be honest.
GenZhou was banned at around the same time GenZedong was quarantined. They gave mercy to GZD, since it was a lot bigger and would make a stronger martyr if they outright banned it. Quarantining a subreddit hides it from the rest of reddit, forcing users to opt-in to seeing its content. It’s heavy suppression. Neither subreddit deserved this, of course. Reddit caved to lib/right wing pressure, because both subreddits were posting uncomfortable truths about the nature of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Ukraine itself.
Libs erroneously call it ‘whataboutism’. GZD often made unfavorable comparisons between the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the US invasion of Iraq (or any of the other American imperialist endeavours). Because of course, there is no competition between the US and Russia when it comes to imperialism. Russia is a toddler throwing marshmallow punches. The US hegemony is… a soldier controlling an autonomous drone loaded with a knife missile that can take out an innocent brown kid from the other side of the world. It isn’t even close. Plus, GenZhou/GZD users correctly pointed out that this was a proxy war between the US/NATO and Russia, using Ukraine as a pawn. Libs don’t like to think about that.
GZD managed to piss off most of reddit during its most active political age, probably throughout its entire history. Libs were feral during the early days of Russia’s invasion. They were calling for the blood of all Russians, whether or not they were complicit in the invasion or just happened to be of Russian heritage. This wasn’t exclusive to reddit, Facebook and Instagram gave special privileges to users who called for Russian blood. They wouldn’t ban them for it. The reddit admins had to do something to calm the liberal masses. So they banned GenZhou and quarantined GZD.
Many disgraced users moved over to lemmygrad.ml (part of the lemmyverse/fediverse) as a safe haven, which this study actually mentions:
5.6 Lemmygrad Analysis
Lemmygrad.ml is a Marxist/Leninist platform that resembles Reddit and is made up of various leftist communities…Monthly Perspective Analysis. Ribeiro et al.[56] found an increase in toxicity after r/The_Donald users migrated to the thedonald.win, as measured by Perspective API scores. Building on this, we perform a monthly analysis of high Perspective API scores on lemmygrad.ml. As illustrated in Figure 9, we observe that the proportion of high scores for the TOXICITY, SEVERE_TOXICITY, INSULT, IDENTITY_ATTACK, THREAT, and PROFANITY models reaches its peak on lemmygrad.ml during the year of its founding, 2019….This increase suggests that the platform migration of tankies led to an increase in toxicity among the tankie community on lemmygrad.ml
Takeaways. We find that the user base of lemmygrad.ml consists largely of tankies. Our analysis shows that the top two communities on this platform are associated with tankie subreddits, r/GenZedong and r/GenZhou. Furthermore, our findings suggest that platform migration lead to an increase in toxicity of tankies, highlighting the importance of considering the potential impact of platform migration on online communities.
This is where the horseshoe theory kicks in. This study posits that the ‘extreme left’ and ‘extreme right’ are the same/similar because they both move to alternate platforms when deplatformed and are thus able to… I don’t know… swear more without getting banned on liberal platforms?
It directly compares the deplatforming of /r/THE_DONALD to the deplatforming of GZD, because the Trump fascists moved to a different fascist platform and some of the tankies moved to a tankie platform. This is surface level, useless analysis, typical from lib ‘researchers’. This is the most mild part of this study, however. It gets much worse. Let’s dig in.
1 INTRODUCTION
The use of social media by extremists is well documented in the press [4, 23, 108] and has been a heavy focus of the research community [7, 46, 75]. However, almost all recent work has studied rightwing extremists….many of the characteristics and behavior we associate with right-wing extremism online have historically applied to hardline left-wing extremists as well. For example, spreading mis- and disinformation from unreputable or overtly biased sources [122]. Despite the impact of right-wing online extremists, political rhetoric, and a history of violence and chaos attributed to far-left extremists, there are essentially no studies of the far-left on social media, let alone far-left extremists.
In this paper, we fill this gap by performing the first large-scale, data-driven measurements of the far-left on social media. We focus primarily on a large left-wing community known as tankies.
There it is. This study is meant to prove how the far left ‘extremists’ are as bad as the far right ones. Let’s look at endnote [122], which supposedly proves that far leftists spread disinformation online. It’s a TIME article, titled ‘Domestic Disinformation Is a Greater Menace Than Foreign Disinformation’. I read the article from start to finish. It doesn’t mention a singular example of left-wing disinformation. It specifically mentions plenty of right wing disinformation campaigns, though:
Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election
Trump’s tweets
Anti-semitic Soros conspiracies
COVID/’plandemic’ conspiracies
“Antifa terrorist” right wing claims
Right wing think tanks creating Black Lives Matter disinfo to dissuade black people from voting
Right wing fake local news organizations
The article even states:
Yes, disinformation comes from both the right and the left, but research shows that highly partisan conservatives are far more likely to share disinformation than partisan liberals….
Disinformation created by American fringe groups—white nationalists, hate groups, antigovernment movements, left-wing extremists—is growing.
But still doesn’t give any actual examples of left wing disinformation. The closest I can find is a mention of China “enter[ing] the disinformation game in a big way, aggressively seeking to fix blame for the epidemic on the U.S. and … regularly highlighting American missteps in coping with the virus.” That’s not disinformation. It’s not China’s fault that the US mismanaged COVID. We don’t even have unequivocal proof that COVID originated in China. We haven’t found patient zero.
Seriously though. Can someone find an example of left wing disinformation in this article? Let me know. This is embarrassing for both the authors of this study and TIME. What a weird piece of propaganda this is.
