“If true, one wonders why, in country after country, these Reds side with the poor and powerless often at great risk and sacrifice to themselves, rather than reaping the rewards that come with serving the well-placed like nudes of underage girls at Epstein’s pedo island.” - Parenti paraphrased
The best thing about “tankies” right now is there really isn’t a singular marxist-leninist figurehead. Let’s say, I don’t know, Richard wolff was in the files? Our entire ideology isn’t tied to one old white dude so it wouldn’t matter much.
Dick wolff is nowhere near an ML lol
I was trying to think of an old man Marxist professor analogous to noam Chomsky. He is pretty frequently on Brian beckers show “the socialist program” and isn’t becker on the PSL central committee?
Becker is one of the founders of PSL when they split from WWP. It’s difficult to pinpoint Wolf’s exact ideology, because he seems to present some co-op road to Socialism to a mostly America audience… He did call Mao a great Revolutionary, and seems to have a positive view of modern China.
Our entire ideology isn’t tied to one old white dude
Just because Marx and Lenin are dead doesn’t make them not two old white dudes (with the caveat that alot of tankies love Mao who only met 2 of 3 of those criteria)
Just because the origins are with Marx, Engels, and Lenin, does not mean that they aren’t continued on by Fanon, Rodney, Mao, Nkrumah, Guevara, Sankara, and more to the modern day.
WRT Marx specifically, most modern Marxist-Leninists subscribe to a pretty different (more advanced) view on colonialism and the national question that were developed later by African and Asian Marxists like Ho Chi Minh, Fanon, Said, and Nkrumah. The criticism of Marx’s eurocentrism has been laid out for a long time and if you find MLs that still subscribe to the exact things Marx laid out in his work with regards to the global south, they’re probably people who are stuck in the 19th century and aren’t reading more modern theory.
Well, they weren’t in the Epstein files at least.
I mean, I guess you probably would? Epstein was explicitly targeting people with wealth and power to bring into his gross “parties”, so if you had “tankies” with wealth and power, he’d have been targeting them and it’s not unbelievable that some of them might have gone for it - if you gain the kind of wealth and power the people Epstein was courting have, you probably don’t have any real moral principles.
I wonder why tankies never seem to have that wealth and power. Could it be that in order to become the kind of wealthy socialite Epstein was doing, you would have to abandon your communist principles entirely? No, it’s the children that are wrong…
Are there any Chinese men in the Epstein files? Honestly curious.
It seems to have been a very international club. Yanks, Brits, Swedes, Russians, Israelis, South Africans. But I haven’t heard of a single Chinese person - especially not a patriotic one - involved in the Epstein stuff.
Keyu Jin is the only one I know of but she didn’t do anything wrong with Epstein, it was just Larry Summers trying to woo her.
You don’t have to go that far. There are “tankies” with wealth and power and the only one who was ever anywhere near Epstein was Castro. Epstein never got near the governments of the other AES countries even when it would’ve been quite advantageous to him to do so, and when he had no issue getting close to government officials of other countries.
I’ve been led to believe for two and a half years that jewish people are in fact not white but a uniquely special ethnic group that deserve to be able to do colonialism and commit genocide without criticism, never mind being stopped.
Interesting that they revert to being “white dudes” when it’s convenient.
Is the argument here that “tankies are further away from power”? What?
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Isn’t this claim born out to be false by the lack of a massive pedophile conspiracy in the Chinese government?
I’d imagine in a society like China with tight control of information and restrictions on criticism of government and officials, they’re be many isolated incidents that would be swept under the rug like all scandals rather than warrant a specific conspiracy. But then it’s hard to get a feel for where things are since the Chinese started using technology to clamp down on corruption by low level party officials.
If you’re going to invent a conspiracy theory to prove a point, perhaps the point itself is baseless?
Alright buddy, and I’d imagine that in a burger obsessed country like the United States everyone is secretly carrying 2-6 burgers on their person at all time in case of emergency. It’s easy to just make up things.
I was eating 2 burgers when you were posting that, in fact
No, actually, that sounds about right.
lmfao… ahh the old “they have total information control” conspiracy again
There’s an interesting assumption going on here.
You seem to believe that everyone wants to go to lavish rape parties, and the only thing stopping them is a lack of power.
Why is that?
You seem to believe that everyone wants to go to lavish rape parties
Not at all. The meme we’re commenting on specifically mentions Epstein Island and the lack of MLs there. I wasn’t suggesting that most or all MLs would go if given the chance but you certainly wouldn’t see zero.
Okay so then you think, within any given group, there’s always going to be at least a few people that want to go to lavish rape parties.
🤨
Not necessarily within small groups but within any given political movement. Law of averages; there’s a few creepy rapey (usually but not exclusively) men in every large grouping of people.
