A tankie is, broadly, someone who wants to effect left-wing ideology using authoritarian methods. It originally referred to those who defended the USSR using tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution, but it could be aptly used to describe those who defend China's actions in Tiananmen Square. It's rightfully used as a perjorative, since authoritarian enforcement is antithetical to leftism, particularly communism.

Tankies are hypocrites who didn't understand their self-proclaimed ideologies. If someone's idea of communist praxis is lining up dissenters for the firing squad, you're dealing with a tankie.

I'm a tankie. What tankie is supposed to mean is someone who blindly supports anything anyone does so long as they claim to be communist and wave a red flag. There's maybe a handful of edgy teens who actually fit that description, but the way it's actually used is to punch left at anyone who supports anything a socialist country has ever done, or who is insufficiently patriotic/nationalistic and is willing to consider things from an internationalist perspective.

If you say for example that Cuba under Castro had a successful literacy program, then there are people who will accuse you of being a tankie just for that. Because it gets used this way, some people like myself chose to reclaim the insult and wear it proudly.

Generally, the actual term for most "tankies" would be Marxist-Leninist. But I actually prefer tankie because it's a more general, big tent label. It's used so broadly that even anarchists can be called tankies. It's basically like "woke" where it doesn't actually have any real meaning.

Militant leftist, in the most basic sense.

But anti-leftists tend to co-opt the term to replace 'fascist' or 'nazi' in their discourse.

People that are happy to run people over in tanks to force their communist version of society on everyone else.

I am by no means an expert, but the test that was explained to me is that if you look at the famous tianamen square picture of the guy holding grocery bags facing down a line of tanks, and then proceed to side with the line of tanks, then you're a tankie.

When I say that I am not an expert, what I actually mean is that I'm a random idiot from the internet, so don't take anything I say as gospel truth.

I've only been on lemmy for a few months, and I've never heard the term tankie on any other platform. My understanding is that a tankie is a militant supporter of communism, who completely disregards (or is in support of) how every time it's ever actually been done it turns into an authoritarian dictatorship (or something similarly unpleasant to live under).

My own biases exposed: I am an american, and most of what I know I learned in the absolutely fucked american public education system, which says communism = evil, because of the red scare a while back.

If you do some googling, there's a wikipedia article on the subject. I've forgotten most of the content of that article shortly after I read it, I should look at it again and maybe it will stick this time.