this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
229 points (90.5% liked)

memes

11222 readers
2536 users here now

Community rules

1. Be civilNo trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour

2. No politicsThis is non-politics community. For political memes please go to [email protected]

3. No recent repostsCheck for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month

4. No botsNo bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins

5. No Spam/AdsNo advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.

Sister communities

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] HollandJim 44 points 2 years ago (28 children)

Okay, I’m clearly ignorant. What’s a “tankie”?

[–] Guitarguru2001 71 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (22 children)

Short answer: folk who are so pro-Communist that they think the Tiananmen Square massacre was a good thing. The massacre in which the CCP bulldozed protestors with tanks.

Hence, "tankie"

Edit: apparently I'm wrong on the origin of the term, and it predates Tiananmen Square. See the reply below.

I will add that given the current projection of power currently, China is a far more powerful authoritarian communiststate than Russia, so most tankie propaganda is China-centric these days.

[–] [email protected] 55 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

That's a wrong answer.

It's in relation to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia during the Prague spring, where they were doing evil things like giving people more freedoms and not having everything under centralised authoritarian state control so the soviets sent over some tanks to kill people and enforce their imperialistic control over the country.

Ironically enough doing more to encourage actual communism than the larpers in Russia ever did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie

In your defence, it's confusing trying to keep track of who these authies murdered with tanks.

[–] Guitarguru2001 1 points 2 years ago

Wow thanks! TIL :)

Yeah honestly I'm pretty socialist but not authoritarian in the slightest. Hearts and minds first.

load more comments (20 replies)
load more comments (25 replies)