Wall of Shame - When Memes Go Wrong Introduction

So a while back I saw this pretty terrible image doing the rounds on social media, you may be wondering why I'm devoting time rebutting this joke, that's the thing this isn't a joke the creator genuinely believes this. This was made by a social media account called Laborwave, which despite the pop zeitgeist name is trying to raise money by selling meme content to fund what it calls "local socialist organising" on its website which is still largely a stock template.

It also came with this charming message.

Fuck these pieces of shit for improving the material conditions of hundreds of millions of people. Youre only a REAL revolutionary if your revolution fails, so you can romanticize it, Like The Paris Commune and Catalonia

It was based on a list provided by another user of what they described as "anti western fighters" and I'm grateful for this list as its saved me a lot of work looking up the images I wasn't that familiar with.

Both criteria, Tankie and Anti Western have some serious issues on this list, some fit one or the other very well, some might count depending your definitions and a tiny minority fit both, while others don't really fit either.

Definitions

Tankie - Tankie is a term that was coined in the aftermath of the suppression violent of a workers revolt in Hungary. The events and images of Soviet military forces especially tanks on the streets of Budapest in 1956 left a lasting.

Journalist Peter Paterson asked Amalgamated Engineering Union official Reg Birch about his election to the CPGB Executive after the Hungarian invasion:

"When I asked him how he could possibly have sided with the 'tankies', so called because of the use of Russian tanks to quell the revolt, he said 'they wanted a trade unionist who could stomach Hungary, and I fitted the bill'.[1]

Because they were the faction that was openly in support of state violence against opposition, even from left wing or alternative socialist forces. Currently on the internet the term is considered somewhat controversial because its view as a slur by "Marxist-Leninsts" or rather Stalinists as they are more well known. This confused me for two reasons when I found this out, firstly because I have met old members of the CPGB at conferences and demonstrations and they still use that term to describe themselves with pride. But secondly because they don't seem to have any real issue with the content behind the word. I've never seen one object to the term and then object to its meaning, usually they will quickly follow up with a defence of ______ Socialist states crushing of opposition and repression of its own workers.

Generally speaking there are two ways the term is used though they often overlap. A slang term for a Marxist-Leninist including admirers of Stalin, Mao Hoxha etc. And less often for anyone vaguely leftish whose ok with armed suppression of opposition no matter its content or origin.

But they refused to see this army as an army. They saw it as the working class movement. What entered the city wasn’t tanks and soldiers but the representative of the victory of the working class. It was our dreams, aspirations and hopes that marched into the city. It was the image of our liberation, of our determination to run our lives free of armies and prisons and tanks. This is what these blind comrades saw entering the city when they cheered.

Letters of Insurgents Yrostan's Third letter 

Anti-Western - This one has two different meanings, like Tankie there is some overlap but it doesn't cover everyone. There's anti-western in the sense of opposition to the nations of the "West" almost always the USA and western European powers like France and the UK, but whether that includes over countries that are currently very close to them like say Japan, Australia or Turkey depends on whose doing the labelling.

The other use of anti-western in the sense of opposing the political, economic and social movements heavily associated with western Europe and the USA. Like the Enlightenment, pluralistic and usually elected government, market driven economics. Again what does and does not count depends, but generally speaking its usage covers at least some of that.

Addendum Lost Cause- While discussing this project with a friend whose shared my political background, he raised something that I think is very important to keep in mind. Like me he remembers when Tankies could be broken up into two distinct groups with very little overlap, the `Anti-revisionists` the ones whom still admired Stalin, and so regarded the post Stalin Soviet Union and most governments friendly to it as deviators and heretics. And the `Revisionists` (though in my experience they didn't like being called that) whom disavowed Stalin to at least some degree.

But nowadays, according to my friend most modern Tankies seem to have spent so much time trying to defend the honour of dead men and governments that they've degenerated into a sort of Lost Cause myth, much like the American Conservatives of the southern states of the Union. It no longer matters that many of these people didn't share the same narrow politics, or that some even tried to kill each other, what matters in this telling is that were in the broadest most superficial sense possible part of the same movement. I think there's a lot to it and its the only definition of Tankie that works for many on this list. I don't quite know if even this one can stretch to a majority.
(Work in progress, subject to changes)

The List

In their own eyes they weren’t cruel but committed. They saw themselves as embodiments of the working class struggle and they saw prisoners as enemies of the working class. Their cruelty wasn’t aimed against individuals but against the principle of evil; through them the workers’ movement was protecting itself from its enemies. Such jailers were convinced that the struggle you and I had waged had been victorious, that the workers had seized power over all social activity. These jailers saw themselves as the protectors of that victory. The proof of the victory was the fact that people like themselves were in power, people whose words expressed the liberation of the working class, whose brains contained a representation of the self-liberation of the workers. Their power over prisoners was the proof of the success of the project. As Zdenek observed in his argument with the former politician, these were people who had transformed the workers’ movement into a religion. They were its priests. They served their religion by suppressing its enemies. Prisons and concentration camps were the living proof of the religion’s victory, strict surveillance of inmates was the proof of its vitality and the liquidation of all the enemies would herald its ultimate realization.

Letters of Insurgents, Yarostan's Third Letter

Before we get to the list, I want to draw attention to the notable exception in such an exhaustive list of "Tankies" Nikita Khrushchev, the original Tanky. Nikita Khrushchev was the one who ordered the Soviet army to put down the revolt in Hungary, those Communist Party of Great Britain members were called Tankies because they publicly supported his policies.

Parody or heartfelt tribute? We may never know

The list 

The Footnotes