“Tankie” was never about “using force to keep the people controlled,” it originated from a split in whether to support the Red Army putting down a fascist uprising in Hungary or not. You’re correct about the origin timeline, but are defending Nazis freed from prison after being jailed during World War II that went on to lynch communists and Jews, just because they were anti-communist.
“Tankie” was a pejorative for Marxists that support socialism in real life then as well as now. It originated in the Communist Party of Great Britain. The term was coined because of the British tendency towards silly-sounding insults, and because the Soviet Union sent in the Red Army to stop the western-backed fascist insurrection. This caused a split in the party (as it always does in western orgs).
"The special correspondent of the Yugoslav paper, Politika, (Nov. 13, 1956) describing the events of those days, said that the homes of Communists were marked with a white cross and those of Jews with a black cross, to serve as signs for the extermination squads. “There is no longer any room for doubt,” said the Yugoslav reporter, “it is an example of classic Hungarian fascism and of White Terror. The information,” continued this writer, “coming from the provinces tells how in certain places Communists were having their eyes put out, their ears cut off, and that they were being killed in the most terrible ways.”
“But the forces of reaction were rapidly consolidating their power and pushing forward on the top levels, while in the streets the blood of scores of massacred Communists, Jews, and progressives was flowing.”
“Some of the reports reaching Warsaw from Budapest today caused considerable concern. These reports told of massacres of Communists and Jews by what were described as 'Fascist elements’ …” (N.Y. Times, Nov. 1. 1956)
“The evidence is conclusive that the entry of Soviet troops into Budapest stopped the execution of scores, perhaps thousands of Jews, for by the end of October and early November, anti-Semtic pogroms - hallmark of unbridled fascistic terror - were making their appearance, after an absence of some ten years, within Hungary.”
"A correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Maariv (Tel Aviv) reported:
During the uprising a number of former Nazis were released from prison and other former Nazis came to Hungary from Salzburg . . . I met them at the border . . . I saw anti-Semitic posters in Budapest . . . On the walls, street lights, streetcars, you saw inscriptions reading: “Down with Jew Gero!” “Down with Jew Rakosi!” or just simply “down with the Jews!”
Leading rabbinical circles in New York received a cable early in November from corresponding circles in Vienna that “Jewish blood is being shed by the rebels in Hungary.” Very much later-in February, 1957-the World Jewish Congress reported that “anti-Semitic excesses occurred in more than twenty villages and smaller provincial towns during the October-November revolt.” This occurred, according to this very conservative body, because “fascist and anti-Semitic groups had apparently seized the opportunity, presented by the absence of a central authority, to come to the surface.” Many among the Jewish refugees from Hungary, the report continued, had fled from this anti-Semitic pogrom-like atmosphere (N.Y. Times, Feb. 15, 1957). This confirmed the earlier report made by the British Rabbi, R. Pozner, who, after touring refugee camps, declared that “the majority of Jews who left Hungary did so for fear of the Hungarians and not the Russians.” The Paris Jewish newspaper, Naye Presse, asserted that Jewish refugees in France claimed quite generally that Soviet soldiers had saved their lives."
Further, the CIA also backed Hungarian resistance forces:
Prague in 1968 was a similar fascist uprising in both cases there were some elements of progressive protest, but these were greatly overshadowed by the fascist movements. Dubcek wanted to sell out to the IMF, and restore capitalism. The idea that any of this was about “democracy” or “freedom” is silly, it was always about Cold War tactics to destabilize socialism.
TL;DR imagine if the January 6th rioters were armed and trained by foreign governments, started lynching officials and Jewish people, and the US sent in the army to put down the insurrection. The MAGA chuds would claim that it was about “freedom” and “democracy,” but we all know that they just wanted Trump in office.
Nowadays, it’s used by any random anti-communist to refer to anyone that supports socialist states or doesn’t buy into the imperialist narrative about global south countries. It was the ones you call “tankies” that knew the stories of WMD and Saddam’s forces leaving babies outside of incubators were both bullshit to manufacture consent for war, but now that its decades later the anti-communists all suddenly have collective amnesia about their willing participation in spreading the lies of empire to murder hundreds of thousands of people.
