I do know what a tankie is, and why one would be against them, but I have never encountered so many people using the word. It’s all over the place here. Why?
Lemmy was created by tankies, so people are rightly going to have things to say about them here.
I was in the same position. I looked into it a little bit and my TL;DR version is that tankies are people who in general are apologists for the Russian and Chinese governments using fascistic and dictatorial measures. I’m guessing that more broadly speaking this could apply to supporting any government that uses violence against its own people, but it usually comes up in the context of those two countries.
In addition to tankies being involved in Lemmy’s development, the fediverse contains more actual lefties than a lot of the internet, and that means 2 things: -more tankies simply because there are more of them in leftist spaces -more people using the word “tankie,” because leftists are more likely to be familiar with the term. Anyone on the right would call them “commies” instead.
