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.
The UK bit makes more sense, I can hear the accent.
I thought it was about the Teineman square tank man with the bags, and Tankie’s were on the side of the tanks. I mean it’s the same concept but yours goes back further.
“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 Soviet Union crushing Hungarian workers in 1956
That’s where the term comes from. Before that, it was common among the western left to support the Soviet Union and don’t allow criticism. When they crushed the Hungarian workers, most western leftist redrew their support, except for tankies. That’s where they got their name.
I’d say “often misused” these days. It’s become a common Reddit term to describe anyone left of Obama 🙄
That may be, I haven’t been to Reddit in a while. On here, there’s some misuse, but a lot of people who it actually does apply to, mostly from .ml anymore; formerly Grad and Hexbear when they were federated. Fuckin’ playing apologist for Uyghur genocide, North Korean Juche, saying Hungarian workers were ‘fascists’ who had to be crushed. Weird stuff. Hate seeing them around.
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.
It’s so goofy that they support modern Russia, a right wing empire that backs fascists worldwide. I get not liking the US or the liberal world order, but Russia trying to build a competing empire is not anti-imperialist. You can’t solve imperialism with imperialism. It’s like trying to solve capitalism’s problems with capitalist solutions.
There isn’t even plausible deniability like with the USSR. It’s an explicitly ethnocentric government of blood and soil rhetoric 🙄