The problem is that liberals think that the uncomfortable truths that leftists expose are disinformation. They’ve been brainwashed by capitalist, red scare propaganda for their entire lives, so when a leftist dismantles that in front of their eyes they must find a way to cope. They insist all the leftists and ‘tankies’ must be wrong, and that what they learned in western schools and through western mainstream media must be right.
This study is no exception to that. It outlines several narratives that it implies to be incontrovertible truths, which it also implies tankies are lying about. This self professed ‘data driven’ article only uses secondary or tertiary sources to ‘prove’ these ‘truths’. They assume their readership also believes these things to be true, and thus only cites western/CIA sources passively. We are going to dismantle these ‘truths’ and the western propaganda they use to ‘prove’ them, one by one.
1. Acceptance of CCP Narratives
That’s their wording, not mine. I am not a lib, and thus I use the appropriate initialism for the Communist Party of China (CPC). Remember friends, the ideology comes before the country. But funnily enough, this section of the study talks about how AES supporters and tankies use ‘CPC’ and how western libs use ‘CCP’.
The first indication this is true from our misaligmment (sic) analysis is tankies’ use of the Chinese government’s preferred nomenclature of Communist Party of China (CPC) [22, 73, 93] instead of the more commonly used western term CCP.
CCP is a western scare term. It’s used mainly because it’s similar to CCCP (the Cyrillic abbreviation for the USSR). CCCP was a scare term used during the Cold War to make westerners feel an unconscionable fear towards the Soviets. CCP is used in much the same way today, to stoke an unconscionable fear of China. Honestly, I don’t want libs to use the correct initialism. It’s a handy way to know exactly who you’re dealing with. Using the term ‘CCP’ essentially puts a sticker on your forehead that says “I am a lib and you’re about to hear me regurgitate CIA propaganda”.
This study implies that tankies are brainwashed by Chinese propaganda because we use (what they readily admit to be) the CPC’s ‘preferred nomenclature’. I personally think it’s more about accuracy than anything, but we all know libs are allergic to accuracy when it comes to the People’s Republic of China.
The study then goes on to imply that simply because tankies use the ‘preferred nomenclature’ of the CPC, that they must unwaveringly accept everything that the CPC says whether its true or not. Like the fact that the ‘Uyghur Genocide’ narrative is a western fabrication to denigrate the PRC. I don’t believe this because the CPC said so. I believe it because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I have never seen anything approaching ‘extraordinary’ come out of the west. Unless it’s extraordinarily untrue.
The CPC narrative is not far-fetched, either, there is a simple explanation backed by facts. Xinjiang had a terrorism problem. China is solving it in the least brutal way possible, which is the polar opposite of how the US handles (perceived) terrorism problems. Here’s what this study says about it:
Additional indication along these lines is how tankies are misaligned with respect to Uyghurs. There is substantial evidence that China detains Uyghur Muslims and sends them to so-called “political re-education camps,” which are rife with human rights abuses [61, 96, 134] up to and including evidence of genocide [53, 124].
“Substantial evidence”. There we go, some sources to dismantle. My favorite pastime. Here’s the first, on endnote [61]:
More Evidence of China’s Horrific Abuses in Xinjiang
Human Rights Watch
Ah, Human Rights Watch (HRW). I learned something about you yesterday. I was reading a study from CO-WEST-PRO, authored by a fellow leftist named Jaq James. Jaq is an Australian lawyer, and she expertly dismantles western propaganda in a much more analytical way than me, from a legal standpoint. I pretty much just go, “this comes from the CIA and has no actual evidence so it’s probably completely false”. But hey, that should be enough, shouldn’t it?
Well, not for everyone. Which is why I greatly appreciate studies like this. I don’t know much of anything about international law, but seeing that these reports from “human rights groups” like HRW fail to meet international legal standards in addition to being funded by the CIA or using sources from the CIA warms my little tankie heart.
So what did I learn about HRW? From the CO-WEST-PRO study, page 79 [emphasis added]:
To give an example, [Max] Blumenthal (2021) describes Human Rights Watch’s Executive Director, Kenneth Roth, as “an obsessive antagonist of China’s government and cheerleader of regime change operations against virtually any state that defies Washington”.154 To support this characterisation, Blumenthal (2021) cites some of Roth’s over-the-top anti-China Twitter posts, including a meme comparing Beijing to Nazi Germany, a fake video that Roth claimed depicted Chinese “killer robots” (which was actually a special-effects training video), and repeated speculation that COVID-19 was brewed in a Chinese laboratory. It is also noted that Roth’s tagline on his Twitter page is “[p]roudly ‘sanctioned’ by the Chinese government”. 155 Such public comments suggest that Roth lacks full objective professionalism when it comes to China. This leaves open to speculation whether Roth’s anti-China prejudices influence the objectivity of other Human Rights Watch personnel working under him. After all, it is the leaders that set the tone for organisational culture. Indeed, the China Director at Human Rights Watch who works under Roth, Sophie Richardson, is also known for making frenzied comments about China on Twitter. For example, she has claimed that the Chinese government is a “disgrace” because it arranged for the Olympics cauldron to be lit by a Uyghur “and there is not a hell hot enough for whoever thought this up”.156
The (former, he stepped down last year) Executive Director and the China Director of HRW are both virulent sinophobes. That’s not all I learned, though. This CO-WEST-PRO study linked to a GrayZone article about HRW. Here’s an excerpt:
Human Rights Watch was founded in 1978 as Helsinki Watch, a US outfit dedicated to undermining the governments of socialist Eastern Bloc countries with an unrelenting stream of abuse allegations. With offices across the West, including in New York City’s Empire State Building, HRW has grown thanks to a $100 million cash injection from George Soros, an anti-communist hedge fund billionaire who has deemed China a “mortal danger” to humanity.