So you don’t think, maybe, some groups of men are more likely to be rapey than other groups? I suppose there’s just an “average man” that exists independent of political affiliation or material conditions or social conditioning, and among that cohort are rapists.
I think, actually, some political movements are worse than others and more likely to be rapey. Radical, I know.
I think they have a point that if you just took the set of all ML men there’d be abusers and pedophiles among them. That much is just undeniable and you’d have to believe that something about reading Stalin makes you a saint who won’t ever take advantage of others to say otherwise, because we’re literally talking about hundreds of millions of people here. To me the question is whether or not MLs have a system that can organize society in such a way that child trafficking rings can’t be built, and whether the system that MLs build is likely to create abuses of vulnerable people. That question can actually be operationalized and studied in a more useful way.
So you don’t think, maybe, some groups of men are more likely to be rapey than other groups?
Sure. And in a given society, they gravitate to positions, lifestyles, and occupations that help them rape much like pedophiles are often drawn to teaching or being youth pastors.
I think, actually, some political movements are worse than others
People with a right wing outlook on life are, in my opinion, way more likely to be rapey.
Let’s define “tankie” as a Marxist-Leninist who emphasizes a vanguard party that makes dictates for a whole country’s economy, approves of the silencing of dissent, and excuses the practice of using force to keep an alliance together and ideologically coherent.
Wouldn’t you think that such a person would naturally seek out positions of power, and have the guile and discipline to mask their intentions until they achieved those positions, so as to be more effective? Certainly it should be possible, 70 years after Joseph McCarthy, to imagine a ML making their way into a prominent position.
Also, where are the Jeffrey Epsteins of Cuba, Vietnam, and China? I left out the other two because Laos is underdocumented and North Korea is opaque. This should be easy for any serious anti-tankie to give examples of.
Wouldn’t you think that such a person would naturally seek out positions of power
You’ve never heard of Joseph Stalin?
Also, where are the Jeffrey Epsteins of Cuba, Vietnam, and China
Well, Jeffrey Epstein was a blackmailer who used his Island to gather Kompromat on people. In that regard, the communist equivalent would be the KGB. If you mean in regards to using power to achieve sex, there were historically large numbers of corrupt lower party officials in China with mistresses’ prior to reforms. If you mean specifically raping kids, then Mao Zedong was alleged to fuck 14 year olds.
You’re losing track of your argument. No one was talking about the period from 1899-1953 (Stalin’s activist era), we were talking about 1991-2018 (the time that Epstein was influential), or possibly as early as 1981 when the neoliberal era came into full swing. Whether tankies ever get into positions of power is not the question, it would be a rather stupid one. The question is why we see radlibs and neocons and fascists in the Epstein connections, but not tankies.
ImmortalInfo is saying that “tankies would otherwise be on the Epstein flight logs, but they were denied access to that level of power”. I am saying that “a tankie is someone who is better than average at making their way into power”, and therefore, anyone who claims that tankies are absent from any sampling of the elite class needs to explain why. There is a massive H0 that most of the people in these comments are referring to, and you’ll need to be able to disprove it.
Don’t lose your train of thought in your eagerness to pull out 8th-grade ideological mantras like “Stalin and Mao were bad” as circular arguments. The way to truth is critically examining what’s there, and using your logic without feeling the need to tip the scales one way or another.
Are there Epstein-style procurement rings in ML-governed countries or aren’t there? And what do you suppose is the mechanism for why tankies don’t show up on the flight logs or in the emails, in light of my point of how they should be able to get into those circles if they wanted to?
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Why do they lack power within this system?
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Why do other leftists like Chomsky not lack power within this system?
- It’s not their system
- Chomsky is a member of the Intelligentsia with celebrity giving him unique access to the upper echelons of society far above what would otherwise be “his station” even when his expressed political beliefs are in opposition to what they believe.
It’s noteworthy that it’s not Chomsky’s system either. It’s not Derrida’s, Foucault’s, Zizek’s, or Deleuze’s system. Yet the people who have power don’t mind letting in these guys, who are ostensibly radicals and critics of power, to the boys’ club and they’re allowed to share that power a little bit. But when you think about intellectuals who do similar work and aren’t anticommunists, none of them are household names. So is the intelligentsia just a thing that exists that has a vague unspecified connection to the ruling class, or is the process of knowledge production just as important for the capitalists to coopt as any other arena of economic and social intercourse?
Why are MLs specifically outside of the western intelligentsia? Can you think of one that’s in the Epstein files?
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Is bro telling on himself?
suddenly having access to power is a good thing for chomsky lovers?
This is like a half-formed thought. They can observe that the people on Epstein’s plane had access to power and “tankies” don’t have access to power, and then the thought just stops before they make the connection between the two.
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Has anyone ever told bro that most ‘tankies’ live in the Global South?
