"Tankie" started as an insult for people who supported Khrushchev's military action in Hungary and the quelling of the Hungarian revolution. I saw someone on r/cth say trots came up with it but I'm too lazy to see if that's true. Nowadays it's used by liberals to refer to anyone left of Bernie Sanders, and by non-ML socialists to refer to MLs, and sometimes people call themselves that. Stalinist is a much more self explanatory insult, and Marxist-Leninist is the actual word for the ideology. Personally I think "tankie" a dumb word that should die out along with "anarkiddie" as a meaningless drama starter.
"Tankie" started as an insult for people who supported Khrushchev's military action in Hungary and the quelling of the Hungarian revolution. I saw someone on r/cth say trots came up with it but I'm too lazy to see if that's true. Nowadays it's used by liberals to refer to anyone left of Bernie Sanders, and by non-ML socialists to refer to MLs, and sometimes people call themselves that. Stalinist is a much more self explanatory insult, and Marxist-Leninist is the actual word for the ideology. Personally I think "tankie" a dumb word that should die out along with "anarkiddie" as a meaningless drama starter.
Tankie is being semi-reclaimed, though. Tanks are cool, so it doesn’t have an immediate knee jerk reaction like, say, Stalinist evokes.