Maybe I am… or maybe we’re all tankies now. What’s the difference?
‘Lemmygrad’s resident expert on fascism’ — GrainEater, 2024
‘The political desperadoes and ignoramuses, who say they would “Rather be Dead than Red”, should be told that no one will stop them from committing suicide, but they have no right to provoke a third world war.’ — Morris Kominsky, 1970
Maybe I am… or maybe we’re all tankies now. What’s the difference?
The Lion of the Desert.
I frequented /v/, /int/, and a few other boards about one dozen years ago. Now the only things that I touch are a few of the archival websites, and even then only rarely. Occasionally I’ll visit an archive to look for images or clips, and more unoften I’ll look up a phrase or word out of curiosity, but that is the extent of it. I haven’t posted anything on the official website in a very long time (and I’ve never posted anything on the archival websites at all).
There is no fediverse instance more queer-friendly and than Hexbear; what are you even talking about?
I am guessing that the reasoning is as follows:
This reasoning does not apply when defending dictatorships of the bourgeoisie such as Imperial America and the British Empire, because
The reason that MovingThrowaway said ‘Almost none of us were alive when Khrushchev rolled tanks into Hungary’ is that certain British socialists coined the pejorative ‘tanky’ to nickname communists who approved of the Warsaw Pact intervention in the Hungarian People’s Republic (and later, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic), but hardly anybody uses the pejorative this way anymore.
In practice, application now varies widely, from approving of the Bolsheviki to opposing the Ukrainian government to suggesting that maybe North Korean politicians think and behave like ordinary human beings. The contemporary criteria are so variable that many would argue that the term is too vague to be useful.