Hyperlinks kept intact. HRW was originally created to propagandize about the Soviet Union, and it’s funded by an American billionaire. Above, we mentioned right wing, anti-semitic conspiracies about George Soros. Those are nonsense. Soros isn’t a piece of shit because he’s Jewish, Soros is a piece of shit because he’s a billionaire and because he’s yet another virulent sinophobe who funds anti-China propaganda.
We can already dismiss whatever HRW says about China based on this alone, especially when none of it is backed by actual, tangible evidence. HRW is trying to prove an already established narrative about China. They wouldn’t release any info that goes against their ‘China bad’ narrative. But alas, we’ll dismantle this hit piece anyways, especially since it’s a different report from the one that Jaq James took on in the CO-WEST-PRO study. From the HRW article:
On February 18, international media, the Uyghur Human Rights Project, and academic researcher Adrian Zenz published the “Karakax list,” a spreadsheet leaked by an unnamed Uyghur source that provides disturbing details on 331 people and their families caught in Xinjiang’s dragnet.
Two great sources here. The Uyghur Human Rights Project was funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, which is a CIA cutout that exists to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly, according to its founder. Adrian Zenz is the other main source, of course. A US government funded anti-semitic Christo-fascist that believes God sent him to earth to westernize China. He is the originator of the ‘over one million Uyghurs detained’ lie.
The Karakax list, if it’s even real considering it’s from an anonymous source and was released by Zenz himself, doesn’t prove a genocide, or even human rights abuses. See, you have to be operating with the prior notion that vocational schools in Xinjiang are actually ‘internment camps’ to believe that. We have zero proof of that, though. The Karakax list provides information on why 311 Uyghurs were ‘sent’ to vocational schools. The reasons may seem mundane, because they are. But they are not reasons why Uyghurs are being arrested and ‘tortured’ or whatever, they are reasons that identify Uyghurs as possibly being on the path to radicalization or in need of vocational skills to join the modern world.
The vocational schools are just that; schools. Like the one you went to if you live in the west, except they focus more on… vocational skills. Obviously. To prepare Uyghurs that are mostly from primitive villages (who never went to school in their formative years) to enter the working world. Some are voluntary. Some are involuntary. This doesn’t mean human rights abuses are occurring, and no Nayirah-style testimony will prove that they are. Only real, tangible evidence will, of which the Karakax list isn’t.
Once again, I must remind you what the US does to suspected terrorists or radicalized people. It isn’t vocational school. It’s actual torture, and often straight up assassination. We have photographic and videographic evidence of that.
Let’s move on to the next endnote in the tankie study, number [96].
I pirated it from Sci-hub. It’s an ‘academic paper’. But really, it acts as a summary of various reports from western, CIA funded sources like, you guessed it, Adrian Zenz again. It cites him 8 times. It cites the World Uyghur Congress, another NED funded propaganda group. This one supports the terrorism that China is trying to eradicate, by the way.
It also cites Radio Free Asia (RFA), which was started by the CIA during the Cold War to propagandize about America’s enemies in Asia. The RFA article uses an anonymous source, of course. That’s standard.
This is not a primary source, obviously. There’s not really anything to debunk. I could go through all 61 of the endnotes, but I don’t want to waste my (or your) time. On to the next, endnote [134] of the tankie study:
Adrian Zenz. 2019. ‘Thoroughly reforming them towards a healthy heart attitude’: China’s political re-education campaign in Xinjiang. Central Asian Survey 38, 1 (2019), 102–128
Yep, that’s right. They have no shame. I’m not gonna go too far in depth here, but let me just show you the first citation in this study:
Since summer 2017, troubling reports have emerged of large-scale internments of Muslims (Uyghurs, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz) in China’s north-west Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). By the end of the year, reports emerged that some ethnic-minority townships had detained up to 10% of the entire population, and that in Uyghur-dominated Kashgar Prefecture alone, the number of interned persons had reached 120,000 (The Guardian, 25 January 2018).
Here’s the Guardian article. It… sources Radio Free Asia. RFA… sources an anonymous “security official in Kashgar”. A CIA funded sinophobic researcher citing a CIA operated news agency using an anonymous source. Yikes. Next tankie study endnote, please, number [53]. This is the first of two citations that supposedly show evidence of genocide:
Don’t ask me about the random capitalization, I don’t know, it’s that way in the report. This paper obviously cites Zenz, and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), which is run by the Australian Department of Defence, and funded by the US Government and various defence contractors like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. It cites the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) which is also US government and defence contractor funded. It cites Voice of America, which is US state media, operated by the US government through the USAGM just like Radio Free Asia. It cites the East-West Center, which is funded by US Congress.
Let’s ignore allllll that. There is a specific claim of genocide in this paper, and I want to dismantle it.
Section 3 will also argue that restrictions to Uyghur reproduction meet the criteria for genocide.
This is the only genocide claim it tries to make, so let’s see it [emphasis added]:
The Uyghur Genocide
In addition to poor treatment of Xinjiang’s Uyghurs, claims of forced birth control, sterilization, and other reproductive restrictions suggest that the Chinese government does not merely seek to eliminate Uyghur religious identity, but it aims to eliminate the Uyghur group entirely. A report published by the Associated Press (2020) illustrates how birth rates in the primarily Uyghur areas of Hotan and Kashgar in Xinjiang have dropped by more than sixty percent between 2015 and 2018 as a direct consequence of the government’s regional birth control campaign. The report describes the government’s efforts to systematically remove its Uyghur population.