Anti-communists, I might add, that you are the modern version of, “left” anti-communists that service empire by attacking the Empire’s enemies for them while not meaningfully opposing the Empire itself. The Zizeks, the Chomskys, the Eric Blairs.
I know quite well what the pejorative you love to hurl means, and its origins. In addition to the liberal viewpoint from wikipedia, I recommend the Prolewiki article on “Tankies,” as well as Nia Frome’s essay “Tankies.” That should give you a more well-rounded view.
It very clearly is about the historical event I have linked above via the acutal wiki not your weird grokopedia thing.
And you’re also arguing off of that random authors book, the one that didn’t actually back up the claims being made. We’ve already been over how factually incorrect that was.
Likewise it was not a fascist uprising simply because it was democratic, /anti-authoritarian and wanted to escape from Soviet imperialism. Everything you don’t like isn’t Hitler.
Likewise it was not a fascist uprising simply because it was democratic, /anti-authoritarian and wanted to escape from Soviet imperialism.
This. My grandparents were there when the authorities opened fire on the peacefully gathering crowd. They only escaped with their lives because they got lucky, they saw some others fall around them.
I recommended reading the Wikipedia entry for the liberal POV, the Prolewiki entry for the Marxist point of view, and the Red Sails article by Nia Frome for a modern contextualization of how the term is used today from a Marxist POV. Prolewiki isn’t “grokopedia,” it has its sources listed clearly.
Secondly, the book I referenced, The Truth About Hungary by Herbert Aptheker, heavily relies on citing western sources like the New York Times (which you can see if you actually read my comment). Aptheker backs up his claims heavily.
It was a fascist uprising because the ones going through with the counter-revolution let Nazis captured during World War II out of jail, and were lynching Jewish people and communists. You can frame this as “pro-democracy” all you want, but this was factually documented. You’re correct about one thing, everything I don’t like isn’t Hitler, but the actual Nazis let out of jail were actual Nazis.
It’s a well known leftist term and is almost 100 years old now. I have a hard time believing you didn’t already know this.
There’s an ongoing campaign by the usual suspects to pretend the word doesn’t have a definition beyond “epithet for The Real Left used by ignorant libtards.” Usually followed by a wall of text containing circular references as citations.
Do you also have an evil gun word to refer to people defending socialdemocracy? Do you call them “bombies” for defending the socialdemocracy in EU states that helped bomb Libya and Yugoslavia and destroyed millions of lives in the process? Do you call them “dronies” for voting for the democrats that threw missiles with drones on brown children during the Obama administration?
Or is the usage of militaristic sounding bad words reserved for those who defend the revolution that saved Europe from Nazism, that industrialized Eastern Europe and saved it from extermination and colonization, saving a hundred million lives in the process from hunger, genocide, disease and exploitation?
Are your bad words reserved for those, and not for the leftists in Spain (my homeland) who refused to repress the fascists during the Spanish Second Republic and allowed a civil war that ended up millions of deaths and in 40 years of fascism? No evil military word for those?
Libtard is used by the right wing, no communists I know will use anything ending “-tard” because there’s ableist meaning there. Lib is not a militaristic bad sounding word, it’s the shortening of “liberal” or “libertarian”.
We know that the Hungarian “popular revolt” was recently proven to be a CIA color revolution, right? Like CIA documents were released proving they instigated and supported the whole thing to destabilize the USSR, right?
Not that the USSR of that time was all that great, but why are we using Cold War anti-communist operations and propaganda for our arguments…?
No, but they have declassified a paper about them being completely unprepared and unstaffed for this, and scrambling to get Hungarian speaking agents into Hungary after it started.
all i can find is that the CIA used Radio Free Europe to communicate to the independence fighters that the NATO allies would support their uprising. then when Hungarians revolted, they found themselves wholly unsupported.
do you have any good articles showing this to be a color revolution? because this reads to me just about what happens when a fascist org (CIA) co-opts international solidarity in order to thwart real change from ever getting organized, something they were very fond of doing throughout the cold war leading to devastating effects in the global south
The biggest tell is that, whatever potentially well-meaning elements among the original movements, ultimately Nazi collaborators were let out of prison, and the counter-revolutionaries were lynching Jewish people and communists, as I elaborated on here. There’s also evidence of MI6 arming and training Hungarian insurgents.
