People who promote authoritarian regimes such as Joseph Stalin’s USSR and Mao Zedong’s CCP.

It comes from describing people who sided with the Tanks in 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre where a reporter recorded a video of a tank flattening a protester who stood in their way, during nationwide unrest across China which resulted in millions of deaths as the CCP used military directly on its own citizens. It was recorded by journalists from all over the world and led to global sanctions against China from many many nations. It also coincided with roughly the fall of the USSR.

They’re a huge problem here on Lemmy because there are state funded campaigns with troll farms and bots actively promote chaos and destruction in nations that oppose modern day Russia, North Korea, Iran, and China. Their main choice of weapon is pretending to be promoters of communism, anarchism, and liberation of minorities standing against the evil corruption of capitalism, when in practice they don’t support communism or oppose capitalism by definition and those words just mean “their homeland” and “western government” respectively. They call NATO, the worlds largest defence pact and main deterrent from Chinese and Russian expansion, a form of “US Imperialism that oppresses others.”

Tankies want war. They don’t care about minorities or civil rights. They want us to harm ourselves and our nations so that their nation can become stronger.