Let’s bring up that report. Here it is, on Associated Press.
The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews and data show. Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang.
Western media is really scummy when reporting on this, I’ve seen it many times. I know everyone has probably heard of the One/Two Child Policies in China. Guess what? Uyghurs were previously exempt from them. Making Uyghurs beholden to the same policies as the Han Chinese is not genocide, if anything it’s equality. Is AP, and thus, this tankie paper implying that China is genociding everyone, including it’s majority Han population?
This article does outline the equality angle, later on:
Chinese officials have said in the past that the new measures are merely meant to be fair, allowing both Han Chinese and ethnic minorities the same number of children.
It then says this:
But while equal on paper, in practice Han Chinese are largely spared the abortions, sterilizations, IUD insertions and detentions for having too many children that are forced on Xinjiang’s other ethnicities, interviews and data show.
This paragraph doesn’t mention the sources for these ‘interviews and ‘data’. Later on, it says that ‘only minorities are sent to “detainment camps”’, but once again, you have to have a preconceived notion that these are ‘torture camps’ and not just schools, which Han Chinese and people around the world are all ‘forced’ to attend. The article later tries to back up its claims about the Uyghurs with unsubstantiated testimony from random Uyghurs, not actual evidence.
The other problem these reports have is that they imply that IUDs are sterilization. IUDs are designed to be removeable. They are a form of birth control, not sterilization. Would you like to see actual evidence of genocide through sterilization? Look no further than my shithole country, Canada, which is still forcibly sterilizing indigenous women to this day. Actual sterilization. Not IUDs. Tube tying.
Oh, and by the way, this AP article directly sources Adrian Zenz and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, haha. Let’s hit up that final tankie study endnote, number [124].
Pretty much the same shit as the last one, cites Zenz multiple times, ASPI twice, RFA once, and the NED funded UHRP once. Yawn.
That’s it for the Uyghur ‘genocide’ part. Here’s the end of the ‘Acceptance of CCP narratives’ section in the tankie study:
Finally, our analysis reveals a marked discrepancy in the discourse of tankies when it comes to the classification of individuals engaging in acts of civil disobedience. This disjuncture is further complicated by the historical precedent of the CCP’s characterization of peaceful protesters as “rioters” [38], which may serve as an indication of tankies’ alignment with the CCP’s narrative.
The study is quite obviously trying to prove its ‘horseshoe theory’ by implying that tankies calling Hong Kong and Tiananmen Square ‘protestors’ rioters is the same as alt-righties calling BLM protests ‘riots’. Of course, this is bullshit. As with BLM, some of the ‘demonstrations’ were riots, and some were protests. ‘Tankies’ focus more on the riots. Do alt-righties do the same for BLM? Probably. Comparing them makes no sense, though. Tiananmen Square was a CIA backed, attempted color revolution. The rioters burned PLA soldiers alive. The HK rioters were funded by the CIA/NED and were defending a literal murderer who didn’t want to be extradited to Taiwan to face punishment. BLM was protesting black people being murdered by police. How is this a valid comparison?
Are the authors of this study denying that some of these ‘demonstrations’ in China would amount to riots? I can show them pictures of dead, naked, and burned PLA soldiers hung by their necks from overturned, also burned, military vehicles, but I doubt they want to see that. How about an article about HK rioters beating up random people?
As a conclusion to this section about tankies following what the CPC says, I want to highlight one little blurb that we skipped over:
…stories of r/GenZedong users attacking Uyghurs and promoting violence against them in the press [27].
This is a wild one. Strap in. Here’s the source for endnote [27]:
Reddit Allows Hate Speech to Flourish in Its Global Forums, Moderators Say
TIME
Unlike the other TIME article, this one actually gives an example of left wing ‘hate speech’:
In subreddits about China like r/sino and r/genzedong, users attack Uyghurs and promote violence against them.
Hyperlinks left intact. /r/Sino is mostly an anti-Hanjian subreddit, it’s not necessarily based on socialist theory but it does a great job at debunking imperialist propaganda about China.
The second link in this blurb goes to a deleted reddit post. My archive links aren’t working because of reddit API changes, so I can’t retrieve it, but from the comments remaining it seems to be about someone debunking the ‘genocide’ narrative. Not sure where the ‘promotion of violence’ is supposed to come from, nothing in the comments indicates it.
The first link is from a hilarious moment where a Radio Free Asia reporter who claims to be an ‘Uyghur advocate’ (read: western imperialist propagandist) did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) and was barraged with comments asking about her time helping the US government torture Muslims, including Uyghurs. Here’s the AMA. Give the top comments a read. It’s a lot of fun.
Rushan Abbas doesn’t just write for the CIA-operated Radio Free Asia, she also runs Campaign for Uyghurs, which is funded by the CIA cutout NED. She worked as a translator for the US Government, which is when she spent time in Guantanamo Bay with the 22 Uyghurs that the US imprisoned. Guess what? These Uyghurs were training to use weapons to go back to Xinjiang and commit terror attacks. The US detained them in a torture camp. Now, the US criticizes China for deradicalizing them in vocational schools. Interesting.
