(Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin, running for a new six-year term in an election that his opponents say is a parody of democracy, said on Tuesday that past U.S. elections had been rigged by postal voting.
“In the United States, previous elections were falsified through postal voting … they bought ballots for $10, filled them out, and threw them into mailboxes without any supervision from observers, and that’s it,” Putin said, without providing evidence.
Yes, we’re going to ignore it, tankie apologist. Because it doesn’t exist. We know what we’re talking about when we use the word.
Don’t want to be called a tankie? Well, don’t be one. It’s that simple.
Common language is essential to understanding for a conversation to move forward. Case in point, I want to know what the USSR did well and I want to know what their failures were, so we can make an attempt at a better socialist experiment and prevent a Stalin from cropping up. An important part of that is seeing past the decades of propaganda and loaded language in the coverage of Western media. Seeking that kind of knowledge is known as scientific socialism. More than a few people call that “tanky”, despite not fitting the definition of “unequivocally supports totalitarianism”.
Looking for the truth on the USSR and Russia’s socialist period is absolutely fine. What I don’t want to see here or anywhere is people making excuses for genocide under the pretext that the atrocities have been committed by reds or ex-reds. That shit is unacceptable.
The word tankie can absolutely be misattributed, yes. But it’s not a significant problem. The criticism mostly comes from good-faith, actual leftists, who have nothing to gain from smearing campaigns and know what they’re talking about.
The existence of people on Lemmy (aka tankies) cheering when innocents die because they happen to be born in the wrong country is revulsing, and a bigger issue.
I consider it’s misuse a much bigger problem than actual tankies. Tankies are a vast minority in leftist spaces, even on the Internet. They are a totally irrelevant faction to anything, especially national politics. I suppose we won’t see eye to eye here.
On the rest, I absolutely agree. I’m the active mod of [email protected] and our top rule is no genocide denial. Every comment I’ve removed on the subject has been in support of Israel killing civilians, so I don’t think it has anything to do with tankies in the first place.
If you hadn’t replied to PugJesus, this would have remained a comment among many others, and reduced the visibility of antitankie comments. Now, you’ve made this a whole thread.
Just let it slide. Don’t jump to their defense. Let the actual tankies marginalize themselves into oblivion and you’ll help solve 2 Lemmy problems at once: tankism, and abusive antitankism (since there won’t be a need for genuine antitankism anymore).
What could have been a quick “aye, fuck tankies” is creating entire threads, and makes us talk about it.