is this and this only: supporting the status quo, but disagreeing on minor points, so that while receiving the plaudits than go along with holding the majority opinion, they can feel (somewhere in their pathetic TV-poisoned minds) that they are “brave” and “intelligent.” It is the ancient gambit used by every would-be intellectual who desires to to be popular as well: “Yes, I agree with you all, but not for precisely the same reasons. Would you perhaps like to hear what I think?” These words, when spoken aloud, are always in that back-of-the-throat drawl which, in American English, signifies considered thought and long acquaintance with books, and of course a string of letters at the end of one’s name.
Thus we get the typical liberal position on anything. “I sympathize with the Palestinians, and the policies of the Israeli government are certainly to be criticized, but all civilized people should denounce Hamas because nothing justifies terrorism!” Or: “Yes, Ukraine has a problem with corruption, and there is a troubling right-wing element in their military, but we still need to side with them because Russia is much worse!” Always there is the ghost of an acknowledgement that the situation is complex – a cheap rhetorical trick – and then doubling down on the socially acceptable position. The ultimate in this stupid game is the invocation of an equally stupid phrase, “two things can be bad at once, mkay?” – which always means in practice that the side America supports is actually the less bad of the two ostensible evils.
Hence we “tankies” are always accused, by liberals, of having for great revolutionaries of the past a wholly uncritical admiration. This is manifestly false, for nearly every discussion among Marxist-Leninists at some point devolves into a picking apart of historical minutiae, with the goal of finding what Mao or Stalin or Honnecker did right or wrong. We are one of the few political groups that does not spare our heroes. But when liberals ask us to approach Mao with “nuance,” what they mean is: admit Mao was a bloodthirsty tyrant who ate babies for breakfast and never brushed his teeth, but he also ended footbinding. Hence the historical record is “complicated.” We Marxists, of course, will not engage in such asinities, and we state openly that Mao’s successes far outnumber and outweigh his mistakes. For liberals, who are at root historical nihilists, this is unacceptable, and why? Because we refuse to play the game, but also because them out in their silly attempts at pandering and social climbing.
I find their constant accusations calling us an “echo chamber” fascinating. They can’t imagine “tankies” existing. We aren’t real people to them. We don’t go down to the shops and watch tv or take our dog for a walk. We’re a group of evil monsters ruining their day by existing and disagreeing with them in way they don’t know how to respond to. So they get mad and try to dismiss us.
They legitimately don’t understand that for the vast majority of us here (who don’t life in AES) that we are in fact not in an “echo chamber” as we interact with dozens, if not hundreds of liberals on a daily basis. Their attitude is pushed onto us by all the people around us in our daily lives, by the media and advertisements that plaster every street in capitalist countries. They can’t imagine anything other than the status quo, which is one of the reasons we make them so mad. We’re disagreeing with them that the status quo is good, and on some level, they probably understand that we have a point there, so they have to bury that idea, lest they start seeing the cracks in liberalism. So they find some excuse, calling us “brainwashed” or “shills” etc. finding some way to declare us “morally invalid” so they don’t have to acknowledge anything we say when they stumble upon an online community like this one. I find the cognitive dissonance interesting, they love calling us an “echo chamber” because we disagree with them, and because we don’t debate the same things they do, like whether or not violent brown people deserve to exist.
Exactly entirely correct.
The thing with liberals is that since they are unable to actualy refute any of our arguments, the only way they can shut down cognitive dissonance and not change their current world view is to find an excuse to dissmiss our talking points without having to engage with them. This is why they love calling us wumao bots or CCP shils and screaming whataboutism. This lead them to have a very conpiracy theorist way of thinking about us. To liberal, we ontologicaly can’t be genuine, to them we can’t even be crazy peoples sincerely beleving in crazy ideas, we have to be bad faith actors of some kind, bots or troll paid by the seeseepee or whoever else, every idea we push must be a ploy of some kind. The reason they have to go that far is because if they even just conceed to us that we are honestly telling them our oppinion, then they will be forced to engage with our arguments, because it’s not a comfortable position to conciously dissmiss and refuse to engage with someone we know is honest, that makes them feel bad, which is why we HAVE to be trolls, that way they can just reject everything we say without thinking about it and not feel bad.
I’ve written a bit about this in the past: https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/1590214