This article contains a shitton of falsehoods and omissions. The tankies were wrong.
Király was not a fascist. He served in the Royal Hungarian Army as a career soldier, joining after his father before the rise of fascism.
He did indeed serve in the invasion army of the fascistic Horthy regime as a captain, and he was indeed put in command of Jewish slave labourers, for which he received the Righteous Among the Nations accolades, as he treated them as humanely as the situation allowed, defying his orders, risking execution.
He was kept on with the Hungarian People’s Army, promoted by the communist leadership multiple times. He married Gömbös’ niece under Communist rule, way after it would have been politically advatageous. Despite that, he was put in command of the Hungarian participation of Stalin’s planned invasion of Yugoslavia.
He fell out of favour after the invasion was cancelled and was caught up in one of Rákosi’s purges, and he spent the three years after in abysmal conditions until the 56 revolution. He got out a month before because of the buildup to the revolution had some political prisoners released. He spent the next month until the revolution in hospital.
The Nagy provisional government asked him to organise the defense against the Soviet invasion, which he tried and understandably failed. He then left for the US along with hundreds of thousands, and got a job as a CIA trainer for Cuban anti-communist insurgents, which got him in the JFK files.
Then the Putin government put those files out and started a coordinated propaganda campaign to whitewash the genocide and rape the USSR committed.
BTW I’m a leftist and think the CIA is the scum of the earth on par with the SS, but let’s stick to the facts.
A random blog post that upon five seconds of inspection is outright abusing the truth?
In 1996, journalist Michael Smith published a book where MI6 officers, a branch of British intelligence, admitted they trained and armed Király’s fighters.8
Hmm okay, so let’s actually read the source provided here:
according to the author of a new book on the history of the organisation.
So random author, advertising a book is the basis of this whole claim.
“There is no evidence that this was specifically sparked by MI6 because there was another series of events”.
So no evidence.
Unfortunately the Budapest students met in a coffee bar to discuss their activities and were swiftly rounded up. Mr Gorka was interrogated for several weeks, strung up from a beam and immersed in icy water. Under torture, he confessed, and was sent to prison for 15 years.
So the few they did try to recruit and train were caught.
Laszlo Regeczy-Nagy, the President of the Committee for Historical Justice, representing the interests of the veterans, said: “There were thousands of Hungarians living in Austria at the time and some were undoubtedly organised and trained by the British.” He believes that foreign intervention played a modest role, and “the vast majority of those taking part [in the revolt] were locally trained and led”. He added: “Even without training, they pretty quickly learned how to fire machine guns and hurl Molotov cocktails.”
So to re-iterate, the claim that they ‘trained and armed Király’s fighters’ was a complete fabrication by the author.
They, as one would expect of them, were trying to build up a network to maybe do so in the future but they actually had nothing to do with the 1956 uprising.
Because they usually, eventually, end up in a position or situation where they have to either justify or gloss over or invent apologia for or just deny the existence amd actions of Beria, who… is the kind of person with the kind of power and cruelty that is an inevitability of their worldview put into practice.
Its not dissimilar from American Extremeist Christians who just start frothing at the mouth when you point out obvious hypocrises and ‘justified’ horrors in their worldview.
Somewhat ironically, the ego of being a ‘correct’ collectivist overrides a basic sense of human decency, resulting in fanaticism, and fanatics, basically by definition, don’t care about ‘the’ truth, they use language as a weapon, not as a means of genuine communication, and they ultimately use it to affirm their own moral/intellectual superiority over others.
Imma be real:
If someone tries to tell me, that Stalin’s purges were totally justified, they’re a tankie. If someone tells me that only “bad people” have suffered under regimes trying to achieve communism, they’re a tankie.
If someone tells me that I must support Iran or Russia because they are not the US, they might be a tankie.
