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.
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.
New site tagline
He definitely should have stopped with the confederates tho
No need. Remember those cowards burnt Richmond to the ground themselves when fleeing
He should have gotten on a boat, followed the Confederates to Brazil, and burnt their estates all over again.
So I disagree with @StalinIsMaiWaifu@lemmygrad.ml
Ok fair, that'd be pretty based, and while there he could help free the Brazilian slaves too
Post it in feedback, this is one of the times it actually deserves to be added
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
Adding more evidence that “tankie” is meaningless vibes-based “woke” for libs.
Tankie is when you kill your OWN PEOPLE and the more of your OWN PEOPLE you kill, the more tankier it is.
Damn, so like the Philidephia Police in the summer of 1985 were tankies?
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
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.
Considering Lincoln suspended Habeus Corpus and used violence to win the civil war and issued the emancipation proclamation and said Labor is Prior To and Superior To Capital, yes, Lincoln was a tankie, at least by contemporary bazinga-brained standards.
Show
A contemporary of and familiar with a fella named Karl Marx as well. Maybe you’ve heard of him.
edit
Previously contained “pen pal” which is more accurately described in the comments below.
To be fair Lincoln was president, and Marx was some random journalist who hadn't published Capital yet. It would be like Biden responding to an E-mail from YUGOPNIK.
Biden responding to an E-mail from YUGOPNIK
enthusiastically explaining to joe biden the concept of the snake that eats its own ass
Yeah fr this "pen pal" thing has spread so far and its getting frustrating. The only response was a thank you from JQA's son which is cool on its face but still. I see specifically "pen pals" and correspondence pop up constantly when it is demonstrably false. I don't care for debate bro reddit types, but I feel we are sending people off to confidently say that only for them to be written off as soon as something easily disproven like that is said
also it wasn't really Marx writing lincoln alone, it was a signed letter from the entire 1st international. Lincoln however was an avid reader of Utopian Socialist Horace Greeley's newspaper (New York Tribune, not to be confused with New York Times); Lincoln called him "Uncle Horus," and Marx published a lot of op-eds in said newspaper, so it is not entirely out of the question that Lincoln could have been exposed to a few of Marx's op-eds.
Yeah didn't Greeley also publish Weydemeyer or Wilich at that time? Who served in the Union as officers. And yeah it was on behalf of the entire org, though I think people get hung up on the fact that it was Marx himself who penned it
I wasn't aware Willich and Weydeymeyer also wrote in Greeley's Tribune but it doesn't surprise me. I know when Willich moved to Connecticut from Prussia he started a German language abolitionist newspaper called the Republikaner for the immigrant community, before he enlisted in the civil war.
It's not JUST killing your own people because they oppose you
HE KILLED HIS OWN PEOPEE
What characterizes it would have to be the intentional and systematic slaughter of non-combatant civilians who were not engaging in battlefield maneuvers.
I just learned that every military since 1850 is tankies. Nobody tell this guy about "Total War" it might break his fragile brain.
How did we get from crushing one revolt in the 50s to this? I guess some people really buy in to America's "precision munitions" bullshit.
Also that they wrote this bullshit without mentioning the systematic and deliberate murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Yemen by the US and Saudi during the same time period as the Ukraine war is just, like... What the entire fuck?
Fun fact; If I understand the matter the "eye for an eye" thing was about equality of justice rather than retribution. ie, if a commoner put out a nobleperson's eye the nobleperson could not seek more than an eye or the value of an eye in retribution. No feuds, no murders, no seizing the whole farm. likewise, a nobleperson who put out a commonr's eye would be liable for the damage at the same level as the commoner - The commoner's eye was worth no less, be it in revenge in kind, or in restitution.
If a man has destroyed the eye of a man of the gentleman class, they shall destroy his eye .... If he has destroyed the eye of a commoner ... he shall pay one mina of silver. If he has destroyed the eye of a gentleman's slave ... he shall pay half the slave's price.
it was more about ending the cycle of revenge by having a definite punishment after which it was over rather than escalating violent feuds
I'm calling for a total and complete shutdown of all posts and comments on lemmy until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on.
Even though the liberal ended up being a liberal in the end, I think you made this liberal do more self-crit than they've ever done. They're never going to shake the feeling that Lincoln might be a tankie. I'm kind of impressed at the genius behind such a simple question.
'Was Lincoln a Tankie?' – the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate,
Second only to fitness-forum "how many days are there in a week?"-strugglesession
Tankie is when you kill part of the civilian population. And the more civilians you kill the more tankie you are. That's why the US was giving lists to the indonesian army of suspected communists to kill. That's why Victor Jara along with other Chilean leftists were tortured and killed by the military dictatorship. That's why the Silent Holocaust was carried out in Guatemala. It's because the US is "tankie."
