I hate to break it to you but you do in fact have beliefs. You might not think about them very hard, they might be totally incoherent, you may have passively absorbed them from capitalist propaganda, but you wouldn’t bother speaking if you were really as vacuous as you claim to be.
I consider anarchists misguided, not my enemy. My enemy is the bourgeoisie and not because they disagree with me but because they exploit me, my peers, and the environment. Do you never argue with people who aren’t your enemy?
Because I see no other credible way to stop capital from devouring the world.
Sure individual veterans of many different militias would accrue individual military knowledge but no amount of individual knowledge is sufficient on its own, there is also a need for institutional knowledge. Leadership must have an intimate understanding of the force which it leads. Effective logistical practices must be developed. Long term relationships with other allied forces must be cultivated. All of this is achieved through the repeated iteration and refinement of military institutions over many subsequent conflicts. These necessities cannot be liquidated and reformed at will.
The need to disassemble and then reform your military inbetween each action doesn’t strike you as an extreme limitation? Just how fast do you think you can pull a militia together if you want to do it from scratch in response to each case of capitalist aggression? I agree that both our movements would need much greater numbers in order to challenge the west militarily but I don’t see how an anarchist force could maintain those numbers if they had them when you only ever want to field completely green, newly formed units. Seems like your just feeding shelter cats to coyotes.
My approach to politics is “like team sports” only in that I acknowledge the existence of teams and have chosen one. Do you really think we’re all on the same side? When liberals insist that we all want what’s best for everyone, that there are no conflicting interests only conflicting methods, do you believe them?
What is your timeline for creating this consensual, decentralized, sustainable, free community and how does it compare to the timeline on ecological collapse? When an already extant “big powerful society” such as the US comes to knock you over what do you propose to do about it that won’t require you to establish a disciplined military of your own?
Of course there is implied comparison. If one doesn’t “fall into the tankie mindset” they must necessarily believe in something else. And if nothing else is equal to the task before us, which I assert to be the case, one must be either a tankie or resigned to extinction. I presumed based on OPs choice of instance and comm that the something else they believe and implicitly compare to “tankieism” is anarchism. OP asked why someone would be a tankie and I told them why I am a tankie rather than what they seem to be.
What is meant by “tankie” if not ML communist? And what other ideology would OP, who posted this from anarchist nexus to an anarchism community, propose i hold instead if not anarchism?
Im a tankie because i want there to be clean water anywhere on earth in the future. We have less than 50 years to overthrow capitalism before the earth is a depleted cinder. Marxist Lenninist revolution has worked in the past. 2 out of 3 post WW2 superpowers arose from it. Anarchist success stories include… Rojava? For a while? If you ignore all the US support and how it fell apart without that. By the time the US is weak enough that it can be destroyed without the need for regimented party and military structures it will simply be much to late.
It’s also quite telling that you squishily back away from “the tiananmen square massacre” but then gesture vaguely at some other unspecified crime. Parenti called what you have an unfalsifiable orthodoxy.
You don’t consciously support capitalism but you uncriticaly accept and repeat all their lies about every serious alternative. You are a useful idiot of theirs. I suppose you also think that Venezuela is a ‘narco terror state’? And if not why do you believe the state department when it lies about its other enemies? And no, it does not follow that just because someone who actually thought nothing would be quiet that someone verbose must be dominated by propaganda. I went through an anarchist phase myself as a dumb college kid. What moved me past it was not exposure to Chinese propaganda but a more thorough examination of capitalist propaganda and how it informed my view of the rest of the world even as I nominally rejected its source. After deworming my brain a bit the numbers on emissions and renewable installations spoke for themselves.