I use tankie the same way. Authoritarians and genocide deniers. It’s a fairly common way to use the word by leftists. Libs and tankies muddying the definition sucks, but how else am I supposed to refer to tankies?
Edit: Also let’s be honest. Tankies call everyone who calls them out a liberal whether it’s warranted or not.
If you demonize previous (even if flawed) socialist experiments (e.g. for being successful and not perfect), then you are a revisionist, if not outright a liberal
I would interpret “demonizing” something as meaning misrepresenting it in a hyperbolically negative manner that may even involve completely constructed criticism.
I don’t think that highlighting authoritarianism in past social experiments constitutes demonising them. You’re right that there were significant successes in these projects, and also that they weren’t perfect. If we don’t properly acknowledge the ways in which they went wrong, can we really hope to do better in the future?
I don’t see any way in which the people you’re replying to are being at all revisionist.
Those on the left who support the state using force to keep the people controlled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
Y’know rolling tanks into Hungary in 1956 when leftists first started using the word.
It’s a well known leftist term and is almost 100 years old now. I have a hard time believing you didn’t already know this.
Completely off topic, but I like your icon.
Uh oh!
“Tankie” was never about “using force to keep the people controlled,” it originated from a split in whether to support the Red Army putting down a fascist uprising in Hungary or not. You’re correct about the origin timeline, but are defending Nazis freed from prison after being jailed during World War II that went on to lynch communists and Jews, just because they were anti-communist.
“Tankie” was a pejorative for Marxists that support socialism in real life then as well as now. It originated in the Communist Party of Great Britain. The term was coined because of the British tendency towards silly-sounding insults, and because the Soviet Union sent in the Red Army to stop the western-backed fascist insurrection. This caused a split in the party (as it always does in western orgs).
The Hungarian revolt in 1956 was infested with anti-semitic pograms. MI6 funded, supplied, and trained the Hungarian counter-revolutionaries. These counter-revolutionaries were allied with fascists who were lynching Jewish people and Communists.
Further, the CIA also backed Hungarian resistance forces:
Prague in 1968 was a similar fascist uprising in both cases there were some elements of progressive protest, but these were greatly overshadowed by the fascist movements. Dubcek wanted to sell out to the IMF, and restore capitalism. The idea that any of this was about “democracy” or “freedom” is silly, it was always about Cold War tactics to destabilize socialism.
TL;DR imagine if the January 6th rioters were armed and trained by foreign governments, started lynching officials and Jewish people, and the US sent in the army to put down the insurrection. The MAGA chuds would claim that it was about “freedom” and “democracy,” but we all know that they just wanted Trump in office.
Nowadays, it’s used by any random anti-communist to refer to anyone that supports socialist states or doesn’t buy into the imperialist narrative about global south countries. It was the ones you call “tankies” that knew the stories of WMD and Saddam’s forces leaving babies outside of incubators were both bullshit to manufacture consent for war, but now that its decades later the anti-communists all suddenly have collective amnesia about their willing participation in spreading the lies of empire to murder hundreds of thousands of people.
Anti-communists, I might add, that you are the modern version of, “left” anti-communists that service empire by attacking the Empire’s enemies for them while not meaningfully opposing the Empire itself. The Zizeks, the Chomskys, the Eric Blairs.
I know quite well what the pejorative you love to hurl means, and its origins. In addition to the liberal viewpoint from wikipedia, I recommend the Prolewiki article on “Tankies,” as well as Nia Frome’s essay “Tankies.” That should give you a more well-rounded view.
It very clearly is about the historical event I have linked above via the acutal wiki not your weird grokopedia thing.
And you’re also arguing off of that random authors book, the one that didn’t actually back up the claims being made. We’ve already been over how factually incorrect that was.
Likewise it was not a fascist uprising simply because it was democratic, /anti-authoritarian and wanted to escape from Soviet imperialism. Everything you don’t like isn’t Hitler.
This. My grandparents were there when the authorities opened fire on the peacefully gathering crowd. They only escaped with their lives because they got lucky, they saw some others fall around them.
