Passenger on Nostr: The term comes from 1956 in Hungary and 1968 in Czechoslovakia, when the USSR was ...
The term comes from 1956 in Hungary and 1968 in Czechoslovakia, when the USSR was faced with mass popular dissent in its satellite states, and responded by sending in tanks.
It shocked a lot of communists, who until then had thought that the USSR - a socialist regime - would behave better than an imperial one. Instead, to quote Bertold Brecht, they massacred the people in the name of The People.
A few communists still tried to defend the USSR, either by denying the atrocities or by making the absurd claim that they were necessary. The rest of the communist community were disgusted with these people and came up with the pejorative "tankie" to describe them.
Communism developed a lot after that: partially through the growth of eurocommunism and third-worldism, partially through various currents within Trotskyism and Left Communism, partially through involvement in the ecological, feminist and LGBTQ+ movements, and partially through reactions to the rebirth of anarchism in the 1970s.
There were individual communists, however, who idolise brutal repressive regimes if those regimes are covered in a coat of red paint. There are still such people to this day. A lot of those people are just campists. A lot of them also seem to be creepily into the brutality and repression, as if that's a turnon for them and not a turnoff.
It shocked a lot of communists, who until then had thought that the USSR - a socialist regime - would behave better than an imperial one. Instead, to quote Bertold Brecht, they massacred the people in the name of The People.
A few communists still tried to defend the USSR, either by denying the atrocities or by making the absurd claim that they were necessary. The rest of the communist community were disgusted with these people and came up with the pejorative "tankie" to describe them.
Communism developed a lot after that: partially through the growth of eurocommunism and third-worldism, partially through various currents within Trotskyism and Left Communism, partially through involvement in the ecological, feminist and LGBTQ+ movements, and partially through reactions to the rebirth of anarchism in the 1970s.
There were individual communists, however, who idolise brutal repressive regimes if those regimes are covered in a coat of red paint. There are still such people to this day. A lot of those people are just campists. A lot of them also seem to be creepily into the brutality and repression, as if that's a turnon for them and not a turnoff.