What is tanky?

An apologist for dictatorial regimes with atrocious records on human rights, so long as those countries are not the US. A person who thinks that because the US is flawed, and has done bad things, that that means that countries that are or have traditionally been our adversaries (generally communist countries) are actually perfectly fine places to live, and everything bad that you hear about them is a Western lie. Someone who goes beyond just being a communist or socialist, into defending some truly awful regimes, a tankie throws out the baby with the bathwater.

John thinks Stalin was awesome, says China isn't oppressing the Uyghurs, and believes that everything bad you hear about North Korea is a lie that the American media wants you to believe. John is a tankie.

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tanky - meme gif

tanky - video

Tanky - what is it?

1 Communists who are anti-american imperialism to the extent that they defend cartoonishly bad people/countries as long as they claim to be socialist and challenged the interests of the U.S. or some other western nation. They can be found defending Joseph Stalin, Bashar al-Assad, and North Korea.

It began as an insult to members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), who supported the Soviet Union's response to the Hungarian Revolution (1956) and the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia (1968)

2 People who fetishize the aesthetics of 20th century socialist states and treat communism like a social group rather than a political ideology; not everyone who calls themself communist on Twitter is a tankie.

Tankie: "I try not to argue with people Lenin would have shot."
T: "Come back after you've read theory, radlib."
T: "Happy birthday, Stalin! 🎉🎊"

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What does "tanky" mean?

Slang for someone who supports militant communism, as opposed to the subversive, political, or economic warfare variants of communism. Generally, though not always, a Stalinist.

Only tankies would actually want to spread the revolution though military might.

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Tanky - what does it mean?

A very authoritarian socialist/ communist.

Have you seen the Video of Ushanka Kid? When he said Stalin would be better than Trump he was a real Tanky

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Tanky - meaning

A hardline Stalinist. A tankie is a member of a communist group or a "fellow traveller" (sympathiser) who believes fully in the political system of the Soviet Union and defends/defended the actions of the Soviet Union and other accredited states (China, Serbia, etc.) to the hilt, even in cases where other communists criticise their policies or actions. For instance, such a person favours overseas interventions by Soviet-style states, defends these regimes when they engage in human rights violations, and wishes to establish a similar system in other countries such as Britain and America.

The term is used to distinguish the rare individuals with these kinds of beliefs from communists more broadly (including Communist Party members), whose adherence to Soviet doctrine and attachment to existing "socialist" states is somewhat weaker.

It is always more-or-less abusive in the sense that those termed tankies do not use the term themselves, but it doesn't have any particular bite (unlike, say, Trot).

The term derives from the fact that the divisions within the communist movement first arose when the Soviet Union sent tanks into communist Hungary in 1956, to crush an attempt to establish an alternative version of communism which was not embraced by the Russians. Most communists outside the eastern bloc opposed this action and criticised the Soviet Union. The "tankies" were those who said "send the tanks in".

The epithet has stuck because tankies also supported "sending the tanks in" in cases such as Czechoslovakia 1968, Afghanistan 1979, Bosnia and Kosovo/a (in the case of the Serbian state), and so on (whereas the rest of the communist movement has gravitated towards anti-militarism).

I wouldn't be surprised if the tankies even defend Saddam Hussein.

Some of the people round George W Bush used to be left-wing, but they haven't really changed their views much; they were mostly tankies.

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