Translation of the Hungarian wikipedia article bc it doesn’t seem to exist in other languages: https://hu-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Sortűz_a_Parlamentnél_1956-ban?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-GB
I recommended reading the Wikipedia entry for the liberal POV, the Prolewiki entry for the Marxist point of view, and the Red Sails article by Nia Frome for a modern contextualization of how the term is used today from a Marxist POV. Prolewiki isn’t “grokopedia,” it has its sources listed clearly.
Secondly, the book I referenced, The Truth About Hungary by Herbert Aptheker, heavily relies on citing western sources like the New York Times (which you can see if you actually read my comment). Aptheker backs up his claims heavily.
It was a fascist uprising because the ones going through with the counter-revolution let Nazis captured during World War II out of jail, and were lynching Jewish people and communists. You can frame this as “pro-democracy” all you want, but this was factually documented. You’re correct about one thing, everything I don’t like isn’t Hitler, but the actual Nazis let out of jail were actual Nazis.
There’s an ongoing campaign by the usual suspects to pretend the word doesn’t have a definition beyond “epithet for The Real Left used by ignorant libtards.” Usually followed by a wall of text containing circular references as citations.
Do you also have an evil gun word to refer to people defending socialdemocracy? Do you call them “bombies” for defending the socialdemocracy in EU states that helped bomb Libya and Yugoslavia and destroyed millions of lives in the process? Do you call them “dronies” for voting for the democrats that threw missiles with drones on brown children during the Obama administration?
Or is the usage of militaristic sounding bad words reserved for those who defend the revolution that saved Europe from Nazism, that industrialized Eastern Europe and saved it from extermination and colonization, saving a hundred million lives in the process from hunger, genocide, disease and exploitation?
Are your bad words reserved for those, and not for the leftists in Spain (my homeland) who refused to repress the fascists during the Spanish Second Republic and allowed a civil war that ended up millions of deaths and in 40 years of fascism? No evil military word for those?
Removed by mod
Libtard is used by the right wing, no communists I know will use anything ending “-tard” because there’s ableist meaning there. Lib is not a militaristic bad sounding word, it’s the shortening of “liberal” or “libertarian”.
Good job in calling out the ableism. I’ve reported it, so hopefully the mods clear it up quickly.
But we do have the more inclusive term of ‘shitlib’, which is a centrist analogue to ‘tankie’ especially so in being ardently uncritical supporters.
particularly i call people with shallow politics who spend more time virtue signaling than trying to engage on topics of critical analysis shitlibs
“Shitlib” is not a militaristic sounding word, though. We reserve those only for communists who oppose the western supremacy status quo
We know that the Hungarian “popular revolt” was recently proven to be a CIA color revolution, right? Like CIA documents were released proving they instigated and supported the whole thing to destabilize the USSR, right?
Not that the USSR of that time was all that great, but why are we using Cold War anti-communist operations and propaganda for our arguments…?
No, but they have declassified a paper about them being completely unprepared and unstaffed for this, and scrambling to get Hungarian speaking agents into Hungary after it started.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/(est pub date) clandestin[15503634].pdf
all i can find is that the CIA used Radio Free Europe to communicate to the independence fighters that the NATO allies would support their uprising. then when Hungarians revolted, they found themselves wholly unsupported.
do you have any good articles showing this to be a color revolution? because this reads to me just about what happens when a fascist org (CIA) co-opts international solidarity in order to thwart real change from ever getting organized, something they were very fond of doing throughout the cold war leading to devastating effects in the global south
The biggest tell is that, whatever potentially well-meaning elements among the original movements, ultimately Nazi collaborators were let out of prison, and the counter-revolutionaries were lynching Jewish people and communists, as I elaborated on here. There’s also evidence of MI6 arming and training Hungarian insurgents.
JFK Files Reveal CIA Role in the 1956 Hungarian Uprising | The tankies were right.
This article contains a shitton of falsehoods and omissions. The tankies were wrong.
Király was not a fascist. He served in the Royal Hungarian Army as a career soldier, joining after his father before the rise of fascism.
He did indeed serve in the invasion army of the fascistic Horthy regime as a captain, and he was indeed put in command of Jewish slave labourers, for which he received the Righteous Among the Nations accolades, as he treated them as humanely as the situation allowed, defying his orders, risking execution.
