Anticommunism always had and still has racist, frequently antisemitic and strongly national-chauvinist undertones. As the vast majority of AES states are and have been countries of the global south using communism as an emancipatory program, this is simply inevitable. Racism is inherent to a rejection of the gloabl south's struggle for independence. It rests on the assumption that "these people" morally deserve to be ruled over by the imperial core, which is a deeply racist assumption. Even when you hear west germans talk about east germans and the DDR, there is a form of exoticising and othering that would undoubtedly have to be called racist if it wasn't white people portraying other white people of the literal same ethnicity as "underdeveloped", pauperized savages. AES states are universally imagined as backwards, failing and inept, not through the isolated, besieged position in geopolitics that is the price you pay for being a communist nation, but as an intrinsic quality of their communist nature, in short: they are seen as inherently inferior. Hierarchizising countries as superior and inferior based largely on vibes is absolutely racist as fuck.

So yes, i would agree that tankie often has racist undertones, just look at how V*ushites and other liberal anticommunists treat Hakim or Luna Oi. It's racism in full swing when a white amerikan liberal jokes about droning the home country of an Iraqi he's debating right after the US has murdered a million people in Iraq. It's racism in full swing when the advances Vietnam made for its citizens are mocked by terminally online amerikan pseudo-leftists whose parents' generation carried out a literal genocidal war against the Vietnamese that cost at least a million vietnamese lives and inflicts damage on the country and the people until this day due to aftereffects of chemical warfare. It is incredibly racist how the west talks about the PRC and DPRK, it is racist how it talks about communist liberation movements in Africa and LatAm, it has also always been racist and antisemitic how the bolsheviks were portrayed.

Reminding us of the trope of"oriental despotism" is an apt and exact comparison, another racist trope relevant in this context would be the "asiatic horde" or the "scheming jew". These are the narratives at play here.

And yes, i'm aware that the white college kid stereotype exists about western communists, but this completely ignores how many communists in western countries are from marginalized communities. This is on purpose: Admitting the liberatory, emancipatory nature of communism even at home violates the discursive hegemony liberalism claims. Theyhave to pretend that communism in western countries is the domain of middle-aged white cishet dudes in tweet jackets and their younger stoner selfs so they can pretend to be the sole advocates for the rights of the marginalized. This mayowashing of communism is part of their cynical ploy to present themselves as the sole advocates for our rights as marginalized people, to browbeat us into supporting the half-assed, insubstantial, uncommitted attempts at securing our civil rights that we may or may not enjoy when libs have won the latest election. So i would argue that the term even may be racist when it is used against an audience imagined to be white cishet dudes.

tl;dr: It's my new hill to die on that every liberal using the word tankie as a slur is a white supremacist amtisemitic transphobic sexpest and i'm asking you to all join me in this struggle.