"Tankie" is a term referring to authoritarian communists, due to the tendency of authoritarian communist states to use tanks in crushing protesters - such as the Soviet Union crushing Hungarian workers in 1956, or China rolling tanks into Tienanmen Square against student protesters in 1989. "Tankie" is also used for apologists for these regimes.

Tankie is sometimes misused as "Someone to my left I don't like".

The current usage refers to people who back dictatorships that call themselves socialist.

Historically, the definition was slightly tighter. A few years after the death of Stalin, the USSR brutally crushed a revolt in Hungary with tanks. The UK's communist party was okay with this. This led to a lot of people leaving the party and calling the people who remained "tankies".

Over time, the term became more broad. A lot of the original users of the term supported Stalin, and would be considered tankies themselves by the modern definition.

It is also sometimes misused. Some people think that dictatorships are the only form that socialism can take. As a consequence, these people call all socialists tankies, including anarchists and demsocs.

Try posting a meme critical of Russia's invasion of Ukraine to lemmy.ml's meme community. If it isn't immediately taken down for "rule 1: uncivil", you will catch some people pasting long entries defending Russia in the comments with varying degrees of civility. These will be the ones we call tankies.

normally claims to be leftist, the main tankie things are being in support of authoritarians, as long as they wear red (claim to be communist) and often uncritically support any actions taken against "the west", which often aligns them with authoritarian governments like the ccp, kremlin. Tankies get their name from support of various events where tanks were used to oppress, like tianmen square, prague spring, etc.

I use it to mean any leftist who doesn't think Stalin and Mao were cunts

Tankie is a derogatory used to refer to marxist-leninist specifically because of their belief in the dictatorship of the proletariet. Most people assume this means a single unelected person has complete power over the economy and military but it should not take this form and marxist-leninist "tankies" do not typically advocate for this. The dictatorship of the proletariet only means that the working class both owns the means of production (anything required to produce goods, this can be factories, land, tools, etc.) and dictates the rules/organization of society. This is as opposed to the dictatorship of the bourgeosie (as seen in current liberal democracy) where an unelected minority, the rich, controls the means of production and dictates the rules/organization of society.

As for the origin of the term

'tankie’ emerged in the 1970s as a pejorative term to describe those who supported the Soviet actions in 1968 and was used in internal disputes, especially around the 1977 revamping of the CPGB programme, The British Road to Socialism, where Eurocommunist ideas reached the upper echelons of the party.

source

Typically though tankie is used to refer to anyone who supports real existing socialism

they're like furries, but for tanks. they make up tanksonas, and wear anthropomorphic tank costumes, got to tankie conventions, and draw lots of art of anthropomorphic tanks. the subculture goes back to the earliest mecha anime, but there are antecedants going back to leonardo da vinci.

So many tankies in this thread smdh

Let me know if the image is fucked, I'm getting errors my end :(

Anyone that a Liberal doesn't like (and occasionally anyone a leftist doesn't like)