• neidu3@sh.itjust.works
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    10 days ago

    In case you’re asking out of good faith curiosity:

    Tankie is a pejorative (and rightfully so) term for a particular brand of communist/socialist. It’s worth noting that I have nothing against communists or communism in general (even though I don’t agree with it as a political system). A tankie is someone whose standpoint is that communism can do no wrong; anything that went wrong in USSR and China is CIA’s fault, and the Czechs, Hungarians, and Tibetans had it coming.

    Oh, and to any tankies who are reading this and are tempted to engage in sealioning, don’t bother - I don’t care and probably won’t respond. Plus there’s a pretty good chance you’re already on my block list. Call me fascist if you will (I’vebeen called worse things), but at least tell me a definition of fascism that doesn’t also encompass todays China and Russia

    Basically, it’s a label applied to people of a communist persuasion who have given up on any form of critical thinking, and just defaults to “America bad, therefore anything opposing it must be good”. Yes, America bad indeed. But that doesn’t automatically Pol Pot, Kim Young Un, and Stalin are good.

    Also, don’t be surprised if this comment is downvoted to oblivion after someone links it on hexbear or lemmygrad. It’s quite telling that comments like this are usually attacked based on syntax rather than substance, while refusing to actually explain what happened at Tianmen Square or during the Holodomor, without citing russian or Chinese propaganda.

    Also, the name is a reference to communist countries sending tanks against civilians, RE: Hungary 1956, Prague 1968, and Tianmen Square 1989

      • SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
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        10 days ago

        True. The problem is their thought process is “therefore every country that’s adversarial to the US is good” including Russia, China, North Korea, etc.