The usefulness of the concept of tankies is in part that it’s so poorly defined that the category can shrink and expand at runtime to prove whatever point you want. Global South brown people aren’t tankies (as long as we’re actively entertaining that brown people exist and have their own subjectivity) because if they are, suddenly 95% of brown people who are leftists disagree with me and that’d make me look racist.
Chomsky isn’t a tankie because he’s said a bunch of things I agree with. But also he is a tankie because he defended the Khmer Rouge and was friends with Epstein. (surprised that the OOP didn’t take advantage of some of Chomsky’s uncharacteristic takes to make that point)
Foucault wasn’t a tankie because he had a nuanced take on Israel (read: he was a zionist) and was very critical of AES. But also if his support of pedophilia is brought up he can become a tankie because he supported the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
These are 2 examples who are real people who have written about their political opinions extensively yet it’s definitely possible for someone to find reasons to put them on either side of the “tankie” divide. If you want to do it with a more nebulous entity like a political community, hypothetical people (like the latter part of the OOP), or a whole country, you have infinite wiggle room. Anything can be used as a data point because the word is meaningless.
Donald Trump is a tankie because he visited North KoreaGood post, they should be redirected to this post whenever these chickens cluck their shit
I think it’d become a better post with examples of radlibs labeling specific intellectuals and political parties tankies and not simultaneously, but I don’t know how you’d find that.
That’s far too much work, you said enough already.
Damn I didn’t know Foucoult was so yikes.
Postmodernism is essentially distilled anticommunism and goes against everything we believe tbh
There’s a reason much of the post modern left received funding and support from the three letter agencies, often without even their knowledge or consent.
The declassified CIA document: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp86s00588r000300380001-5
If you’re curious and wanna know more about this chapter in history, the following article may help,
The CIA Reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left
The declassified CIA document: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp86s00588r000300380001-5
Will read. I love learning about CIA projects that, if I tried to explain to a normal person, would make me sound insane.
When I’m on writing forums and “show, don’t tell” comes up all I want is to call that CIA propaganda.
He also was incredibly active in the effort to bring down socialist Poland and was proudly an anticommunist.
Cuba, Vietnam, DPRK, and Sahel, welcome to the white-o-sphere
You can prove anything I guess if you just make shit up. Tankies destroyed
“yeah, you’re right, but have you considered you’re wrong?”
Given more access to power…as if power isn’t actively bargained for by these liberals. Nope they just gave Chomsky the pedophile wealth power like a fucking Green Lantern ring. The fucker just got done talking about how it’s all about reciprocity. Can’t even be consistent in their own narrative.
Also why weren’t tankies given more power in this arrangement? Maybe there is a clue. Because tankies don’t seek power by cuddling up to billionaire pedophiles nor enter into reciprocal exchanges of favors with them.
If you met with Epstein but you were completely honest about it when questioned and nothing comes out of the files contradicting it, I’ll believe you. He certainly had meetings with non-pedophiles sometimes.
However, if it turns out you lied about a single detail of your relationship with Epstein, as far as I’m concerned that’s enough evidence to put you in prison for child sexual assault. There is no other reason to lie about your relationship with Jeffrey Epstein than trying to hide your crimes. Put everyone he’s ever sent an email to on trial, and put anyone found to have lied about it in prison forever.
Noam Chomsky is a pedophile and a child predator. Any mention of him should be “Notorious pedophile Noam Chomsky”
FFS, Epstein was getting around with world leaders of every continent. He was pictured with Castro one or two times yet no evidence exists that Castro even did as much as shake Epstein’s hands since Epstein was only there for other people. He was doing deals in Mongolia.
Isn’t it notable that in all of that he never entrapped anyone from a communist country? It’s likely he was operating as an intelligence asset and it’s obvious how useful it would be to have compromat on leaders of enemy states, or even left wing intellectuals like Chomsky and Parenti. But it appears that no one you could consider a “tankie” was implicated.
Isn’t it notable that in all of that he never entrapped anyone from a communist country?
I mean yeah kinda actually.
Statistically by sheer numbers there would have to be a corrupt pedophile with some kind of power in China.Right, and the closest he got was being the awkward wingman for Larry Summers with Keyu Jin whose dad was vice minister of finance[1] in China but she actually stopped her affair with Larry Summers because… he was friends with Jeffery Epstein who was already known to be a pedophile.
Just statistically that is kind of impressive actually
Let me whip out some IdPol like pocket sand.
I don’t even get what their argument is, tankies didn’t fuck around with Epstein cuz they’re white… so they don’t need Epstein’s influence? I legit don’t get the argument.
They’re saying that white men all become Epstein groupies if given power. Tankies weren’t around Epstein only because tankies have no power (implying tankies are white, too? Unless it was specifically about Parenti)
