I keep seeing “fuck tankies” everywhere, and seem to see people getting called “tankie” for any number of things–I used to feel like I knew what it meant (the formal definition, which I thought was the only application) but that’s clearly not the case anymore. Saw someone get called one because they… Liked the idea of universal basic income and wanted walkable cities? And now the same sentiment is on a large number of Lemmy communities, lol.
I feel like I’ve been living under a rock.
Edit: Wow, I guess it’s just as meaningless of a term now as it seemed. At least it’s a nice, bright flag for ghouls not worth engaging with meaningfully, lol. I saw “fuck tankies” on a genderqueer community and got pretty confused on how the two ideas correlated in the slightest, so I guess that was the tipping point on me finally asking about it.
It’s become a catch all insult for anyone to the left of Biden, pretty much. It’s totally divorced from it’s original meaning and used as a thought terminating cliche at this point.
Ah, that explains a lot. The current state of political discourse is… Very good and productive.
because there are some Stalinists or just dumb people who are proud of their country or a country they didn’t even live in.
The Soviet Union won World War 2 and saved the world from fascism. Millions of Red Army soldiers and Russian civilians died at the hands of fascists and we are in their debt
I don’t get how doing what is so obviously good makes you a good leader, that just makes the west bad because they basically helped hitler. Also this "we are in their dept thinking isn’t really a productive argument.
Why can people just admit that there are some truths and not everything was good.
Communism is not an ideology that can be done by just reading a basic rulebook and blindly believing historic anecdotes that are hard to verify or just straight up wrong.
I also want to believe that there were good and powerful communist leaderships, I can understand that.
How does wanting to understand make me a lib? Isn’t this kind of flagging people what left ideologies criticise?
Just give me some real facts or evidence and I am happy, if you can’t show me these you are reactionistic and conter-revolutionary.
Stalin was a bad dictator, Lenin I think was not, Mao tried to be good but also made some mistakes and turned evil in his last years.
Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist power structure.
- Declassified CIA report from the 1950’s
Even the CIA knew that calling Stalin a dictator was bullshit.
Also Mao “turned evil”? Come on.
Clearly you have totally internalized the “pop-history” view of socialism in the 20th century, surely you realize such a simplified narrative cannot help but hide ideological bias.
