I think there’s a small amount of truth to it especially when people target someone like Luna Oi, but at least for now it’s in the vast majority of cases an equivalent of chud or lib etc. and historically was a term made by mostly white British leftists to make fun of other mostly white British leftists, not something to describe groups of people in the global south.
I think this is pretty similar energy to right wing ppl / libs last year claiming using gusano is racist, obviously the people who get called gusano are almost always more reactionary than people that get called tankies outside of maybe like 1 or 2 of nazbols, but I think neither in his words are frequently racist, and it’s a weird energy especially as Ben Norton is a white American guy and seems more about wanting to own the people who use tankie as an insult than it is about making a stand against any racism happening.
https://unofficialbird.com/BenjaminNorton/status/1609586255641169921#m
Western libs will call mediocre socdems in global south and anyone who supports them “tankie” its definitely a racialzed term
More often then not it seems to be the polite lib version of “race traitor”
How do you know what race someone is on something like Reddit or forums or left book or anonymous Twitter? There’s tons of non-white people who use social media and they get called tankie all the time if they point out western chauvinism and imperialism and fascism
Ask a leftist or patriotic Chinese person about their experience on the English speaking internet and how many times they get called tankies or chicoms or CPC shills or wumaos etc
again, libs and radlibs on twitter calling people tankie have no idea who is at the other end of their insults. they have no idea if they are white coastal elites or chinese communists or what. So black, asian, latin people are called tankie all the time by rich white anglos
historically was a term made by mostly white British leftists to make fun of other mostly white British leftists
The prior were white British chauvinists who support western colonialism and imperialism. The latter were white British anti-imperialists who had solidarity with the global south.
It was always chauvinist, and the accusation was implicitly racist immediately because it made solidarity the 2nd and 3rd world a bad thing. “You are a traitor to good civilized proper socialism. You agree with dark, evil, foreign socialism”
