I'm pretty good at picking things up from context, so I'm gonna say a tankie is someone opposed to the deployment of tanks against a captive civilian population, the police having tanks, and tanks' worth of tear gas being used on peaceful protestors?
(please don't reply with earnest answers to my question, thx)
EDIT - some of y'all are failing to follow this last instruction smdh
It refers to Karlin Tank a 20th century ballet dancer and political figure in the USSR who advocated for distributing free copies of his book "Hegelian Dialectics in the Ballet World of 1962" to the masses. In which he advocates for finding Alien life by any means necessary and forcing them to watch ballet until they reveal their technological secrets. BUT the word has really lost its meaning lately tbh...