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
The classic explanation (at least how it ends up being used)...
The people in the picture are
Row 1: Neslon Mandela, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Assata Shakur, Angela Davis
Row 2: Huey P. Newton, Thomas Sankara, Amílcar Cabral, W. E. B. Du Bois
Row 3: Kwame Ture, Paul Robeson, Leila Khaled, Malcolm X, Yuri Kochiyama, Fred Hampton
I knew most of these figures from before, but there were a few where I knew the name but not the face, or the face but not the name, or had never heard of them at all.