Rushan Abbas was rightfully criticized for being a tool of the US government and trying to spread propaganda. That is by no means an attack on Uyghurs, whether or not she is Uyghur (she is). That’s an attack on a US government stooge. The TIME article doesn’t link to the AMA, it links to a /r/Sino thread where the users there roast her for a now deleted comment saying the Uyghurs were better off in Gitmo than they would be if they were free in Xinjiang, which is an insane claim to make. The worst ‘attacks’ I can see in that thread are from people calling her ‘fake’ and ‘ignorant’. Milquetoast stuff, really, I’ve got some actual ‘attacks’ for this scum-sucking race traitor. I’ll let you imagine them.
Thus concludes the ‘Acceptance of CCP narratives’ section. To sum it up, this study used three secondary/tertiary citations without any tangible evidence to ‘prove’ human rights abuses. One was from the billionaire funded, sinophobic lead Human Rights Watch, which sourced Adrian Zenz and an NED funded Uyghur org. The second was a study that sourced Zenz 8 times, an NED funded Uyghur org, and Radio Free Asia. The third was directly from Adrian Zenz, with the first citation coming from RFA.
To ‘prove’ the genocide allegation, this study used two other secondary/tertiary studies. The first cited Zenz, the government/defence contractor funded ASPI and CSIS, the US Congress funded East-West Center, and Voice of America, which is US state media. The second cited Zenz multiple times, ASPI, RFA, and an NED funded Uyghur org. Neither study had tangible evidence, once again.
On to the next section.
2. Stalinist Leaning
Hey, another scare word. Yo, libs? Stalinism isn’t a thing. It doesn’t exist. Stalin was a Marxist-Leninist, and the USSR under Stalin was also Marxist-Leninist. What you call Stalinists are just Marxist-Leninists. You know that Stalin has a negative connotation in the west because of red scare propaganda, so instead of calling us M-Ls, you call us Stalinists, if we support Stalin’s USSR. Stop that. Grow up.
There aren’t Marxist-Leninists that don’t support Stalin. They may criticize him, but they still support the USSR under his rule. We don’t fall for your propaganda. We know the gulags were regular prisons and never had more people incarcerated at any one time than the US currently does. We don’t believe the famine of the 30s (libs call it ‘holodomor’) was intentional, or meant to ‘genocide’ the Ukrainians, especially since it also affected Russians, and killed a higher percentage of Kazakhs than Ukrainians. We don’t support the double genocide theory, since it is Nazi propaganda meant to downplay the very real holocaust.
We don’t believe the Katyn Massacre that the chief Nazi propagandist Goebbels brought to light was perpetrated by the Soviets under Stalin, because the ‘proof’ had signs of being forged and was released by the anti-communist/US simp Boris Yeltsin, who needed justification for the illegal dissolution of the USSR. We don’t believe the claims of antisemitism levied against Stalin, specifically the Doctor’s Plot, because it is another Nazi fabrication. That doesn’t make us Stalinists. We’re still just Marxist-Leninists, or ‘tankies’, sure. Whatever.
Tankies, as defined, have a tendency towards Stalinism (see Section 2). However, according to the definition provided by the subreddit r/InformedTankie, they primarily identify as Marxist-Leninists.
Interestingly enough, this study shows that we don’t identify as Stalinists, yet still calls us that. Why?
So far, our previous analysis shows that tankies tend to focus more on topics related to Stalin and mention Stalin more frequently than Lenin in comparison to other far-left communities.
We talk more about Stalin than Lenin because libs like you spread more propaganda about Stalin than Lenin, which we need to counter. Simple as.
For r/Anarchism, de-Stalinization & USSR is a conceptually homomorphic pair, which is meaningful when we consider the history of Anarchists in Soviet Gulag Camps [29, 84].
Here we go. We talkin bout gulags. Were some anarchists sent to gulags for being a threat to the USSR? Yes. Who gives a shit?
Interestingly, leading additional credence to tankies’ Stalinist leaning, “trot” is a pejorative term used for Trotskyists, which was originally used by USSR-supporting elements during Stalin’s reign [3, 120].
M-Ls don’t usually care much about Trotsky himself, we just dislike Trotskyists because they’re insufferable. Most trots dislike M-Ls. Just pointless sectarianism. Shrug.
Using ‘trot’ as a pejorative doesn’t make us Stalinists. We’re still just M-Ls.
Next section?
3. Acceptence(sic) of the Russian Narrative in Ukraine
You know, I bet the authors of this study call anyone who disagrees with the western narrative on this invasion a ‘Russian bot’. First sentence of this section:
The support of tankies for the hardline Soviet era extends to Russia’s current authoritarian regime’s actions.
Yea, no. Tankies don’t support modern Russia, at all. We just support NATO and the hegemon of the US empire much, much less. Authoritarian is a buzzword anyways. Libs will connect the Soviet Union to modern Russia by implying they’re both ‘authoritarian’, without understanding that every country on earth, and throughout history, has been ‘authoritarian’. Libs just use that term for the ones they were brainwashed not to like.
Modern Russia is nothing like the Soviet Union. It’s a capitalist shithole run by oligarchs, just like every other capitalist superpower. Libs will take our dislike of the fascist Ukrainian state as ‘proof’ that we support Russia. It’s just blatantly false. Personally, I think both are bad, and I think Ukraine shouldn’t get special treatment over every other country in crisis because the inhabitants are almost entirely white and the government is a US puppet.
We watched the US and other western nations train and arm actual Nazis in the Azov Battalion before Russia invaded. We watched the same western media outlets that once demonized those Nazis start to defend them once Russia invaded. We just don’t like Nazis, whether they’re from Ukraine or Russia or the US.
