The Democratic People's Republic of Tankiejerk

The origins of the word comes from Marxist Leninist's (ML's) describing other ML's who supported the Soviet Union's invasion of Hungary in 7th of November 1956 with USSR troops and tanks. It describes a certain tendency as you may see. Similar incidents include the invasion of Czechoslovakia 20th of August 1968 and East Germany 17th of June 1953.

Basically, Tankies are authoritarian ~~bootlickers~~ "communists" pretending not to be who routinely deny the human rights violations of the CCP/Russia and hold them up as the gold standard. They refuse to recognize China, Russia and even NK as being authortarian regimes or if they do, its OK/Neccessary because it takes down the west/capitalism. If you have a historical fact that puts any of those countries in a bad light, they'll probably deny it happend or is just "western propganda."

So they believe and spread things like the Russia narratives on Ukraine (When it happened they were parroting the whole "special military operation" thing, the current thing is that it was "just a diplomatic maneuver to bring Ukraine to the negotiating table")

Hex and Grad are very in your face about it, but .ml tends to be more subtle, often opting instead to remove dissenting comments and ban users before letting threads get out of control. So, as a result many instances defed from those 2.

.ml is run by the head Lemmy devs who are, unfortunately, Tankies themselves and tend to enforce the Tankie mindset throughout with more subtlety through mod/admin action. Because of that, and a lot of the lemmy support forums being on .ml, they tend to get handled with “kid gloves” more or less by most instances.

You can check out [email protected] if you want to see some documentation