this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!
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As the other tankie poster mentioned, it is a very old term, from the 50s and 60s, when the Soviets sent tanks in to crush Hungarians and Czechoslovakians for wanting to be a slightly different kind of Communist than the kind of Communist the Soviet Union wanted them to be. 'Tankie' was the term used by many Western Communists to condemn the Soviets and their supporters, and many Western leftists subsequently split from Soviet sympathies after the incidents. Tankies are the kind of people who say 'Left Unity' but by 'Left Unity' mean 'Everyone agrees with us or gets shot'. They're cretins, authoritarians, and usually genocide deniers, when they aren't busy celebrating genocide.
If the Hexbears could read they'd be very upset right now
i mostly agree with this view although i personally prefer a usage of the term "tankie" to refer to any regime (or any individual performing apologia for said regime) which specifically used(or uses) military assets to systematically brutalize and slaughter their own civilians when those civilians dare to hold a political opinion other than the one espoused by the regime.
The reason: this is a fairer definition that accounts for atrocities which are equally as objectionable without the pointless and irrelevant overhead of economic policy, such as: when Petro Poroshenko shelled civilians in eastern Ukraine for the """"crime"""" of living in the same broad municipal area as pro-Russian separatists. This bone-headed move is what gave Russia their (extremely dubious) Cassus Belli for invading Ukraine later. If not for Poroshenko pulling a tankie maneuver and hurling military assets at his own people, Russia would have had EVEN LESS legitimacy to their claim of the Ukrainian government trying to "genocide" the Russian-speaking populations within Ukraine. As it stands, thanks to Poroshenko, there in fact WERE civilians who died under the Ukrainian regime at the time, and whom also were native Russophones.
(Frankly i suspect that Poroshenko was either a Russian false flag plant or a useful idiot 'helped' into place in order to undermine Ukraine and make it vulnerable to Russian takeover, and that he wasn't """"supposed to"""" lose to Volodymyr Zelenskyy in in 2019. Russia was anticipating to be carrying out its """"special military operation"""" against Poroshenko's regime, NOT some other guy who wasn't brutalizing civilians, and when that went off the rails, they decided "fuck it we'll do it anyway" and it's not working out terribly well for them as a result. But that's an argument for another thread.)
I feel like at that point the casual usage of 'murderer', or 'war criminal' would be more appropriate than 'tankie'. Like how National Socialists are neither constrained to their own nation nor socialists, but no one would use the phrase to mean anything but the original fucking Nazis and those who are like them. Tanks may be a good representation of government authority overreach and violence, but 'tankie' has an established meaning, and communication is dependent on established meanings.
I heard that "national socialist" is kind of a translation error and that a more fitting verbiage would have been "social nationalists" because they are, at their core, nationalists (nationalist supremacists that believe their nation should reign over others) who passively ape the aesthetics of socialism up until the moment they can get away with murdering all the socialists.
I suppose it's that, from the standpoint of making language perform its task with better efficacy and efficiency, a tweak of a term's usage that removes confounding specificity which gives it a broader, more flexible scope, that is more applicable for general use, would remove room for hair-splitting arguments (since now it's involving the whole scalp, metaphorically speaking) and make the term less niche and obscure, thereby improving its utility.
Language is, after all, descriptive rather than prescriptive. While we all fundamentally have to know what others mean when they use a word, we do have the power to motivate a refinement of its meaning that makes it easier to understand and use.