The Legendary Dragon Alephwyr, named Alephwyr, BA

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.

Anyway, this is why today's online tankiedom is such an uniformed and contradictory grab-bag of bullshit. There's been some congealing as folks competed to show off what texts (in this previously dead space) they'd read, but mostly it's just social positioning.

This kind of thing happens EVERY time a movement gets a flood of new recruits. People flood in and want to grab high status immediately, are resentful of those already there, and clash over not wanting to learn or accept preexisting consensus positions they don't yet hold.

My go-to example of this in Occupy were kids who "not to brag but had been an anarchist now for OVER A MONTH" getting furious and yelling at longstanding anarchists that we were "fake anarchists who don't know anything!" because we weren't pacifists.

See also leftypol & the dirtbaggers. Folks get converted on one issue and then recoil about being expected to also learn / change their opinion on a variety of other topics. *Respecting pronouns?! Never! You olds are a joke! We're making a new movement with hookers & blackjack!*

Having been on the 'chans and reddit for a long time, I saw two phenomenon: - Soviet and other ML iconography/propaganda was easily translated into memes. - ML theory has a program: Marx -> Lenin -> (maybe) Stalin -> (maybe) Mao. Even lying dormant, these are easy to pick up.