“Tankies”

A whimsical internet word for a very serious thing. For the uninitiated, a “Tankie” is a descriptor for a person (usually an online avatar) who wraps themselves in a communist aesthetic and then openly supports or denies the worst campaigns of genocide, imperialism, and warmongering committed by any and all “anti-American” regimes. To them, the Khmer Rouge didn’t happen, the Uighurs are fine, the Iranian people are all CIA plants, Stalin’s purges were great, the people of Bucha deserved it/it didn’t happen, Venezuela should annex Guyana, the Rohingya deserve it, etc, etc. Oh, and to them, September 11th was justified, and the Americans were the bad guys in WW2.

The word “Tankie” is internet-speak. It’s a reference to the murky beginnings of the extremist position, which involved high praise for Stalin’s NKVD mass murders and use of brutal reprisals against the Hungarian Student uprising of 1957. In the Hungarian uprising there were famously tanks in the streets gunning down students. Hence, “Tankie”.