this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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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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That's the problem though. When you study revolutions you overwhelmingly find there is a group doing reforms in a civilized way after the previous government is removed. And they almost always get lined up against a wall by a power hungry asshole.
You have to remember that your slow and patient reforms can drag their feet to the point it becomes indistinguishable from malice. That's what happened to e.g. the "socialists" who allied with the Russian provisional government and kept supporting the war against the will of the people.
Well that's what the Bolsheviks claim at any rate. It's always what the dictator claims.
The masses supported the Bolsheviks in the summer and fall of 1917 because they were the most radically and consistently antiwar party, regardless of their other faults. It was the most urgent issue in politics at the time for reasons that should be obvious. This is a pretty widely accepted narrative even among right wing historians.
I agree with that but it's still just one issue that could have been solved with actual representation.
That's also why I think people are too quick to reject pax America. It's a locally stable region in which we can build. Reverting back to a revolutionary stance has a very real possibility of going quite far in the wrong direction before we can advance over the status quo.
Unless, of course, the path to post scarcity communism is just "21st century tech, 17th century population." Which I suppose is probably valid.