godisidog [none/use name]

That’s fair, I can see it’s value as part of a broader argument.

Can we please not use this line of argument when even the CPC admits people were killed in the streets around Tiananmen.

Tankies don’t operate on the basis of parties. They are authoritarians, so when they mean CCP, they mean Xi. When they mean Russia, they mean Putin.

Legitimately one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read. Western China-watchers are constantly going on about Xi’s personal ambitions to take Taiwan (nonsense), or going on about ‘Putin’s War’, but we’re the ones who see things through the lense of individual “great men”?

Tank Man was hauled off (by either fellow civilians or plain-clothes cops, we’ll never know), and the tanks drove home.

The violence was the day before.

Maybe they’ll ’Night of the Long Knives’ them when they stop being useful; have the military purge them and then just assume fundamentally the same role without the unpopular baggage?

That was over by 1850

Empires stop being Empires if they’re not actively expanding, it’s why Rome became a wholesome nation state when the Legions bedded down for the night and only became an Empire again when they started marching the next morning.