The Legendary Dragon Alephwyr, named Alephwyr, BA

My sincere answer for why tankies reemerged five years ago is that movements are social hierarchies and newbie teens don't want to compete for status in existing illegible/inaccessible spaces like anarchism, so they resurrected a dead/empty scene that had trappings of status.https://twitter.com/Marusya_161/status/1295111957071175683 …

Leftism exploded in social cachet for a variety of reasons, and newly minted leftists needed to slap an identity, a brand, a flag of status and association on themselves. "Stalin did nothing wrong, USSR looked cool" is a quickie that requires no work or long acculturation.

For all of recorded history tankies were like three old creepy white dudes no one cared about at the back of an IWW meeting. Sometimes they'd trick a kid or two for a couple years. The reemergence of tankies involved people completely disconnected and unrelated to prior tankies.

When I first started hearing whispers of anyone under 50 actually defending Lenin it was newly minted trans girls in abusive cult collective houses. They weren't like getting this shit from contact w/ actual leninists, they were inventing a new social milieu from whole cloth.

Sure, there were *some* points of transmission. A creepy professor schooled in standard creepy tankie entryism gathered some students, got them to take over fb pages, etc. But mostly tankies were just googling "what is communism" and grabbing random shit.