Rob : You’re a total paranoid.

Alvy Singer : Well, how am I a para-? I pick up on those kind of things. You know, I was having lunch with some guys from NBC, so I said, uh, “Did you eat yet or what?” and Tom Christie said, “No, didjew?” Not, “did you”, “didjew eat?” Jew? No, not “did you eat”, but “Jew eat”? Jew. You get it? Jew eat?

Dictatorship at the time didn’t mean necessarily authoritarian, it just meant government. Someone always dictates however they may be elected. He felt the people dictating should be the working class.

You got down voted but you’re right. Tankie is the new form of commie after that fell out of favor. Western “champaign socialists” (another term I hate but it kinda applies here) use it to criticize people from countries that actually have had socialist experiments. Most of the leftists globally are not western and would fit under the standard western definition of tankie. But if you’ve never come close to overthrowing your own government, are you positioned all that well to criticize someone elses revolution while you sit comfortably in the imperial core?

Poor countries face challenges that rich countries can’t imagine often from western interference and revolutions are an ugly business. No Castro was not Santa Claus but he was a marked improvement over Batista.

Just because something is a social construct doesn’t mean it isn’t real or important.