A tankie is a communist who at least defends and often advocates for forced submission to their rule, or more broadly defends the authoritarian regimes that engage in such. It dates back to the USSR sending in tanks to crush an uprising in Hungary in 1956, and was applied to the UK communists who argued in support of the USSR.

The owners of lemmy.ml are tankies.

Actually, I think it’s amusingly perfect that the tankies were hyperfocused on conjectural threats posed by capitalists and entirely missed the much more imminent threat posed by a government.