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this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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chapotraphouse
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Tankie has become a pretty useless word especially over the last 4 or 5 years.
Originally it meant people who supported the USSR in suppressing an attempted revolution in Hungary (which by the way was largely supported by Hungarian fascists who were literally fighting alongside the Nazis only 11 years prior, it was complicated)
Then it meant generally people who think socialist states should maintain their structure using violence when they see it as necessary to not collapse. As if every other type of state doesn't obviously do that
Then it started to just mean "marxist-leninists"
Then pretty recently it got misused even harder, until it split and started to mean three things:
It's mainly "anyone to the left of me" which is just the word "woke" but for liberals.
Give it 2 or 3 years, and republicans will be calling Joe Biden a tankie.
One thing I never can really grasp my head around is the framing of the Hungarian uprising or tiananmen square protests. There were much larger acts of state violence committed at the same time elsewhere. Like the French killing a million Algerians or the us proping up iraq in the Iran iraq war while they genocide kurds and launched chemical weapons at Iranian cities. There has to be some dissonance or just ignorance there. It's the emphasis vs lies propaganda at its finest.
Parenti's "non-falsifiable orthodoxy" statement explains it. It really is just reflexive, deeply ingrained, and completely unexamined anti-communism. It's not a real event to most of them, it's an article of religious faith that proves the righteousness of their anti-communist beliefs. Trying to tell them "no one died in the square, about 300 people including unarmed pla soldiers died in fighting between the pla and insurgents several blocks away" is like telling someone that the tears leaking from the virgin mary are a rusted out sewer pipe. You're not revealing the truth, or educating them. You're attacking their religious convictions that form part of the foundation of how their world works, and they react accordingly by shutting down and denying.
All of that type of propaganda carries with it a note that "they did it to their own people!". There is in implicit understanding (or was, at least, when I was growing up in the US) that it is natural for militaries to kill people from other countries, a group which also conveniently includes minorities. Imo this was probably a deliberately crafted piece of cold war propaganda, since the US never really had to kill white people to suppress unrest.
You know it