Is “Tankies” a new term? I’ve never heard it before a week or two ago.
It’s decades old. Refers to people who support communist regimes regardless of what they do. Originally because the Soviet Union used tanks to quell rebellion and some people in the west still cheered for them.
I believe it was coined by the British left when the USSR quashed the Hungarian revolution by driving tanks through their streets. Anyone still in support of them is deemed a “tankie.” Nowadays it was meant to criticize authoritarian communists.
when the USSR quashed the Hungarian revolution
quashed the Hungarian communist (democratic worker) revolution; lowercase.
Was it from the Soviet Union? I always assumed it was a reference to justifying Tianamen Square.
I guess that more you know.
Yup, when I first joined I wanted to join lemmy.ml because “oh I like machine learning”.
Those were the days…
I apologize I’m only up to ‘s’ in my quest to memoriz3 every fucking word ever used in the English language. 🙄 The fuckin word, “meme” is like a million years old. It doesn’t mean it was as regularly used in conversation before social media. On a different note, for how many other languages use Lemy how would you know English is my primary language?
Is that when you joined Lemmy? Because Lemmy is infested with Tankies, and you’ll hear someone calling them out before long
edit: Spelling Errors
No, but considering Lemmy overall has grown 5800% in active monthly users in the first month the Reddit protests began, it’s safe to assume most people haven’t been here much longer than that lol. How long have you b3en using Lemy? 20 years? 50 years? Lol /s
I joined during the Reddit migration and ended up dealing with Tankies almost immediately. Before Lemmy I always thought most Communists would claim that true communism hasnt happened yet, I was NOT expecting people who aggressively protected safe spaces and didnt allow any level of words that could be considered slurs to think that Russia and China have done nothing wrong and are super great countries
