Nah I dislike you just as much. Was lincoln a tankie?
...
Fuck.I really WAS looking forward to blocking you. AND you didn't give me a good reason not to. BUT,
the more I think about it, the more I find myself liking your question and feel myself WANTING to explore it.
At first, I asked myself if I could say "yeah, actually" but clearly THAT would be untrue - and not just for the reason that battle tanks weren't even invented yet at the time, but because even though lots of people hurl the word "tankie" around as a blanket insult with no real meaning, I'm instead actually honestly trying to mean something specific - It's not JUST killing your own people because they oppose you politically (using the figurative "you" here, not the literal you). It's the amount of intentional civilian casualties.
When people take up arms for a cause, they're self-selecting into the combat role, after all. Executing a planned, organized attack upon a government's assets is not a civilian behavior. It's either the behavior of an enemy (to said government) soldier or the behavior of a criminal. It's not innocent. The rebels in the American civil war were certainly not innocent bystanders.
What characterizes it would have to be the intentional and systematic slaughter of non-combatant civilians who were not engaging in battlefield maneuvers.
While this DID apparently happen in the American civil war, contributing to the civilian death toll of some 50,000 people, it was largely the actions of general Sherman, who unilaterally chose, regardless of actual orders, to burn entire cities.
I can't speak for you, obviously, but if a group exhibits all the behavioral phenomenon we presently associate with, say fascism, EVEN IF the actions and events concerned occurred before fascism was ever recognized or named, illuminating these behavioral facets by CALLING it "fascism" still possess communicative utility. Maybe meet half way and call it proto-fascism.
Likewise, if one were to call Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's actions during the American Civil War "proto-tankie", I'd be hard pressed to honestly disagree with them.
When it comes to the defining incidents of the term, though - the Prague Spring - the "rebellion" didn't declare war, they merely elected someone the Soviets didn't like, and for that, 165,000 troops and just over 4,600 tanks were dispatched and nearly ALL the resulting casualties were civilians, even with the elected leader of the time telling the civilians NOT to resist for the sake of their safety. Thankfully the number of civilian casualties were relatively few, with less than a hundred murdered and only just over 250 severely wounded.
The other oft-cited incident, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, actually featured armed insurgency and makes no distinctions clear enough regarding how many of the ~3,000 Hungarian casualties exactly were armed, organized, and mobilized, so I for one hold it in less critical a light than what Sherman did in the American Civil War.
When it comes to what Petro Poroshenko did in Ukraine, he actually admitted on video that he intended to make civilians suffer and fear for their lives, to make children cower in basements, in order to coerce compliance from them. Them, meaning, people who didn't even declare any intention to pick a fight with his administration in the first place! Punishing them for the "crime" of merely living in the same municipal area as alleged insurgents.
If you don't want to call it "tankie", fine.
But this IS a pattern of politically motivated state sponsored brutality that DOES recur throughout history and whatever you DO choose to call it deserves to be named, shamed, and blamed for giving Russia any justification whatsoever to "protect civilians" in the Donbas region by invading Ukraine.
In short, Lincoln wasn't a tankie, but Sherman may have been a proto-tankie.
Imagine thinking Sherman did anything wrong at all. (Edit in his march to the sea).
Edited : forgot all about his post civil war evil (which a lot of the union generals did).
Stalin shouldn't have stopped at Berlin, and Sherman shouldn't have stopped at the sea.
Sherman was one of the most important leaders in the genocide of Indigenous Americans in the last half of the 19th century.
I was gonna post the "Arson Locomotive" meme but it doesn't feel right. I didn't realize that Sherman was in charge of the whole westward expansion program on the military side. : |
Sherman should've marched straight into the ocean.
This is why we have
but not :Sherman:
Pretty much.
...and continued to Berlin.
Yeah I forgot about the dark half of literally 90% of civil war union generals in the postwar era.
The Radio War Nerd series on the American Civil War has opened my eyes to one thing that frankly should have been obvious to me earlier: the regular union army had to drag their leadership to take any truly aggressive action against the rebels.
All the union leadership went to the same war colleges as the rebel leadership, Sherman included. The Union side tried acting chivalrous for years while the Rebels spit in their faces. As a result, several more years of useless bloodshed passed. It was General Grant who convinced Sherman the March tot he Sea was the way to go. Sherman was the last guy in the Union army to realize that the Rebels were not going to just come to their senses by themselves.
JOHN BROWN, ON THE OTHER HAND SHOULD HAVE HATCHED A BETTER PLAN TO FREE THE SLAVES
I've said it before and I'll say it again: if the North had done what it should have after the war, it would've made the Great Purge look like a Sunday picnic.
no more half measures walter.