this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2026
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That sounds like a description of every troll. Tbh I keep hearing tankie thrown around, but I've never had the conversations people who complain about it have.
Tankie is a general term for someone who thinks there is a clear justification to use force or the threat of force to impose a socialist system on a state. The term originates with people who supported the USSR "Sending in the tanks" to annex other countries and crush dissent from people in their sphere. They are what people mean when they "If you go far enough left, you get your guns back." These days they tend to be a tiny minority within the rather small minority of actual leftists. They do exist, and some of them are pretty out there, but not the way the .ml crowd tends to characterize them. They're terrified of them, because in their heads the most terrifying thing in the world is a leftist that is willing to fight back, and they don't recognize anything that doesn't kill someone as "fighting."
Wait so .ml isn't a community of tankies? I've been on here for 6 months and I just assumed that .ml was tankie central based on how people talk.
No. Or at least that isn't what the term was coined as. They discover a new word and then reinterpret it as kind of a weird cosplay thing.
Wait so are you mad at tankies or .ml? Or both?
I learned a long time ago there's no point in being mad at people on the internet. If I'm going to have a beer with someone, I'd probably choose the tankies. They're way less likely to call for the genocide of my family, my nation and torture and murder of people who think like me, but hey, do your thing.