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Title: Always Against The Tanks
Author: Various Authors
Date: November 22, 2019
Language: en
Topics: anti-Bolshevism, Authoritarian Left, anti-authoritarianism
Source: Retrieved on 30th October 2020 from https://www.sproutdistro.com/2019/11/22/new-zine-always-against-the-tanks

Various Authors

Always Against The Tanks

Introduction

This zine was compiled with the goal of making accessible a critique of

“tankism,” a reactionary ideological position that seems to be trending

on the Left. Much like the alt-right, which in 2015 appeared to be an

internet phenomenon with little potential to gain a foothold in the

streets, tankies have fared well in the era of ascendant nationalisms.

In North America they are making the jump from Twitter to our offline

communities.

Those of us who believe in a world of radically expanded freedom and

theend of domination must contend with the zombified corpse of the

20^(th) Century’s authoritarian Left.

In “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Tankies, But Were Afraid to

Ask,” Mike Harman uncovers the history of the term “tankie” and its

relationship to various strains of Marxism-Leninism. Then “Ending the

Idealization of the Other” draws on Su-lin Yu’s critique of Orientalism

to explain why some queer people of color in North America support

repression when it is committed by “socialist states.” Finally, in “Is

Genocide Denial Anti-Imperialist Now?” Darya Rustamova confronts the

fetishization of the USSR while expounding on the harm caused by those

denying or minimizing genocide and war crimes.

Everything you ever wanted to know about tankies, but were afraid to

ask

By Mike Harman, @libcomorg

March 8^(th), 2018

What does tankie mean?

On October 27^(th) 1956, Peter Fryer, a member of the Communist Party of

Great Britain, and correspondent for its paper the Weekly Worker,

arrived in Hungary. This was four days into an uprising of workers

calling for worker controlled socialism. Factories had been taken over

nationally by workers councils, in a demonstration of workers

self-organisation that was unprecedented at the time, and the first

strike on its scale in an Eastern-bloc country. On the 4^(th) of

November, Russian T54 tanks rolled into Budapest to suppress the

uprising. Street fighting continued until the 10^(th) November, although

the workers councils held out for two months.

Fryer returned to the UK horrified by the Soviet repression he had seen,

but his attempt to write about it for the Daily Worker was suppressed —

the editors were sticking to the official USSR line that the entire

uprising was a fascist counter-revolutionary plot and refused to publish

anything contradicting that narrative. When Fryer wrote up his

experiences anyway, he was expelled from the CPGB. Hungary 1956 split

Communist parties across the world; many who had supported the USSR up

until this point became disillusioned and split or left individually,

while those who stayed loyal to the USSR earned the epithet ‘tankies’.

After 1956, the USSR was to invade Czechoslovakia in 1968, then

Afghanistan in 1979.

Are all Tankies Marxist-Leninists?

While the original ‘tankie’ epithet grew out of the split in the

Communist Party of Great Britain, the geo-political ‘anti-imperialist’

support for the USSR and any state aligned against the USA has also been

popular with some Trotskyist groups.

In the 1980s it was revealed that the Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary

Party (famous for the involvement of actress Vanessa Redgrave) had been

receiving funding from Libyan intelligence services and passing details

of Iraqi dissidents in the UK to Saddam Hussein.

In the USA, the Workers World Party and Party for Socialism and

Liberation both originated in a split from the Trotskyist Socialist

Workers Party under Sam Marcy. Marcy split from the SWP over the

position it took on Hungary ’56, although somewhat bizarrely, also

accused those who supported the uprising of being Stalinists. Both

parties describe themselves as Marxist-Leninist now, and no longer cite

Trotsky, but their origination was in the Trotskyist theory of the USSR

as a ‘deformed workers state.

So support for crushing of workers movements is shared by both some

Marxist-Leninists and some Trotskyists, one explanation for this is that

the actual politics of Stalin and Trotsky were not very different.

Are all Marxist-Leninists tankies?

The significance of Hungary was not only the uprising itself, but that

it occurred in an Eastern Bloc country which was claiming to be

socialist. This caused an existential crisis for any communist that

still considered the USSR to be a workers’ state. Along with

Khrushchev’s speech to the 20^(th) Congress of the Communist Party of

the Soviet Union in February 1956, exposing and denouncing many of the

actions of Stalin.

It was at the same time that Mao began to gradually distance China from

the USSR. Maoism had already become a distinct current but without any

formal break, which was precipitated by Khruschev’s speech and the

international reaction to it. Both China and the USSR claimed to be the

vanguard of Marxist-Leninism from this point onwards (from here sprang a

million accusations of ‘revisionism’). This was mostly due to the

national interests of the two countries, and internal contradictions in

China but was expressed politically as a split with Khrushchev.