He was kept on with the Hungarian People’s Army, promoted by the communist leadership multiple times. He married Gömbös’ niece under Communist rule, way after it would have been politically advatageous. Despite that, he was put in command of the Hungarian participation of Stalin’s planned invasion of Yugoslavia.
He fell out of favour after the invasion was cancelled and was caught up in one of Rákosi’s purges, and he spent the three years after in abysmal conditions until the 56 revolution. He got out a month before because of the buildup to the revolution had some political prisoners released. He spent the next month until the revolution in hospital.
The Nagy provisional government asked him to organise the defense against the Soviet invasion, which he tried and understandably failed. He then left for the US along with hundreds of thousands, and got a job as a CIA trainer for Cuban anti-communist insurgents, which got him in the JFK files.
Then the Putin government put those files out and started a coordinated propaganda campaign to whitewash the genocide and rape the USSR committed.
BTW I’m a leftist and think the CIA is the scum of the earth on par with the SS, but let’s stick to the facts.
Your ‘evidence’ is a random blog post?
A random blog post that upon five seconds of inspection is outright abusing the truth?
Hmm okay, so let’s actually read the source provided here:
So random author, advertising a book is the basis of this whole claim.
So no evidence.
So the few they did try to recruit and train were caught.
So to re-iterate, the claim that they ‘trained and armed Király’s fighters’ was a complete fabrication by the author.
They, as one would expect of them, were trying to build up a network to maybe do so in the future but they actually had nothing to do with the 1956 uprising.
Why are tankies always so dishonest ?
Because they usually, eventually, end up in a position or situation where they have to either justify or gloss over or invent apologia for or just deny the existence amd actions of Beria, who… is the kind of person with the kind of power and cruelty that is an inevitability of their worldview put into practice.
Its not dissimilar from American Extremeist Christians who just start frothing at the mouth when you point out obvious hypocrises and ‘justified’ horrors in their worldview.
Somewhat ironically, the ego of being a ‘correct’ collectivist overrides a basic sense of human decency, resulting in fanaticism, and fanatics, basically by definition, don’t care about ‘the’ truth, they use language as a weapon, not as a means of genuine communication, and they ultimately use it to affirm their own moral/intellectual superiority over others.
It would be funny if it wasn’t so deadly serious.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
That is by far not a universal definition anymore and not at all how it is used on the internet by a lot of people 😑
E.g.: Liberals often use it to refer to anyone revolutionary, from anarchists to Maoists…
It’s a loaded and really unclear term nowadays and could even be interpreted as whistleblowing
Edit: Hence my question, because this could have been a rule 1 deletion and/or a temp ban e.g.
Imma be real: If someone tries to tell me, that Stalin’s purges were totally justified, they’re a tankie. If someone tells me that only “bad people” have suffered under regimes trying to achieve communism, they’re a tankie. If someone tells me that I must support Iran or Russia because they are not the US, they might be a tankie.
I use tankie the same way. Authoritarians and genocide deniers. It’s a fairly common way to use the word by leftists. Libs and tankies muddying the definition sucks, but how else am I supposed to refer to tankies?
Edit: Also let’s be honest. Tankies call everyone who calls them out a liberal whether it’s warranted or not.
If you demonize previous (even if flawed) socialist experiments (e.g. for being successful and not perfect), then you are a revisionist, if not outright a liberal
I would interpret “demonizing” something as meaning misrepresenting it in a hyperbolically negative manner that may even involve completely constructed criticism.
I don’t think that highlighting authoritarianism in past social experiments constitutes demonising them. You’re right that there were significant successes in these projects, and also that they weren’t perfect. If we don’t properly acknowledge the ways in which they went wrong, can we really hope to do better in the future?
I don’t see any way in which the people you’re replying to are being at all revisionist.
What counts as demonization for you?
I have often seen people say this but I’ve never seen an actual example of someone misusing the term tankie.
Then I’m glad you got spared the headaches
Fair, fair.
I’ve used this definition many times on Lemmy/PieFed so far, it’s my genuine meaning of the word.