chapotraphouse

Uhh. It's complicated. It's an insult used to denounce communists and some other related groups. The people who use it are mostly what we consider to be liberals, aka people who believe that liberal economics produce good results for humanity. We apply "liberal" or "lib" pretty freely. It's our pejorative/insult for everyone from Democrats to V*ush fans to people who claim Anarchism but seem to have a limited understanding of theory.

The complicated part is that it doesn't really have any clear meaning. The people who use it seem to apply it to anyone vaguely lefist that they don't like. Generally speaking if you think China under the CPC or the Soviet Union were anything less than pure evil you'll find people throwing "tankie" at you without much thought. Most people who use it don't seem to have much if any grasp of history, and what they do know is often incomplete, flat our wrong, or western anti-communist propaganda.

Most communists have strong criticisms of the conduct of the Soviet Union, the CPC, and other socialist states, but we also acknowledge programs and concepts that were successful. They're not just one thing that can be reduced to good or evil - Stalin's forced removal of entire ethnic groups was horrible and should not be repeated, but we can also acknowledge that the Soviet Union made incredible leaps in agricultural technology or materials science. Both things can be true, and the reasons for each of these things can be very complicated - Stalin, or that is to say the Soviet government, wrongly believed that people like the Volga Germans represented a serious threat of collaboration with the Nazi regime, and deported them in to the interior of the USSR in what was de-facto collective punishment. But on the other hand the Communist Bloc was able to take advantage of the socialist economy, which allowed free sharing of scientific information without being hobbled by patents and IP laws, to collaborate very effectively and make great scientific strides. One of these doesn't cancel the other, and both hold important lessons - Things we should learn from and build on, and things we should be careful not to repeat.

All that is lost on people throwing around the tankie insult. They mostly know about the USSR and China from very low quality sources or naked propaganda, and they have a very black and white view, condemning entire countries and all the people in them based on false beliefs. It's very frustrating.

As for the origin of the term - In 1956 in Hungary there was a revolt against the Communist government. Many different factions sprung up during the revolt. Some seem to have been communists acting in good faith on the belief that their government was not implementing a socialist society effectively and needed to be replaced. However others were fascists, or the children of fascists, who had collaborated with the Nazis during WWII just ten years prior. After some indecision the Politburo in Russia decided to send Red Army troops to crush the revolt and restore the previous government. This action essentially split the left outside of the Eastern Bloc. The consensus is that many western leftists believed that the communist bloc could maintain itself without the use of force, and that the Politburo had betrayed the revolution by crushing the Hungarian revolt. British communists who broke with the mainstream communists over this disagreement coined the word "tankie", after the Red Army tanks sent in to Hungary, as an insult to describe their opponents.

Some jackass dug the term up out of the history books a few years ago and now many very online people use it as an insult against people they perceive to be evil and ruthless.