I tried explaining my problems with tankies without calling them tankies. In fact, I used their own terminology to describe my disagreement with them. It, uh… well it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

George Orwell fought in the Spanish civil war on the side of the Marxists. His army was betrayed by the Marxist-Leninists. After that experience, he wrote 1984, in which a totalitarian government uses “newspeak” to suppress dissent by suppressing the very ideas that people are capable of communicating. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Marxist-Leninists describe their disagreements in terms that turn criticism of them into gibberish. I think it’s exactly what Orwell was writing about based on his experiences.

    • Genius@lemmy.zipOP
      32·
      1 day ago

      It’s an English idiom. The alphabet is also called the “ABCs”. As in “kindergarteners need to learn their ABCs”. Americans refer to any kind of basic knowledge as ABCs, like “The ABCs of cell biology” - this would probably be identifying organelles in a textbook. “Marxism ABC” is a very bad attempt at using this idiom by someone who neither understands other cultures nor their own.

      • console.log(bathing_in_bismuth)@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        I get it now, thank you. I kindly accept any list of top “ABCs” (correct?) of what I am supposed to know, but going with wha?t I’ve read and my historical knowledge I doubt I’ll learn anything new.

        Thanks for the explanation!

        • Genius@lemmy.zipOP
          64·
          1 day ago

          It’s a tankie saying that we need socialism before communism because some old white guy wrote it in a book.

          Einstein said if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it. These tankies tell us to read the books instead of explaining what’s in them, because they don’t understand what’s in the books. They’re hoping we’ll get as confused as they are and blindly go with what the old white guys said 200 years ago before any of their theory had actually been attempted in practice.

          That’s, uh, not how science works. That’s how religion works. Reading ancient texts that the author got 100% on the first try is for religions. In science, we follow an iterative process of collective knowledge acquisition. The newest research is usually the most correct. We stand on the shoulders of giants and we see further.