What are tankies? (why are they like that?)

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As has been said, tankie originated to describe communists outside the USSR who condoned the forcible suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. Thus, "tankie", refers originally to a leftist who rationalizes or defends the atrocities of leftist regimes solely because they are leftist (or call themselves such). For me personally, a tankie is a leftist who has not yet had a "Kronstadt moment". Ie: a moment where you realize: "Maybe I should not mindlessly agree with everything a leftist regime does just because it is a leftist regime." For many this was the Hungarian Revolution. For others it was the Kronstadt Uprising, the Holodomor, the suppression of the Greens, the betrayal of the Blacks (the anarchists, not Africans), the prohibition of non-Bolshevik socialist and anarchist political parties, the Great Leap Forward, the development of cults of personality around communist party leaders, the crushing of the Prague Spring, or...anything Pol Pot did.
The term, like so many others, has been thrown around so much as to become almost meaningless. One person's tankie is another person's spineless, bootlicking capitalist apologist. It's like "fascist", but applied to leftists primarily by other leftists. Most anyone to the left of social democrats is prone to being labelled a tankie by someone or other.

ANNOYING LEFTIST HERE!

We, those billions upon billions of Human Beings, are NEVER going to get out of the very real existential threat that has been wrought upon all of Humanity by Capitalism, and the psychotic ghouls it rewards, for no other reason than to make profit for that tiny Class, if We continue to argue inane BS 24/7.

Better, We ALL need to come together, to LEARN THE TRUTH of this disastrous system, to wade through ALL THE LIES it produces to keep Us confused, divided, fooled, and made effectively impotent against its power over Us, to reach an effective mass movement. This includes countering any and all idiotic tendencies to argue for the very false notions propagated and perpetuated by the Capitalistic system. This includes arguing about stupid terms used by psyops to keep Us divided.

The system doesn't care about you, other than that you give it your life, in order to keep the system going. This MUST STOP, or We all will suffer fates that are far worse than anything that has come before.

That said, it annoys me to no end that y'all (some of you) are supposedly so "smart", yet none of you can see THE OBVIOUS TRUTH. You prove this time and time again. I wish you'd "get it' already.

Based on my understanding of the term the video gave an overly sympathetic explanation, likely aiming at other lefties to make them reconsider their views towards tankies.

As a political bloc it's hard to sympathize with people who support violently crushing attempts at reform from within in single party ML states. Those sorts of dictatorships already are disadvantaged when it comes to responding to popular pressure, instead of responding violently they should be coming up with means by which to address that pressure. Failure to do so ensures things reach boiling points at times, and just laying a whooping isn't actually a solution.

Personally, I would say the apologia for regimes like Putin comes from both a mixture of traditional left and authoritarian right blocs. You have people who's knee-jerk opposition to NATO pre-dates the end of the USSR (or was inherited from those sorts) and you have people who see traditionalist and authoritarian regimes as a preferable model to liberal democracy. There's a small overlap between those sorts, but mostly they're just united by hating liberals and hating NATO.