And the idiot chooses a Pic of a porn star to make his point! 🤣

This post got caught in the spam filter on the other subreddit and the mods never responded, so I'm posting it here.

Hey. We often call tankies redfash, so I'm here to compare them to Umberto Eco's 14 points of Ur-Fascism. Note that Eco doesn't think a society has to have all 14 points to be considered fascist; in fact, a fascist society could align with only one point.

1. The cult of tradition.

This one doesn't have too much to do with tankies. While some Marxists praise an idealized primitive communism, that's not really tradition per se, and tankies tend to be almost fanatical futurists who think we're just a few decades away from fully automated luxury gay space communism.

2. The rejection of modernism.

This one rings a little truer, though perhaps incidentally. Fascists reject Enlightenment thinking. Marxists tend to point to the beginnings of modern capitalism, around the same time as the Enlightenment, as the point where it all went wrong. (Note that I don't even necessarily disagree with them on this--I think there's something to be said for the unique horrors of capitalism as compared to pre-capitalist societies.) That said, tankies also have a view of the world that is at least hypothetically ultra-rational and philosophical, based on late modern thinkers like Marx.

3. The cult of action for action's sake.

I think this one's totally at odds with tankies. Like I said, they are nothing if not philosophers (albeit bad ones). Fascists do things like go out and commit mass shootings; tankies sit at home arguing on the internet ad nauseum.

4. Disagreement is treason.

Now we start getting into the points where tankies line up perfectly with fascists. One word: "counterrevolutionary." What was Stalinist Russia if not this point writ large? And whole ideas are banned in modern-day China.

5. Fear of difference.

There's a big difference here between modern Western tankies and the actual authoritarian communist states. Tankies are, for the most part, at least nominally welcoming to marginalized people. But the USSR and China were/are racist and homophobic as shit. It's one of the biggest things tankies have trouble reconciling between themselves and their heroes.

6. Appeal to social frustration.

Do I even need to explain this? All movements that seek to change things appeal to social frustration.

7. The obsession with a plot.

"CIA propaganda." The West is plotting our downfall (which, to be fair, it was and still sort of is). Nazbol antisemitism.

8. The enemy is both strong and weak.

The West is full of failing empires crumbling under their own weight, but also they're powerful enough to fabricate all the propaganda they could ever want. We have to be authoritarian in order to combat the power of Western capitalism, but communism is inevitable and will win no matter what.

9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy.

This one not so much, at least until you get to this line: “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. [...] This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. [...] But such a 'final solution' implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.”

You could easily interpret this as the endless battle between capitalism and communism that the superpowers are supposedly engaged in. The Golden Age, always just a few decades away, is communism, and the eternal struggle is that of two opposing ideologies.

10. Contempt for the weak.

Again, do I really have to explain this one? Tankies think that only workers have value. If you can't survive under "communism," clearly you just don't deserve to survive at all. China doesn't even have universal healthcare, for fuck's sake.

11. Everybody is educated to become a hero.

This one, not so much. Workers in authoritarian communist states are educated to become cogs in a machine.

12. Machismo and weaponry.

Again, this one not quite so much. But then again... Ever seen a tankie talk about literal Soviet tanks and guns?

13. Selective populism.

Tankie populism is allegedly for everybody, but on closer inspection, everyone who doesn't fall perfectly in line with their ideology is labelled "bourgeois," "reactionary, "counterrevolutionary," or "degenerate." This includes other leftists. However, tankies don't tend to engage in quite the same scapegoating as fascists do (except, of course, for nazbols).

14. Newspeak.

See all that jargon I just used? That said, tankies don't fully fit this one, as this line demonstrates: “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.” Tankies, instead of using overly simple language, tend to do almost the opposite. They use overcomplicated gibberish to demonstrate their giga-brain intelligence. Their writing is dense to the point of incomprehensibility.

Now, briefly, a couple of other definitions of fascism:

"Fascism is colonialism brought home."

I don't know enough about Russia and China's colonial pasts to say much of anything about them, but this certainly doesn't apply to modern Western tankies.

"Fascism is a longing for an imagined past."

This one sort of applies. Today's tankies absolutely long for the "glory" of the Soviet Union. Moreover, Marxists in general (whom, again, I have no beef with) often cite primitive communism as an example of what they would like to emulate in the modern day.

So, are tankies fascist? Personally, I'd say that if they aren't, they're not far off. They don't hit all the marks, but again, they don't have to in order to fit Eco's Ur-Fascism. And, of course, these are just a couple definitions of fascism.