this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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"Tankie" does not come from Tiananmen Square, that is a common misconception. The term "tankie" is 33 years older than the Tiananmen Square massacre.
It originated to describe people who supported the 1956 Soviet Union military intervention in Hungary. Stalin sent in a bunch of T-35 tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution. He was successful, and thousands of people died in the process.
Ever since then, "tankie" has been used as a derogatory term against Stalinists, Marxist-Leninists, communists, and leftists in general.
I don't think it is a common misconception, I think it's pretty common knowledge (at least among the terminally online) that it started with the Hungarian Revolution.
The term mostly had been invoked by anti-authoritarian leftists derisively toward anyone who still supported the Soviet Union. In time, the usage generalized to apply broadly to authoritarian leftists, such as Marxist-Lenininsts (or Stalinists).
Now is it largely misused by liberals to designate anyone strongly critical of Western imperialism, which includes everyone from anarchists to campists.
To be fair, tanks seem to be a favored tool of these oppressive regimes. I'm personally not against communism, they have some good ideas like universal child care, guaranteed jobs, and housing (even though the latter may be considered sub-par by some). The problem comes when these fucking authoritarian cheerleaders come out and say communist governments were never oppressive.
Tankies never seem to get that that part is not being critized, but the subversive of the movement by authoritarians.
Except you'd not get that healthcare and the rest if you didn't pay people off.
In theory it might seem fine, but in reality it was just a dictatorship, and quite a brutal one too.
eh docs and nurses are pretty fucking cool but don't work for free. of course you're going to pay people off, they need wages ffs
Communism = no currency. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of knowledge regarding communism in here. A bit of an echo chamber. It's funny how so many can hate something so much without actually knowing what it is they're hating. Ha.
Extremists like to use "alternative facts" or whatever other tactics achieve their goals. The means does not matter to them, only the ends, which they feel self-righteously justifies anything to achieve.
And then separately from that, gullible people also exist too. It is a bias that we all could fall prey to, though some of us seem more on guard against it than others.
(Tbf, many of those claiming those alternative facts are quite aware of just how nonfactual they actually are - they simply do not care as power, rather than correctness, is all that there is to them.)
Thats a really interesting bit of history, thank you for the additional context
Their name references a genocide, I doubt in good faith
Krono? Or are you referring to someone else in this thread?
No, the one with Tatar in their name defending the USSR. The Crimean Tatars were one of the genocides carried out by that nation
Ohhh. I think you may have gotten confused about where you're replying to. I hadn't even seen them, as they weren't in the direct chain of comments I was replying in. I was thanking Krono for explaining that tankie came from violence carried out in the Soviet Union long before the tianamen square massacre, and so the name predated that particular act of violence
Anyway, I hope you have a lovely day :)
Thank you.