I’m very OOTL when it comes to a lot of the major divides in online communities because thankfully I’ve managed to avoid most of the arguing. I’ve noticed a lot of instances say “no tankies” as one of their first rules and figured this might be the only place I could get a real answer.
Was there something specific they did to piss off everyone? If I had to take a shot in the dark, are they just people who are really pro-military?
The TL;DR is someone who supports authoritarian regimes that ‘are trying to achieve communism’ to the degree that they support, often uncritically, the oppression caused by (self-claimed) communist regimes. Some examples of such regimes would be : the USSR, the Chinese Communist Party, North Korea and Russia.
They will often deny or severely undermine events such as the Holodomor, Uyghur genocide or the Tiananmen Square massacre.
The term comes from the usage of tanks by the USSR “to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring uprising”.
The extra weird thing is they generally support Putin and Russian government policies. It’s not exactly about ‘trying to achieve communism’ for them I think, they seem to reflexively defend and support all kinds of right-wing BS depending on who is doing it. To me tankies don’t seem to be motivated by a coherent political philosophy, I think they are almost like LaRouchites where they don’t really have an actual ideology and are more like a cult.
I think it has to do with an anti-western point of view that mostly comes from the cold war.
Also, Russia essentially lives in the USSR’s shadow (This can be seen with its aggression of its neighbour countries and the use of the USSR anthem for example) even if it is politically and economically pretty different so I think quite a few believe that the war in Ukraine for example would bring back the USSR or something. I don’t really understand it personally. I think it is a strong general narrative pushed by the Russian government.