Some of them have a real thing for saying the Tiananmen Square massacre never happened and there's no evidence, too. I guess I just hallucinated those news reports at the time with screams and gunfire in the background.

Hmmm ... I think I might have seen a statement or two like that. Though, in my cases, it seemed a lot more like moving the goal posts or not arguing so well their general anti-western sentiment ... I don't think I've seen anyone go so far as to support the killing of civilians (in fact, I saw opposition to the deaths of civilians).

Do you have any receipts?

And, FWIW, my general position here is that I'm not a "tankie" or whatever and don't necessarily like everything they have to say around here, but, by default I lean toward having access to a wide set of opinions so long as I have the option of walking away or ignoring them when I need to. The thing that disturbs me about a lot of the "anti-tankie" sentiments is that it looks a lot like an aggressive enforcement of a political bubble against any hardline critiques of the west. I, for one, am happy to hear said critiques even if they are off-base most of the time, in part because I have no doubt that we are all living in sometimes petty political bubbles.

That, of course, doesn't excuse being awful ... it's just that I haven't encountered the degree of awfulness that many speak about and whenever I've gone looking (which, admittedly isn't deeply or often) I have struggled to find what has been accused. Because of this, I'm always curious to see what "anti-tankies" are talking about.