this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Tankiejerk
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Dunking on Tankies from a leftist perspective.
A tankie is someone who defends/supports authoritarian or even totalitarian regimes who call themselves "socialist". The term originated from people supporting the 1956 invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union. Nowadays they are just terminally online, denying genocides, and falling for totalitarian propaganda and calling such regimes "true democracies". remember to censor usernames when necessary.
Please be sure to obscure usernames on posts to prevent doxxing.
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Had a, uh, discussion with lemmygrad where apparently wanting high speed rail without secret police and genocide is a controversial take. It was a post kind of half celebrating the atrocities of communist regimes. Only for lemmygrad users to turn around and tell me that those things never happened, but they were totally justified and ought to happen again, but communists don't do that kind of thing and it's all made up propaganda, unless you're a capitalist or a liberal or [someone else who deserves it]. There were a few interesting and intelligent lines of thought in that whipping circle I found myself a part of, and I was glad for those, but generally the ideological spin was going so fast, you just about had to slap a tail rotor on it.
You'd think it would give a person pause when in the course of defending their political beliefs, they manage to post a single comment that contains four or five lines, almost verbatim, from the Narcissist's Prayer.
But it never seems to.
It's because a lot of them seem to want secret police first and high speed rail second.
State socialists have some reasonable explanations for the authoritarian aspects of the USSR and sometimes China but they're so easily provoked (online) it's hard to find them in the flood of reactionary dumbassery going on around it. Don't take this as a defense of state socialism. It's not. But their logic has some merit if you believe a state is a necessary institution in a socialist/communist society
Yes, I found that to very much be the case with lemmygrad.