Tankie is a left-punching scary military-sounding word used to try and denigrate supporters of actually existing socialist projects. It’s used by westerners who live in the imperial core and cannot accept that socialist countries subjected to immense pressure by dominating world capitalism have to resort to less-than-pleasant repressive methods against external interference. The people who use the word “tankies” won’t call US democrat-voters “dronies” despite their support to US drone-bombings during Democrat rule on the other side of the world, and they won’t call EU-socdems “colonialies” despite their support of neocolonialist murderous regimes. Evil sounding words are reserved to punch to the left, not to fight the system