For the sake of combating the narrative, this album shows the truth of what happened during the student protests in China in 1989, including the context of the “Tank Man” photo:
Warning: blood, gore, visible injuries, death.
The lie that no one was killed by the CCP should be repudiated at every opportunity.
The CCP would prefer that you are only aware of the “Tank Man” photo, that you don’t fit it into its larger context. They would prefer that you not discuss the horrific brutality they created when they used their military to suppress the voices of their own citizens, or the absolute disaster that Maoism brought to China. They would prefer that you forget that they repeated that brutality in Hong Kong. They would prefer that you forget the whole thing.
Fuck them.
Even the CCP admits that some protesters were killed. Wild that Western tankies dial up the denialism even past that.
They’re edgy tweens, just block them and move on. They’ll learn if someone doesn’t slap them to death before they hit their twenties.
Man, I remember when I was in school the edgy tweens and teens who claimed to be communist didn’t say stupid shit like denying actual history… They just wore red berets and Che Guevara t-shirts, completely oblivious to how that was supporting capitalism.
They’re not western anything, they’re LLMs run by Dmitri in St Petersburg.
General consensus is that there wad no massacre on the square. Once had a tankie bringing all the sources that says “Nothing happened on Tienanmen square but PLA killed thousands of people outside of it”.
They’re delusional. There is little use in trying to engage with them. Convince other people who may unironically be convinced by them but don’t engage with them.
Yup. Spread the truth wherever you see the lies.
I don’t think that’s a consensus at all. Most of the reports I have seen suggest that the violence started in the square when students were attacked minutes after they had agreed to leave, as soon as they had broke ranks, as it were. The violence then spread throughout the city afterwards as various groups attempted to reorganize in different places.
Honestly didn’t realize there were that many photos. I’ve only seen Tank man and photos of protestors. I had no idea the violence was so well documented
Tankies with a few more braincells than the others will know about these pictures and insist there were only a few hundred killed and most were not in the square. They flatly deny the massacre and instead paint it as a riot being put down or… Something to that effect. I forget the specifics.
I will remember the man in the white shirt, quietly standing in the path of a CCP tank, with grocery bags in his right hand. We don’t know what they did to him after that, but he matters. He will always matter.
The first one is hilarious. So even if the tank was heading away from Tianemen square, that still means it was there before. How does that make anything better. Just say no one died if you want to lie about it.
Name and shame these assholes.
They’re interchangeable tankie fuckwads. It doesn’t matter what their names are, they all regurgitate the same lines. Besides, I’d rather not fuel their persecution complex.
Most of them don’t have names because they’re LLMs.
Hey, let’s leave the baseless LLM accusations to them, yeah?
LLMs are used in discourse to change people’s minds. No one who thinks the Tiananmen Square massacre happened is going to buy this, especially if the only place they post their opinions to the contrary is an instance that every other Lemmy instance with an ounce of self-respect has defederated from. It’s tempting to believe these people as AIs because the alternative is believing that actual humans hold those views, which is much scarier. Unlike tankies I have faith in our ability to live without comforting delusions.
It’s not baseless, its well-known that the Kremlin uses anonymous social media to influence elections, and we should call it out when we see it.
Anonymous social media accounts sure. But using LLMs to spread propaganda in a forum where the only people liable to see it are people who already agree just seems like a waste of effort.
The Kremlin reinforces a range of extremist political beliefs in order to create tension. Digital divide and conquer.
As if they aren’t all using sock puppet accounts on .world.
These types are so fucking predictable.
Are those tankies or downright hired propagandists? Hard to tell.
There’s functionally no difference. Tankies work for free
The first is comical. The second I don’t get. That looks like sarcastic satire to me.
I hate the word tanky though. It has no clear definition. It is often used here as a subversion of opinion.
Most of my comments, especially political comments, are intended in the abstract/sarcastic/satirical light. It’s mostly the frustration of my situation with physical disability and how depressing it is to deal with the US government knowing every article about homeless or food deficiency is my future while I’m barely able to take care of myself with a little help right now but slowly getting worse. Like who has the right to label and discredit that frustration?
Feel free to call me out. I don’t like to argue, but I love to learn and expand my horizons. Just don’t try to belittle me with some niche subculture label in an attempt to subvert my opinion. That is predatory and prejudice.
I won’t speak for others, but I’ve been called a tanky here and I find it offensive and toxic. Like I’m on here a lot when I’m hurting too much to do anything else. I try my best not to be negative towards other people. If anyone is offended I’ll gladly step back and apologize or try and clarify my thoughts. Why ostracise people that see things differently unless those things are comically wrong? Maybe if someone can answer that I’ll STFU.
The word “tankie” does have a definition though, and a long history behind it.
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support acts of repression by such regimes or their allies. More specifically, the term has been applied to those who express support for one-party Marxist–Leninist socialist republics, whether contemporary or historical.
The first is comical. The second I don’t get. That looks like sarcastic satire to me.
It’s not. They go on to justify East German guards gunning down escaping civilians as ‘preventing imperialism’ and a host of other questionable things.
Why ostracise people that see things differently unless those things are comically wrong?
