Tankies are hardcore communists who believe Stalin was just a jolly guy and that rolling the tanks into streets to intimidate and kill opposition is always a good idea. Dig a little and you’ll find tankies are heavily authoritarian and curiously far right in some of their views.
Call it brown-red (Nazi and Communist) or NazBol or Strasserites (left flank of the Nazi Party that Hitler murdered), this has been going on for decades. The flag image here is for Otto Strasser’s Black Front Party in th 1930s. They Nazis, and were anti-capitalist, yes, however everything else was far right. And, their primary target for anti-capitalism was, wait for it, Jews. So surprising. Otto was purged and went into exile. His brother was murdered in the Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives.
Worker’s World and the Party of Socialism and LIberation are tankies, although they try to hide it. The Revolutionary Communist Party are Maoist, however, pretty much is the same thing. All hail genocide of the revionist Uighurs!
Tankie Prime Directive. Anyone who opposes the U.S. must be supported
Yes, they really are this Manichean. And any thug anywhere who badmouths the U.S. is automatically a hero.
Tankism as an ideology defined fundamentally by anti-Americanism. She describes a process by which people with some justifiable anger against America — due to its treatment of minorities or overseas military actions — slip into a deep and monomaniacal hatred in which America defines evil and anything that opposes America is defined as good. As she describes it, these people then cluster into a close-knit, highly paranoid, almost cult-like subculture.
Anarchists are now and always have been enemies of tankies
Remember, tankies are optimized for infighting. Anarchists are their chief rival for the mantle of revolutionary vanguard (and a far more credible bearer of that mantle, since anarchists actually fight in the streets while tankies’ idea of revolution is to plant a Chinese flag in front of a courthouse)
Tankies hurt the left, and this is probably by design
If you actually harbor far right ideas, then hurting the hard left is a good thing. I man, during all of Trump, these Marxist parties, WW, PSL, RCP, and others were mostly mute when it came to opposing Trump. What a very strange thing for a vanguard party to do.
U.S., tankies are primarily a threat to the newly emergent American left. Not only do they take up the left’s time and energy with constant infighting, but they give the entire left a bad image in the eyes of the general public. The average normie Twitter user probably only very dimly understands the difference between tankies and other leftists, and conservatives are happy to conflate the two.