Armenia said on Wednesday it would host a joint military exercise with the United States next week, a development that Russia said was cause for concern.
The Armenian Defence Ministry said the purpose of the Sept. 11-20 “Eagle Partner 2023” exercise was to prepare its forces to take part in international peacekeeping missions.
A U.S. military spokesperson said 85 US soldiers and 175 Armenians would take part. He said the Americans - including members of the Kansas National Guard which has a 20-year-old training partnership with Armenia - would be armed with rifles and would not be using heavy weaponry.
They mean well (in their crazy, stupid, fucked up way) but they actually have a much higher body count.
The term tankie has been vulgarized, but it has a specific meaning. A tankie is an orthodox communist who puts the “dictatorship of proletariat” above any morality or any other interest, foreign or domestic. That’s how a tankie brushes away any genocide, any crime, because no value or entity is too important to stand in the way of their communist utopia, even human rights. In this sense, this group is very close in practice to nazis, you just have to replace “proletariat” with “nation” and for that abstraction anything is allowed: internal repression, invading your neighbours and allies.
But not all “communists”/socialists are like that and many mean well (e.g. Gorbachev, some anarchists like Chomsky or “democratic-communist” Lula, etc), but a good few follow tankies unquestioningly without realising the underlying inhumanity dressed as theory.
People denying genocide and promoting mass executions never “mean well”
Everybody “means well”, hitler thought he was reviving the German people from their humiliation at Versailles and that any price was reasonable.
That and $2.50 will buy you a pack of gum.