You see the issue, or part of it. Some people overuse the word ‘tankie’ to mean ‘left person I don’t like’, but actual tankies - typically MLs or MLMs - hold incredibly vile and wrong views. I went onto lemmy.ml the other day to see, out of morbid curiousity, what they were saying about the war in Ukraine. A lot of “NATO PROXY WAR” and “UKRONAZIS” style discourse. Heinous shit. That’s not the kind of stuff you say “Agree to disagree” about, it’s not the kind of thing you give any sort of respect or legitimacy to; it’s the kind of thing you shine a light on and scatter whenever you see it.
MLMs
Marxist-Leninist Marketeers? Sounds about right.
Nah they don’t actually care about communism, its a facade for their propaganda.
Yeah, it just so happens that said propaganda is authoritarian communist in nature, always talking about dragging landlords and “right wing people” (read: those that support capitalism rather than communism, meaning you if you think “shooting people they don’t like” is bad) out of their homes and shooting them in the street, with not even so much as a distinction between large firms and the sweet and nice capitalist pig Mabel who used to rent the punk house to us and was really cool about it. They literally say after we kill all the people who disagree we can transition to the classless stateless society we call “trve communism.”
We can play “no true Scotsman” all we want but if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and wants to kill people, it’s probably a duck that wants to kill people. Tankies are communists (but not all communists are tankies), they’re just “bad.” Yes, communists can be bad, communism isn’t “when good.” They want to usher in communism through abhorrent acts. We may know that is impossible, but they do not, they unironically think they’ll cede power “when the time comes.”
Instead I think it’s pragmatic to recognize that they are communists but as with ice cream there are many flavors of communism, they are neither the “only” flavor nor do we agree with their violent flavor, opting instead for a diplomatic approach. To deny makes us seem either naive or willfully ignorant, to acknowledge but distance appears more level headed.
Except many of them really aren’t communists. Sure there are some genuine communists and some useful idiots, but most of it is a facade for propaganda.
Can you back that claim up with anything other than “Nuh uh, real communists are like me!” or are we just pretending/conveniently using their status as losers to say “but they haven’t accomplished anything?”
Go look at their content. Most of them aren’t trying to spread communis. If they believed in it they’d be trying to persuade others of their views, but its much more common to see strawman attacks and low effort group think.
Of course, I don’t have secret Kremlin or CCP files to share with you, I’m not sure how else I could prove it. No doubt you’ve seen some of the posts of “Trump supporters” happily offering cooking instructions when requested, or claiming to be a gender/race they obviously aren’t.
The Kremlin and CCP are highly active spreading propaganda through anonymous social media, and they’re absolutely here on the Fediverse with its sporadic moderation.
I’ve never seen that kind of stuff on .ml. Now grad is a whole different story, but even with my account on .ml, I don’t see much grad stuff. It could be that I export my block list from here over to there and I block a lot.
I actually joined grad at random in my first attempt to check out Lemmy 2 years ago, glanced at it twice, rolled my eyes, and never used it.
I think I’m going to dive into this with AI tonight. I lack the vocabulary to express why I don’t like the term and want better ways to describe this type of subject. Thanks for the inspiration. Maybe I’ll make a Word of the Day post if anything interesting stands out, not that anyone cares or would change.
I lack the vocabulary to express why I don’t like the term and want better ways to describe this type of subject.
Might be because tankie is sometimes used as a ‘thought terminating cliche’ - you say someone’s a tankie, and then voila, you don’t have to deal with them. End of.
That’s not how it should be used, of course. If you accuse someone of being a tankie fuck, it should be to highlight what you are dealing with - “This is pattern recognition - don’t be fooled into thinking their motivations are to ‘just ask questions’ or whatever the excuse du jour is, they’re fascists painted red who consistently argue for fascism, and their arguments should be studied and refuted with that in mind, not viewed independent of context”
But people, even people on the same ‘side’ as oneself, often prefer the easy path of a thought-terminating cliche.
I get what you’re saying. I mean more the philosophical context though. Like a more exact way of describing all angles of this, but primary why I find tankie to be a colloquialism I dislike and what I would prefer to use. I have an AI prompt tuned for this kind of exploration against my personality. I tend to feel vulnerable to manipulation on some kind of psyops-like level, like I’m not always self aware within this space, or my best of intentions are obviously easy to manipulate from some perspectives. It is really one of those back burnered things I’ve mulled over for years but never directly explored. It seems like the amateur psychology ‘gaslighting’ label fits, but what do you call the gaslighter’s functional thought and philosophical perspective.
I’m not saying you were doing this, or that this is the definition of tankie. It is just the feeling of someone using it as a label to discredit someone. Like platonic sophistry is to make a plausible false narrative or perspective argument that is difficult to disprove, and is intentionally misleading. Trump is a master sophist, especially because he has no ethics but is so dialed in to a niche audience, they are the only ones that can’t see his true nature. I despise the guy, but I have to admire someone that is so skilled as a con artist that he might just burn down the world for kicks and giggles when he leaves.
Platonic sophistry doesn’t really describe when the individual is the target. Gaslighting is the instance where the individual is the target but is indirectly subverted by undermining their basal logic. What would be the word for when the individual is subverted through invalidation without an attempt to mislead, like with a poorly define colloquialism?
Don’t think I have an answer off the top of my head, but I wish you luck! Examining language and its relation to reality and implication is always a worthy endeavor.
