Nah I dislike you just as much. Was lincoln a tankie?

...
Fuck.

I really WAS looking forward to blocking you. AND you didn't give me a good reason not to. BUT,

the more I think about it, the more I find myself liking your question and feel myself WANTING to explore it.

At first, I asked myself if I could say "yeah, actually" but clearly THAT would be untrue - and not just for the reason that battle tanks weren't even invented yet at the time, but because even though lots of people hurl the word "tankie" around as a blanket insult with no real meaning, I'm instead actually honestly trying to mean something specific - It's not JUST killing your own people because they oppose you politically (using the figurative "you" here, not the literal you). It's the amount of intentional civilian casualties.

When people take up arms for a cause, they're self-selecting into the combat role, after all. Executing a planned, organized attack upon a government's assets is not a civilian behavior. It's either the behavior of an enemy (to said government) soldier or the behavior of a criminal. It's not innocent. The rebels in the American civil war were certainly not innocent bystanders.

What characterizes it would have to be the intentional and systematic slaughter of non-combatant civilians who were not engaging in battlefield maneuvers.

While this DID apparently happen in the American civil war, contributing to the civilian death toll of some 50,000 people, it was largely the actions of general Sherman, who unilaterally chose, regardless of actual orders, to burn entire cities.

I can't speak for you, obviously, but if a group exhibits all the behavioral phenomenon we presently associate with, say fascism, EVEN IF the actions and events concerned occurred before fascism was ever recognized or named, illuminating these behavioral facets by CALLING it "fascism" still possess communicative utility. Maybe meet half way and call it proto-fascism.

Likewise, if one were to call Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's actions during the American Civil War "proto-tankie", I'd be hard pressed to honestly disagree with them.

When it comes to the defining incidents of the term, though - the Prague Spring - the "rebellion" didn't declare war, they merely elected someone the Soviets didn't like, and for that, 165,000 troops and just over 4,600 tanks were dispatched and nearly ALL the resulting casualties were civilians, even with the elected leader of the time telling the civilians NOT to resist for the sake of their safety. Thankfully the number of civilian casualties were relatively few, with less than a hundred murdered and only just over 250 severely wounded.

The other oft-cited incident, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, actually featured armed insurgency and makes no distinctions clear enough regarding how many of the ~3,000 Hungarian casualties exactly were armed, organized, and mobilized, so I for one hold it in less critical a light than what Sherman did in the American Civil War.

When it comes to what Petro Poroshenko did in Ukraine, he actually admitted on video that he intended to make civilians suffer and fear for their lives, to make children cower in basements, in order to coerce compliance from them. Them, meaning, people who didn't even declare any intention to pick a fight with his administration in the first place! Punishing them for the "crime" of merely living in the same municipal area as alleged insurgents.

If you don't want to call it "tankie", fine.

But this IS a pattern of politically motivated state sponsored brutality that DOES recur throughout history and whatever you DO choose to call it deserves to be named, shamed, and blamed for giving Russia any justification whatsoever to "protect civilians" in the Donbas region by invading Ukraine.

In short, Lincoln wasn't a tankie, but Sherman may have been a proto-tankie.

  • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]
    ·
    1 year ago

    10/10 bit, but also looking over their post history I feel like this is probably a teenager with no real beliefs. They said Ukraine went "Tankie Mode" by killing civilians in Donbas when someone told them about it lmao.

    Comrade Zelensky, welcome to the revolution zelensky-painleft-unity-2stalin-gun-2

    • citrussy_capybara [ze/hir]
      hexagon
      ·
      1 year ago

      Adding more evidence that “tankie” is meaningless vibes-based “woke” for libs.

      • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Tankie is when you kill your OWN PEOPLE and the more of your OWN PEOPLE you kill, the more tankier it is.

        • Vncredleader
          ·
          1 year ago

          Wait so Khrushchev was not a tankie since he wasn't Hungarian?

        • Grownbravy [they/them]
          ·
          1 year ago

          Damn, so like the Philidephia Police in the summer of 1985 were tankies? cringe

    • Fuckass
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      deleted by creator

      • robot_dog_with_gun [they/them]
        ·
        1 year ago

        can't wait for zelensky to pull some industrialization out of his ass and smash azov with the army he used this time to be ready to mobilize against them

        • Fuckass
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          deleted by creator

    • SacredExcrement [any, comrade/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Certain words are just labels to be attributed to people as far as libs care, negative labels are thus doled out to adversaries REGARDLESS of their actual actions/beliefs/political affiliation and so on.

      So Putin could be a 'Tankie', he could be a 'Nazi', he could be whatever negative label you want. He could be both at once, it doesn't matter how contradictory they are, both mean 'bad thing'.

      This is your brain on the ideological slurry of a vibes-based worldview, where materialism does not ever enter into consideration.

    • eatmyass
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      deleted by creator