We’ve noticed a distinct lack of support for countries like Yemen and Syria who were, and still are, being destroyed by the same western capitalist nations that demonize Russia. The US is buddy-buddy with the Saudis, who are causing the worst humanitarian crisis in recent history in Yemen. Libs don’t give a shit about that because the media doesn’t cover it obsessively like they do with Ukraine.
We know that what the US did to Iraq just in the last 2 decades has dwarfed anything Russia has done or can do to Ukraine, and no one tried sanctioning them, or banning Americans from sporting events, or calling for the President’s arrest in the ICC, or anything that is happening to Russia and Russians. We’re tired of the hypocrisy. That doesn’t make us Russia supporters or ‘Russian bots’.
We find that tankies are more accepting of the chosen nomenclature from the self-proclaimed republics in Ukraine’s Donbass region, Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) and Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), which were explicitly recognized by the Russian government and used as casus belli for the 2022 invasion of Ukraine [129]
Yes, we refer to the Donbass region by the majority of the population’s preferred nomenclature, once again. Russia may only support the LPR and DPR because it helps them in their conflict with Ukraine, but that doesn’t mean the people of the region who were bombed relentlessly by Ukraine for 8 years before this conflict don’t deserve our respect.
This pattern is not unusual among the far-left; a previous study [49] found that over 22% of comments on r/socialism between January 1, 2022, and March 15, 2022, were associated with topics presented by Russian state media, with more than 100 comments explicitly discussing Ukrainian Neo-Nazis.
Topics presented by Russian state media? So, just the same things that Russian state media talks about? Tankies don’t hate Ukrainian Nazis because RT told us to. We hate them because…. we hate Nazis. Violent nationalism has been a huge problem in Ukraine since it’s inception (you know, when Lenin granted them sovereignty?)
I was born in Edmonton. The Ukraine diaspora in Alberta’s capital has a bust of Roman Shukhevych at the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex. Shukhevych led the Nazi battalion UPA (which still exists) who allied with the Nazis and exterminated tens of thousands of Jews and Poles. A private cemetery in Edmonton has a monument to the 14th Waffen SS Division, which is obviously a Nazi division. Most Edmontonians don’t understand why we have monuments to Nazis. The Ukraine diaspora refuses to take them down. They were vandalized once by a leftist. Nice work.
The Ukraine diaspora in Edmonton recently threatened violence if the Heritage Festival allowed the Russian Pavilion to participate. The Russians were banned from participating in an apolitical event that is literally meant to “promote intercultural contact” to “improve mutual acceptance”. The Ukrainians would not have it, of course. They felt the need to punish and exclude Russians who have absolutely nothing to do with the invasion.
Oh, and Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister, basically the vice president of Canada, is Ukrainian and has a Nazi collaborator for a grandfather, who she refuses to denounce. She was photographed in front of a scarf from the aforementioned, far right UPA once. She blamed it on Russian disinformation, of course. Like the authors of this study would. Ukrainian Nazi bullshit has infected even my country, and many others around the world.
I didn’t get any of this information from Russian state media, libs.
We find that LPR and DPR are not in the vocabulary of r/DemocraticSocialism (and conceptually homomorphic pairs regarding LPR and DPR were off-topic). This might be because the focus of r/DemocraticSocialism is more on US politics than AES and Russia - Ukraine war (see Figure 9).
It’s because demsocs are usually just LARPing libs who eat up western propaganda.
Next section, please.
4. Anti-Zionist Leaning
Oof. The authors are zionists. I mean, it makes sense.
USSR had anti-Zionism efforts since its establishment [112], and today’s far-left anti-Zionism is showing similarity with USSR’s anti-Zionist campaigns [123]
Yes, the USSR was anti-zionist, and that’s a very good thing. To support the apartheid ethnostate of Israel that was quite literally stolen from the Palestinians makes you a fascist. Plain and simple.
Lib support for Israel makes zero sense to me. It has to be an ethnostate, there’s no other way. You have to forbid other ethno-religions/ethnicities from either living in or ruling over it if it is to stay homogenously Jewish. There’s no other way. Zionists want an ethnostate. Libs claim to be against ethnostates. Is it fine simply because Jews were persecuted in WWII?
Many, if not most Israelis are not indigenous to the middle east. They’re white Europeans. It’s why they have the second highest skin cancer rate in the world; they did not evolve to live near the equator. They’re second only to Australia, who is also dominated by a group of whites who colonized it from the indigenous.
Zionists use a book that the majority of the world doesn’t believe in as justification for them ‘reclaiming’ their ‘holy land’. AKA, religious based fascism. It’s clear why the USSR was against that.
We can see tankies have more leaning towards anti-Zionism from Zionist & Israeli, Zionists & Jews, Zionist & Israel, Zionism & Israel, and isntreal & Israel pairs. These pairs show that tankies simplify the complexity and diversity of Jewish identity and also the establishment and development of the State of Israel.
Tankies don’t simplify the complexity and diversity of Jewish identity, Zionists do. Zionism is in and of itself anti-semitic. Most zionists assume that all Jews must support the apartheid ethnostate of Israel, when in actuality, a great many don’t. Probably the vast majority around the world don’t. Assuming that Jews, the main target of fascists in WWII, would support a new fascist state is extremely anti-semitic.
It’s as simple as: anti-zionism good, anti-semitism bad. Which would be like saying “anti-nazism good, Germanophobia bad”.
Furthermore, this usage of Zionism disregards the historical and ongoing discrimination that non-European Jews have faced within Israel [115].
