• TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Have you actually talked with “tankies?” Yes, some are so anti-NATO that they veer into authoritarianism. But not all, or even most. I’ve had better discussions with tankies than liberals on here. Do I agree with everything they say? No. But I can understand where they’re coming from. Try talking with some. Are you pro-NATO?

    • PugJesus@kbin.socialOP
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      1 year ago

      Have you actually talked with “tankies?”

      Yes. Too many. I’ve been arguing with tankies for a decade and a half now. I once knew a guy from Aussieland who wrote long rambling screeds on how firebombing capitalists was the only way for the proletariat forward. I knew a Westerner who unironically praised Juche and decried everything anti-NK as capitalist propaganda. I knew an atheist-turned-ultra-Orthodox who critically praised Stalin.

      I’ve talked to plenty of fucking tankies. Some of them aren’t inherently bad people, deep down. But they all have shitty views.

      Yes, some are so anti-NATO that they veer into authoritarianism.

      Are you… are you taking the piss?

      The entire point of a ‘tankie’ is that they veer into authoritarianism.

      ‘Tankie’ doesn’t mean ‘socialist’, it means ‘apologist for the kind of regimes that would crush the socialist revolution of Hungary in 1956 for being the wrong kind of socialist’.

        • PugJesus@kbin.socialOP
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          1 year ago

          “Tankie doesn’t mean socialist” meaning “Tankie and socialist are not synonyms”. All tankies are (arguably) socialists, but not all socialists are tankies. Most socialists, since the fall of the USSR and the flow of funds from it, are not tankies.

          • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            By not answering if you are a socialist or if you’re pro-NATO, I can only assume you are a liberal or centrist. If that is the case, I can understand why you hate tankies. You are closer to MAGA then they are. Of course they’re your enemy.

            • PugJesus@kbin.socialOP
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              1 year ago

              lmao. Not a tankie, just using the same rhetoric as they do. Why don’t you call me a ‘social fascist’ next for believing in a democratic government?

                • PugJesus@kbin.socialOP
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                  1 year ago

                  To me, personally? MAGA is more of a threat. To many elsewhere in the world, tankies are the greater threat. Unless you’d like to go talk to some folk in concentration camps in Xinjiang and tell them that their real threat is American right-wingers.

                  Nazis are worse than tankies, but not for lack of trying by tankies.

                  • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    From a utilitarianist perspective, American right-wingers are a bigger threat. If they take over, they have an $860 billion military to unleash on the world. The way I’m interpreting this; you’re a closet conservative who thinks he’s a liberal. Yo hate communism more than fascism. Am I correct?