So if you know what the word "commie" meant during the cold war, "tankie" means the same thing, just said by people who don't want to seem like elderly boomers
It used to be a word for people who defended Stalin sending tanks to Hungary in the 50s. It caught on in leftist discourse as a word for leftists who excuse illegitimate state violence, domestically and abroad. Though on Lemmy, like reddit before it, it's mostly thrown around at anyone who disagrees that the US used to a be radiant light in the world until 2016 or anyone left of Pelosi.
Westerners really are unbelievably arrogant; not spouting off about things you demonstrably don't know even the most basic facts about should be normal behaviour
I'm asking if there's anything else so I can either cross out only the name or the whole section.
Please, If you disagree, say why you disagree. If you want to correct something, correct it. If you're going to add nothing, you might as well be the asshole correcting people's grammar.
Westerners
You're making a lot of assumptions based of one mistake, but you don't have to insult me.
I don't think the mistake poisons the well, but point taken. Pointing out misinformation is helpful, but not if you're aggressive and arrogant about it, at best it makes people more quick to dismiss it.
Look, I want to be amenable. It's easy to take random historical anecdotes for granted so I promise to make an effort to fact check these things. Like, really.
Classic tankies are the authoritarian leaning communists, that is communists willing to use (military) power to accomplish their goals and will voice those more aggressive sounding opinions.
EDIT: Okay so I actually read the first three paragraphs, and no. On Authority isn't relevant. Engels is using a different definition of authoritarian than I am.
They claim to be the only real leftists, because communism requires putting down revolutions with tanks and supporting genocidal dictators. They call it "the dictatorship of the proletariat", where proletariat means worker. They think a dictatorship can be leftist.
I have never seen a tankie oppose liberalism. I've seen plenty of tankies say they oppose liberalism, but then they act like liberals. It's very confusing.
To me seems to be people that think that the evil imperialist actions of countries that claim(ed) to be Communist are excused by the evil imperialist actions of the USA.