You mean stealing land from Palestinians in the name of your ethno-religion has unintended consequences for the followers of that ethno-religion that are actually indigenous to the area? Color me shocked.
It also ignores the fact that not all Jews or Israelis support the Zionist movement and the state of Israel [71, 115].
Tankies don’t tend to assume that, though. I would know, I learned all about anti-zionism from tankie groups. In fact, all of these subreddits that this study covers denounce anti-semitism. Once again, it’s the zionists who make that assumption.
As we find later in Section 5.4, tankies have the most proportion of posts with high identity attack against Jews in the far-left community.
???
Let’s pull up that section quickly:
The Perspective API [92] is a widely used [9, 12, 26] tool for measuring toxicity. Although it has limitations, e.g., there are issues of bias and questions of performance when encountering conversation patterns that it was not trained on, at scale it provides a decent measure for comparison between online communities.
They used an API tool to analyze comments on the tankie subreddits. They specifically mention that it has limitations if it wasn’t trained on certain conversation patterns. The Perspective website doesn’t mention it being trained on Reddit comments or comments in leftist communities. This is junk science, of course.
Finally, we observe that tankies frequently target Muslims and Jews in their posts.
I’m not about to dig too deep into the way this API determines what constitutes an Identity Attack, since this study doesn’t even attempt to elaborate on it, but I’m going to assume that if it detects ‘hateful words’ in the same comment as a ‘named entity’ like Jew or Muslim, it just assumes the comment is attacking that entity.
Here’s the problem. A comment like this:
“Zionists are pieces of shit for assuming all Jews support Israel”
or this:
“Implying that the US gives a fuck about Muslims when they criticize China is delusional”
would likely be considered by this bot to be an attack against Jews or Muslims. Curiously, this report doesn’t provide a single shred of evidence of these attacks on Jews or Muslims. But, in the ‘C.1 Qualitative Validation’ section, they do give some examples of the toxic comments that this bot identified. Not a single one is specifically about Jews or Muslims.
Here’s two examples:
To me, boarding schools serve as schools for potential terrorists, and China’s approach seems more humane than the US’s
and
Zionism equates to Fascism.
Neither comment is an Identity Attack against Muslims or Jews. The first is talking specifically about the small portion of Uyghurs that China has identified as being radicalized, not all Muslims. The second is about Zionism, which as this study pointed out, does not mean all Jews. Neither one contains the word ‘Jew’, or ‘Muslim’, anyway.
Hmm, I wonder why they omitted that. Because the truth doesn’t fit the ‘tankie bad’ narrative they are pushing? This is research misconduct, pure and simple, and this singular example of evidentiary omission should cause any non-tankies reading this study to dismiss it in its entirety. But of course, it won’t.
Next section.
5. Pejorative Terms to Ideologies
We find tankies tend to refer to other ideologies with pejoratives. E.g., anarkiddies, anarchildrem(sic), and anarkids instead of anarchists, succdems, succ dems, and succs instead of socdems, and westoids and libshits when referring to liberals. We also find ultras & tankies and radlibs & tankies pairs. Considering tankies is a pejorative term used by other ideologies, this finding means that tankies use ultras and radlibs in a pejorative way, similar to the Democrats v. Republicans example.
Every internet political community does the same. I don’t really care to debunk anything here. Even alt-righties do it with the term RINO. Next.
6. Leaning Towards State-Sponsored Media
Now we’re getting into some more interesting territory. Since we already realized earlier that this study extensively sourced people or organizations directly tied to the US State, and even US state media itself with Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, it should be quite interesting to see their take on tankies and state media.
We find RT & NYT and CGTN & CNN pairs between tankies and r/DemocraticSocialism. CGTN and RT are media organizations that receive direct support from their respective governments; CGTN is controlled by the Chinese government, while RT receives funding and backing from the Russian government [37, 85].
This is trying to show that tankie subreddits will link to an article from RT or CGTN for a specific subject, while a subreddit like /r/DemocraticSocialism will link to NYT or CNN for the same subject. I’m not gonna go in depth on how this seems to imply that billionaire owned, capitalist media like NYT or CNN is unbiased and reliable on subjects that concern America’s or capitalism’s enemies, but obviously, they aren’t. At all.
In my personal (anecdotal) experience, I don’t see tankies linking to Russian or Chinese state media often. When they do, it’s usually not to try to prove a ‘tankie’ narrative. I don’t personally use CGTN much, if at all, because while I don’t necessarily think they outright lie like capitalist state media does, they too often embellish or exaggerate facts and exclude contradictions to bolster a point. I don’t touch RT, since Russia is a capitalist shithole and capitalist state media is a cesspool.
Tankies don’t need to link to CGTN to prove the Uyghur ‘genocide’ is a myth, for instance. Because it’s clear that the accusations are based purely on US state propaganda. ‘Anti-tankies’ will not hesitate to source US state media Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, think tanks funded by CIA cutouts like the National Endowment for Democracy, or US-government-funded christo-fascists like Adrian Zenz to try to prove their sinophobia, though. I’ve seen it happen more times than I can count.
A previous study [48] that involves RT and CGTN found that Russian and Chinese news outlets frequently employs “conflict” or “crisis” to refer Russian invasion of Ukraine, while Western news outlets typically use “war” and “invasion.”
Yea… this is a non-issue. Especially since the state media that the authors of this study cited uses terms like ‘genocide’ and ‘human rights abuses’ to refer to… vocational schools.
As we find later in Section 5.5, tankies have the highest proportion of sharing new(sic) outlets from China and Russia, and have the least proportion for news outlets from western democracies.
