Nice to have you here! This post is meant to poke fun at how "tankie" is used a lot online now.
It's usually used as a pejorative term against communists, but the people who use it tend to not really know what communism is or who it should apply to. You'll get funny situations like anarchists getting called tankies.
It harkens back to British communists a couple decades ago. People who supported the USSR's use of tanks to crush fascist protests in Czechoslovakia were called tankies. It's then devolved to applying to any communist that thinks a communist state should be able to use violence, and now it's become basically meaningless.
It's not a term we self identify with - just one that gets lobbed at us a lot.
Sorry if that was a lot! :).
*edit: A Nazi uprising in Hungary in 1956, per redsquid below
Interesting. Sounds like a meaningless definition. By this I'd say your average Fox News watching chud would fit the definition of tankie. You'd need only give them a tank, point them to some BLM protestors in a road, let them know they won't be arrested and have immunity and they'd charge the fuck on down with that tank while screaming how all lives matter.
Or for that matter as others have pointed out, a lot of cops.
I've seen pictures of protests in Latin America, I forget which country, it had a right-wing government at the time, the protestors were leftist and the government rammed them with armored combat vehicles, not quite tanks but those must be tankies too.
Sounds like a rather useless term to be honest. Not only that it would seem to paper over the fact lots more people have been run over to death by normal vehicles, jeeps, armored vehicles that aren't tanks, etc than could possibly have been run over by tanks. So those people's lives don't matter, the use of vehicles to slaughter then don't matter? Only if it fits a narrow criteria?
By this I’d say your average Fox News watching chud would fit the definition of tankie. You’d need only give them a tank, point them to some BLM protestors in a road, let them know they won’t be arrested and have immunity and they’d charge the fuck on down with that tank while screaming how all lives matter.
Considering Florida passed such a law giving people immunity for running over protestors on roads, and modern American trucks and SUVs are practically the size of tanks, this isn't even an exaggeration of reality.