tankie is when you don’t want to send tanks to ukraine

anyone with the smallest criticism of US Imperialism is a tankie now

It means whatever it needs to mean in the context in which it is deployed.

It’s a tool deployed by liberals against people to the left of them in exactly the same way that woke is a tool deployed by reactionaries against people to the left of them.

It gets deployed against everything from ML to anarchist to even socdems, depending on whether you say something that goes against the US’ imperial core goals.

The purpose of the tool is thought-termination. To prevent people from listening to the person that it is deployed against. Reactionaries use woke to prevent people among their ranks from listening to anything reasonable the ““woke”” person might say, and liberals use tankie to prevent people among their ranks from listening to anything reasonable the left might say.

It is an adaptation of mccarthyite behaviour.

You ain’t done nothing if you ain’t been called a Red applies now to this word just as much as it applied back then.

It’s become a catch all insult for anyone to the left of Biden, pretty much. It’s totally divorced from it’s original meaning and used as a thought terminating cliche at this point.

Liberals think it means someone who lies about wanting socialism and instead just wants to kill people. They think it refers to a proponent of a society where all decisions are made by a single crackpot dictator. They think they have a correct view on how to create and institute socialism, which would involve things like voting in elections, organizing pickets, and very slowly seizing power through mass appeal. As a corollary to this, liberals believe this type of socialism has already been achieved in places like Sweden and Denmark. Depending on how much they’ve read socialist theory they may also point to Catalonia or the Zapatistas, but they’ll usually be referring to completely imaginary mangled versions of these events that don’t reflect history.

What tankie means in practice though is something more like “race traitor.” Or “nation traitor.” Liberals will say they hate the west’s actions and what it stands for, but what they really mean is they hate everywhere else more. Any designated enemies of western countries are permanent enemies and outside of liberal values. People who call themselves socialists will still use this dichotomy. Tankie means someone who expresses sympathy for countries that have been designated as enemies to the west. You’ll notice that Xi Jinping himself isn’t called a tankie. Stalin’s not a tankie. Figures like that get called authoritarians or dictators. Tankie is someone in the west who has broken convention and gone to the bad guys. That’s all it means at this point.

I really believe there’s been a decades long project to usurp socialist rhetoric by liberals, whether they realize it or not. The existence of tankies threatens their reputation, because it draws socialist terminology back into scary communism. Liberals have spent decades trying to position themselves as the true, good leftists. That only works if they can paint socialist movements worldwide as liars and their own internal socialists as traitors

“Person on the left I disagree with”

Aka “woke” for democrats

It’s supposed to mean “authoritarian leftist” (the concept of authoritarianism as a distinct political trait / goal is a key part of horse-shit theory), but the assholes who say that also insist that “true leftism” is inherently libertarian and cannot be authoritarian, and so actually tankies are just red-fash masquerading as leftists – they hate to even acknowledge a family resemblance.

So these people based their understanding on the political compass (which is trash), but then also decided that their own frame of understanding was shitty and broken because by having an authoritarian-left axis at all, it didn’t condemn tankies enough.

You ain’t done nothin if you ain’t been called tan-kie

Eventually it drifted from it’s original meaning to instead mean “Marxist-Leninist, or an adjacent Marxist ideology (anything from Trots to MLM or MTW, but mostly ML) which is an ideology I hate due to American propaganda,” and I think it was basically used that way for a long time; then more recently it’s become a term for “Anyone who doesn’t unequivocally condemn designated enemies of the US state.” This more recent drift means an anarchist or even a social democrat who doesn’t support Azov Battalion, the IOF or Syrian “moderate rebels” can be labeled a tankie, making it essentially a meaningless term.

The nice thing is that if someone calls someone else a tankie you can basically immediately know that the first person is some disgusting globe emoji ghoul.

EDIT: Of course, you sound like you already know this, but for anyone who doesn’t, the original meaning was “ML who didn’t support the fascist counterrevolution in Hungary.”

opposing imperialism, colonialism, racism, capitalism, patriarchy, animal abuse, domestic violence, or pollution in a way that is not utterly ineffectual or pacifistic

Tankie is just the lib version of woke

It basically means ‘leftist’

its the new “commie” or “red”

all you need to know really

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“anyone to the left of me that i dont like”

it’s a term used only to signify ingroup versus outgroup in the context of right wing debate nerd circles.

it’s the political equivalent of ‘slut’ or ‘hipster’ in the way those terms functionally mean ‘person who is having more sex than me’ and ‘person who is cooler than me’