Sure, probably. I would like to see a comparison of the frequency of tankies sharing CGTN articles and anti-tankies sharing Radio Free Asia, et al. articles, though. Obviously tankies are reluctant to source either capitalist state media or capitalist billionaire owned media, because they’re wildly biased against AES countries, which tankies support.
I source more western media than AES state media, because I am constantly either debunking it or using it as proof that even capitalist media can’t deny all of the atrocities of capitalism.
On to the final section.
7. US Politics
We find that tankies frequently discuss Joe Biden, displaying a similar focus as r/DemocraticSocialism users have on Donald Trump.
Of course. As I said before, the demsoc subreddit is full of libs. Democratic Socialism itself is a perfectly fine, albeit flawed ideology (you cannot vote out capitalism), but the denizens of that subreddit don’t follow it. This study showing that they don’t criticize Biden as much as Trump proves that. Biden is just as bad as Trump. Tankies often consider him to be worse, because the image that is portrayed of him is a complete fabrication. He is just as racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, ableist, and generally bigoted as Trump, just in a more subtle way. Subtle fascism can arguably be more dangerous than outright fascism, because libs are on board with it. It flies under the radar of the general public.
Additionally, the anti-democratic leaning of tankies is evident from their discussions on topics such as “popularity contest & elections.”
Ah, the lib definition of ‘democracy’ rearing its ugly head. Didn’t you know? Democracy is when you get to choose to vote for a blue white cis male rich septuagenarian who hates the poor or a red white cis male rich septuagenarian who hates the poor. Listen, I wouldn’t take as much offense to this sentence if the authors used the common ‘liberal democracy’ nomenclature which implies that it’s a sham, but they didn’t. They’re calling capitalist hegemonic superpowers ‘democratic’, and AES countries ‘undemocratic’.
All five of the current AES countries (China, north Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba) could be described as a dictatorship of the proletariat. The leadership of these countries serve the majority of the population and not capital. The same can obviously not be said for any capitalist country. ‘Democracy’ by definition means ‘rule by the people’. The US is run by three defence contractors in a trenchcoat to the detriment of ‘the people’.
Tankies call electoralism in capitalist countries a popularity contest because it quite literally is. You have people wearing shirts and hats with Biden or Trump’s face or slogans on them. It’s a cult of personality. Compare this to, for instance, Cuban democracy. Here’s a fact sheet (PDF warning). Some salient points:
“The grassroots participatory nature of the Cuban system means that in addition to elections, there are further opportunities for the population to participate in decision making”
“Cuba’s mass social and grassroots organisations have millions of members. They are self-regulating voluntary bodies with their own staff, buildings and resources.”
“Cuba has 169 Municipal Assemblies, 16 Provisional Assemblies and a National Assembly to which representatives are elected by secret ballot. Voting is voluntary and votes are counted in public”
“During elections it is illegal to spend any money promoting candidates. Candidates’ biographies and their reasons for standing are simply displayed on local notice boards so that every candidate receives the same exposure.”
I’m sure the authors of this study would also call China undemocratic, because it is a ‘one party state’. Of course they’ll ignore the fact that the Communist Party of China has almost 100 million members from nearly all walks of life that directly participate in decision making. Read more about democracy in the PRC here.
The authors would absolutely claim that the DPRK is undemocratic, despite the DPRK having three political parties, elections every 5 years, and workplace democracy. Read more about democracy in the DPRK here.
The DPRK has county, city, and provincial elections to the local people’s assemblies, as well as national elections to the Supreme People’s Assembly, their legislature. These are carried out every five years.
That’s all I’ve got for this study. I’ve addressed the most egregiously incorrect claims in full. The general idea of the study is to use a bot to figure out what terminology ‘tankie’ subreddits use, and compare them to other left-wing ideologies. The purported intent is to identify how the ‘extreme left’ compares to the ‘extreme right’.
At that, it failed spectacularly.
In the US especially (but in every major capitalist country as well) right wing extremism manifests itself through violent attacks against minority groups. If this violence existed via left wing extremism, the only minorities that tankies would attack would be the rich, and they deserve it. But in reality, it just doesn’t happen. We haven’t rolled out the guillotines yet.
Of course, the authors of this study will point to the violence that occasionally breaks out at BLM protests or climate protests or during Occupy Wall Street. They’ll compare this to the violence that frequently breaks out at right wing extremist events and take the /r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM approach. But, even this comparison is unfavorable. The three types of protests I mentioned above are about protecting disadvantaged groups. Black victims of police violence and the proletariat who suffers the most from climate change and wealth inequality.
Right wing ‘protests’ are almost always about upholding the racist, sexist, homophobic, white status quo. The January 6th insurrection was worse than anything the ‘extreme left’ has done in modern times. Oh, and don’t forget about the Charlottesville Nazi rally.
Aside from mass protest events, right wing extremism promotes violence through ‘lone wolf’ shootings. A new one happens in the US near daily. The vast majority are linked to right wing extremists and perpetrated against a minority group.
Remember kids, horseshoe theory isn’t a thing, and no, I don’t even like fishhook theory. We don’t need it. We know self-professed ‘centrists’ are always firmly right wing and projecting. We don’t need a ‘funny little meme graph’ to counter horseshoe theory.
There is no comparison between the ‘extreme left’ and the ‘extreme right’. This study is useless and pointless, it has no need to exist. The degeneracy of liberalism knows no bounds; when you have to lie this much to spread your anti-communism, you’ve lost the plot.
Now subscribe, or I’ll use a bot to analyze your reddit history.