this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
60 points (98.4% liked)
The Democratic People's Republic of Tankiejerk
1080 readers
45 users here now
Dunking on Tankies from a leftist, anti-capitalist perspective.
Rules:
- No bigotry of any kind.
- No tankies or right-wingers. Liberals are allowed so long as they are aware of this
- No genocide denial
We allow posts about tankie behavior even off fedi, shitposts, and rational, leftist discussion.
Curious about non-tankie leftism? If you've got a little patience for 19th century academic style, let a little Marx and Kropotkin be your primer!
Marx's Communist Manifesto, short and accessible! Highly recommended if you haven't read it
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
lol, leopards ate my face
This is what cracks me up about all the people calling for guillotines on Lemmy. You think they’ll stop with oil company ceos or whatever? No chance.
I mean, tbf, guillotines had a better record than firing squads, with only a few tens of thousands of innocent collateral
I imagine setting up a guillotine is harder than setting up some guns, so makes sense.
Guillotines were also public during the French Revolution, so you have to keep up the crowd's appetite for guillotining people. The more innocents you send to the guillotine, the more they lose their taste for it.
It’s not exactly funny-haha, but it’s strange to think about the approval of a literal bloodthirsty mob as the limiting factor on violence.
A bloodthirsty mob is like a fire. It requires fuel or it can burn itself out but it also needs to be tended or it might blaze out of your control. And when you start messing with big enough ones, you run real risks of it killing you.
Tyrants ain't like that. They can often abstract away most of their killing so they just gave orders while their subordinates are just following orders. And the thing is, a mob's anger gets sated if it lets itself, but a tyrant's only killing a little out of anger. Mostly its fear and greed. And once you become a tyrant those are two bottomless pits. Fear in particular because everyone you kill out of fear spawns a new people who want you dead.
This is democracy manifest!