What is exactly is a "tankie"?

[Rome's rightful successor]

I know historically a tankie were western leftists that supported the soviets against Prague Spring with the common phrase of "send in the tanks" but what does a tankie means in the present day?
They seem nostalgic for the soviet union and simp for communist mass murderers. They also seem to be the type of lefties that other lefties seem to hate like how vaush doesn't like them.
But they seem to be far less anti-white then other leftists and seem to be less ashamed of their history compared to other leftist as well.
They seem to love soviet aesthetics and at least their taste in art doesn't seem as bad as your typical center left liberal (their love for brutalism notwithstanding).
The tankies seem bad but the lefties that hate them seem far worse, more degenerate and cringe.
Can someone explain what exactly is a tankie in 2022?

 

[Iceland Heavy]

Tankie is just a buzzword for generically authoritarian leftist at this point. The difference you're probably seeing is that tankies at least have nations to be dubiously proud of, none of which really had 'fuck white people' as one of their core values while the average non-tankie radical leftist these days does.

 

[milk]

People, who unironically love the USSR and PRC. They glorify the violence too.

 

[Dammit Mandrake!]

The kind of cute alt chick in high school that wore all black and had heavy black makeup and it was kind of neat but then she never grew out of it and now she's 36 and still dresses and acts the same.

 

[Beautiful Border]

A tankie is a leftist who defends examples of socialism that have actually existed like the Soviet Union, as opposed to some amorphous, hypothetical version of socialism that has never been tried where everyone gets a free unicorn. I respect "tankies" way more than the kind of people who use words like "tankie" (mostly white middle-class suburbanites who identify as anarchists) because they're at least honest about what they want and are able to clearly define it, even if what they want is shit.

 

[A Cardboard Box]

The kind of cute alt chick in high school that wore all black and had heavy black makeup and it was kind of neat but then she never grew out of it and now she's 36 and still dresses and acts the same.

Sounds hot.

 

[Exigent Circumcisions]

Sounds hot.

I already fucked her.

 

[Disheveled Human]

A retard.

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

A Communist that doesn't deny that the atrocities of the USSR and such were indeed part of Communism and that Communism did indeed happen, and it was somehow good. Basically the opposite of your regular commie that wants to hide that the USSR was real Communism to get people to try doing it again.

 

[Mnutu]

A retard
EDIT : fuck @Disheveled Human beat me to it.

 

[Vivec]

A tankie is when you like tanks, and the more you like tanks, the more of a tankie you are. Mao and Stalin both really liked tanks.

I think it may be a subgenre of train based autism.

 

[Goebbels]

Tankies simp for the Soviet Union and East Germany both of which were white which explains why they're far less anti-white than other leftists.

 

[mr.moon1488]

A comie that understands he can't have what he wants without accepting that at least 90% of what the monarchies did was for good reason.

 

[Prophetic Spirit]

Tankie sounds like a secondary tank from RPG videogames. you know: a off-tank; still healthy with high defense but not as a pure tank, trading that to damage.

 

[rage against modernity]

Tankies simp for the Soviet Union and East Germany both of which were white which explains why they're far less anti-white than other leftists.

The more socially conservative communists are called nazbols. Tankies definitely overlap with nazbols but not as much as the modern day twitter faggot communists. It's fucking crazy how many trannies support Stalin, like compared to how many support Hitler it's a much much much larger number.

 

[theshitposter]

Tankie sounds like a secondary tank from RPG videogames. you know: a off-tank; still healthy with high defense but not as a pure tank, trading that to damage.

There's a game "tanki online"

 

[TheTrumanShow]

Just like many words, it has different meanings depending on who you ask and most tankies seem to simp for Stalin or Mao or other megalomaniacs like this.

Others like in part Slavoj Zizek are partly ironic/trolling but also partly sympathize with certain elements of collectivist authoritarianism. This does include some aspects of communist aesthetic and idealism.

And the guy was a persecuted dissident. As someone who loves freedom but could see myself lining up some people in a line to shoot them, I think I fall in here with Zizek.

Here is a good intro to him, but he's very much playing to the audience.
In other interviews he's much more direct. I know he's said something like "I fear If I had power. Because I know how to use power".
Essentially a platonist type of "philosopher king" , I'm sure he would murder quite a lot of people but from his perspective for the greater good.

For the same reason I've become more and more politically inactive as the years go on. I've realized that most people barely deserve democracy and can't handle something like collective responsibility very well. I don't want to force these people to live in a system that they might first accept due to its promises but then detest due to its practical implications, resulting in violent oppression. Despite what some rightoids might contest, communism requires an extreme amount of participation in all factettes of political life by the ordinary citizen for the system not to completely spiral out of control.

I've realized that most "commiest", "lefties" , etc are hypocrites, they are just as selfish if not more than their opponents and that there is some truth in Margaret Thatchers idea that "soon you'll run out of everyone elses money", but only because people for most part are this way, not because the system otherwise couldn't work if people were largely different. For the same reasons I don't really like the idea of a supposedly altruistic elite managing the world together with a bunch of technocrats.

So I guess I'm a consciously closeted tankie in part and those that aren't like me haven't come to these realizations or do not care and simply want to impose their collectivist communist views on others without regard to their psychology and ultimately their will.


Interestingly enough the tankies as such are the most oppressed faction of Chiense society. Maoist forums and radical student groups in China are routinely shut down and people are jailed en masse. But this shouldn't surprise people too much. Stalin killed more communists as a percentage of the population than anyone else and Robespierre during his reign of terror turned the guillotine on more revolutionaries than on nobles in the end.

A retard.

TLDR mostly this.

 

[RembrandtCourage]

People who spam tank units in RTS games.

 

[Just_Somebody]

A retard, yes, But a retard by choice, rather than by mental disability.

 

[Thomas Talus]

Tankies are the people who looked at the famous picture of the guy standing in the road, blocking the tanks headed to Tiananmen Square, and said "the tanks were in the right."