I'm too tired and busy tonight to make a case here, but I would just point out that lemmy.world has defederated from anyone who can explain to you what a tankie believes and why, and you are only getting one side of the story in this thread.

I think most Americans who lived through the Iraq war are aware that America lies, but still not aware of the extent of it. The main targets of those lies are socialist states. When the intent of the lies is to make socialist states look monstrous, anyone who claims otherwise gets smeared with the same brush: a defender of monstrous states. It's a rhetorical firewall.

If you want to know what tankies believe and why, you should ask them. Whether you find them persuasive or not, you'll at least have learned what a subset of the human population believes and it will round out your perspective on the world.

The two main lemmy instances where you can find tankies are hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml. Hexbear is larger and more active, and their range of perspectives is a little broader because they include anarchists. Hexbear's list of federated instances is here https://hexbear.net/instances, and lemmygrad's is here https://lemmygrad.ml/instances.