this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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Okay I’ll ask the obvious question… what are tankies?
"Communists" who think USSR and CCP are good. They often deny their war crimes, then when you prove them they attempt to justify them. Basically red fascists.
How the hell does someone justify genocide?
People deny the ongoing genocide of indigenous North Americans all of the time. It's really easy when you have some sort of intrinsic motivation to do so, apparently.
Ongoing? Please explain. My own country (Canada) is sadly guilty of committing what is tantamount to indigenous genocide in the past through residential schools. But I haven't heard of anything so serious happening currently.
My own country (Canada) is sadly guilty of of committing ongoing indigenous genocide. One merely needs to look up the term as defined by the United Nations Genocide Convntion to understand how.
It defines genocide as any of these five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group":
killing members of the group
causing them serious bodily harm, or mental harm
imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group
preventing births
forcibly transferring children out of the group
We tick every box. Every. Single. One. Always have, and continue to do so.
By saying it wasn’t one
“It was a necessary evil against aggression”
“It was a guerrilla group unaffiliated to the red cause”
“It was an attack by the the blues to make us look bad”
Etc.
Pick your poison.
I'd like to see them make that argument for the great terror...
In January 1968, a progressive faction was able to gain control of the government in communist Czechoslovakia. They proceeded to liberalize the country. Czech media was allowed to be critical of Soviet-style communism for the first time, and many restrictions on individuals were eased. This was called the "Prague Spring"
Fearing a weakened position in the cold war and a spreading desire for liberal reforms in other countries, the Soviet Union, with the aid of other Warsaw Pact countries, invaded Czechoslovakia in order to install a more friendly regime and bring the country back in line with Soviet policy.
For many western communists and socialists, this was the final nail in the coffin for support of Soviet-style communism. A small minority, however, supported the action. They were labeled as "tankies" because of the imagery of tanks rolling in to Czech cities.
Today, "tanky" is used to label a spectrum of people. At one end are those who have large support for marxist-lenninist/marxist-lenninist-stalinist/marxist-lenninist-maoist Communism (different philosophies of how to accomplish a communist revolution) at one extreme. At another end are people who support the current Russian or Chinese governments because they oppose American imperialism. Most of those people do not really identify as "tankies". The current usage also doesn't really relate to the original, as most people don't have a stance on the Soviet response to the Prague Spring today.
Lemmy.ml is understood to be friendly to marxist-lenninist thought, since the founders subscribe to that philosophy. Thus, users of the instance are often labeled as "tankies".
Commies, but even more pathetic than the conventional ones
What’s ‘overeach’ and ‘contral’?