Oh! You've helped me understand why that screenshot was even there! I was so confused, because it didn't seem like a good example of our "bad behavior", we're literally just talking about how to access our emojis. Scary stuff. But it's actually because of the content of the emojis. I literally didn't even think of that, which is wild
Wow wtf they screenshot wholesome
as an example of tankie behavior when 
was right there
12 year old v*ush (🤮) fans trying to explain why fighting against slave owners makes you a "tankie":
Tibet should be free from the demon SheeSheePee! And by "Tibet" I mean the "Lamas" and by "from the demon SheeSheePee" I mean "to own slaves".
WHY YOU WANT FEDERATION FOR HEXBEAR? IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH AS PROCURED FROM CHAPOCHAT ONLINE WORKS? YOU THINK NEEDS IMPROVEMENT? THEN MAYBE YOU FIND JOB WITH ARMY OF LEMMYGRAD! YOU HAVE DRINKS WITH BEATNIK THESPIAN, TRADE STORY OF MANY PLATFORMS DESIGNED AND DETAILS OF SCHOOL FOR ENGINEERING!
OR MAYBE YOU NOT DO THIS. PROBABLY IS BECAUSE YOU NEVER DESIGN PLATFORM IN WHOLE LIFE. YOU LOOK AT FINE COMMUNIST FORUM, THINK IT NEED CRAZY SHIT LIBS ON ALL COMMS OF INSTANCE. YOU HAVE DISEASE OF AMERICAN CAPITALIST, CHANGE THING THAT IS FINE FOR NO REASON EXCEPT TO LOOK DIFFERENT FROM COMRADE. YOU PUT CHEAP FORUM OF GERMAN SLAVE FACTORY ON ONE SIDE, YOU PUT BAD INSTANCE OF CANADIAN MIDDLE WEST ON OTHER SIDE, YOU PUT LIBERAL COMMUNITY ON BOTTOM SO YOU ARE LIKE AMERICAN MOVIE GUY JOHN RAMBO. MAYBE YOU PUT SEX FORUM ON TOP TO FUCK YOURSELF IN ASSHOLE FOR MAKING SHAMEFUL TRAVESTY OF SITE OF BEATNIK THESPIAN, NO?
HEXBEAR IS FINE. YOU FUCK IT, IT ONLY GET HEAVY AND YOU STILL NO HIT LARGEST SIDE OF BARN. GO TO POSTING RANGE, PRACTICE WITH MANY ZINE OF SAMIZDAT. THEN YOU NOT NEED DUMB SHIT PUT ON SIDE OF HEXBEAR.
Much appreciated it was about time I gave it a reread, I couldn't remember it word for word by heart
Personally I upvote way more now, just to ensure we ratio the libs. Previously I didn't upvote much because I knew we were all friends here but now there are stakes. There are people being wrong on the internet and I have to make sure they know it.
Imagine thinking Sherman did anything wrong at all. (Edit in his march to the sea).
Edited : forgot all about his post civil war evil (which a lot of the union generals did).
Stalin shouldn't have stopped at Berlin, and Sherman shouldn't have stopped at the sea.
Sherman was one of the most important leaders in the genocide of Indigenous Americans in the last half of the 19th century.
I was gonna post the "Arson Locomotive" meme but it doesn't feel right. I didn't realize that Sherman was in charge of the whole westward expansion program on the military side. : |
On September 23, 1868 General William T. Sherman wrote to his brother Senator John Sherman from the headquarters of the Military Division of Missouri. In his letter Sherman discussed the ensuing struggles between the United States Army and the Plains Indians and expressed some of his thoughts on how best to deal with the situation. Many of these thoughts appear to point to one thing: Total War
Sherman should've marched straight into the ocean.
Yeah I forgot about the dark half of literally 90% of civil war union generals in the postwar era.
The Radio War Nerd series on the American Civil War has opened my eyes to one thing that frankly should have been obvious to me earlier: the regular union army had to drag their leadership to take any truly aggressive action against the rebels.
All the union leadership went to the same war colleges as the rebel leadership, Sherman included. The Union side tried acting chivalrous for years while the Rebels spit in their faces. As a result, several more years of useless bloodshed passed. It was General Grant who convinced Sherman the March tot he Sea was the way to go. Sherman was the last guy in the Union army to realize that the Rebels were not going to just come to their senses by themselves.
JOHN BROWN, ON THE OTHER HAND SHOULD HAVE HATCHED A BETTER PLAN TO FREE THE SLAVES
I've said it before and I'll say it again: if the North had done what it should have after the war, it would've made the Great Purge look like a Sunday picnic.
The Union side tried acting chivalrous for years while the Rebels spit in their faces. As a result, several more years of useless bloodshed passed.
no more half measures walter.
when he's 60
but not :Sherman:
I have ever seen