I’ve seen conservatives lob the word tankie around before like they do with other scary sounding political words. But not here on lemmy. “Tankie” has a very precise meaning on lemmy that everyone here seems to understand, despite a few tankies trying to gaslight people into thinking the term has “lost it’s meaning”.
In a nutshell, alternative-imperialists with a leftist bent. They’re hypocrites. “Imperialism is evil…with these exceptions, those empires are cool”.
It’s frustrating trying to talk with tankies, because really I agree with practically all of their criticisms of the US and a few criticisms of NATO and the West at large. But then that gets turned around into a justification for X formerly-socialist country drafting soldiers to invade sovereign country “Y” with practically unanimous resistance, and I just don’t see how the hell that’s supposed to help the working class of either state.