The split between China and the USSR, between Maoism and Stalinism, had

repercussions elsewhere, such as the multiple splits in the Communist

Party of India in the mid-1960s, most often associated with the the

Naxalite rebellion, or when the two countries supported opposite sides

in Angola’s civil war in the 1970s.

Tanks rolled into Tiananmen square in 1989, and those who supported the

Chinese government against workers and students have sometimes been

labelled ‘tankies’ too.

This means that ‘Marxist Leninist’ in the 1960s could include those

still aligned with the USSR, those who had been aligned with the USSR

but had split after 1956, those influenced by Maoism

(Marxism-Leninism-Maoism was coined later in the ‘90s) and even more

confusingly, some Trotskyists would occasionally call themselves

Marxist-Leninist too (because they were Leninist Marxists!).

Are all Leninist Marxists Marxist-Leninists?

There have been other historical currents that were influenced by Lenin,

including Trotskyism, the Italian branch of Left Communism, and the

Operaismo (workerist) tradition in 1960s and 1970s Italy, as well as

major figures like CLR James (early on a Trotskyist and leading

Pan-Africanist, later moving towards a council communist position).

There are huge differences between these currents, as wide as the

differences between ‘anarchists’ and ‘marxists’. In terms of a

relationship to Lenin we can identity some questions which most of these

currents and others have had to answer:

— whether Lenin’s work contains unique insights relative to other

Marxists at the time

— whether Lenin was correct that Russia would have to pass through a

capitalist stage prior to communism and that the task of the Bolshevik

party was to raise the forces of production prior to a transition to

communism.

— whether the conditions of Russia in 1917 apply to the US in 1960, or

to anywhere in the world in 2018.

— whether the USSR was still revolutionary after 1921, 1927, 1956, or

1981.

The answers to these questions led Marxists like CLR James to abandon

‘Leninism’ almost entirely, whilst still retaining an admiration of

Lenin the thinker and historical figure.

Were the Black Panthers tankies?

Some Black Panthers, such as Fred Hampton, described themselves as

Marxist-Leninist, but were more influenced by the writings of Lenin and

Mao (and the context of Vietnamese resistance to US invasion and African

liberation struggles) than the internal or foreign policy of the the

USSR. Huey Newton in 1970 introduced the idea of Revolutionary

Intercommunalism, a clarification of his ideas which firmly rejected

‘socialism in one country’.

In 1966 we called our Party a Black Nationalist Party. We called

ourselves Black Nationalists because we thought that nationhood was the

answer. Shortly after that we decided that what was really needed was

revolutionary nationalism, that is, nationalism plus socialism. After

analyzing conditions a little more, we found that it was impractical and

even contradictory. Therefore, we went to a higher level of

consciousness. We saw that in order to be free we had to crush the

ruling circle and therefore we had to unite with the peoples of the

world. So we called ourselves Internationalists. We sought solidarity

with the peoples of the world. We sought solidarity with what we thought

were the nations of the world. But then what happened? We found that

because everything is in a constant state of transformation, because of

the development of technology, because of the development of the mass

media, because of the fire power of the imperialist, and because of the

fact that the United States is no longer a nation but an empire, nations

could not exist, for they did not have the criteria for nationhood.

Their self‐ determination, economic determination, and cultural

determination has been transformed by the imperialists and the ruling

circle. They were no longer nations. We found that in order to be

Internationalists we had to be also Nationalists, or at least

acknowledge nationhood. Internationalism, if I understand the word,

means the interrelationship among a group of nations. But since no

nation exists, and since the United States is in fact an empire, it is

impossible for us to be Internationalists.

These transformations and phenomena require us to call ourselves

“intercommunalists” because nations have been transformed into

communities of the world.

[...]

I don’t see how we can talk about socialism when the problem is world

distribution. I think this is what Marx meant when he talked about the

non‐state.

Former Black Panthers such as Russell Maroon Shoatz and Lorenzo Kom’boa

Ervin, both of whom have spent years in prison for their association

with the BPP, have broken with Marxist-Leninism after seeing how the

Leninist structure of the Black Panther Party made it vulnerable to the

FBI’s COINTELPRO programme, and by examining the trajectory of Leninist

revolutions.

So the BPP wasn’t a monolithic entity politically, and the individual

politics of its members as well as the orientation of the party itself

changed over time. Rather than claiming it was any one thing, we can

read what Black Panther Party members actually wrote in their own right.

And the League of Revolutionary Black Workers?

The League of Revolutionary Black Workers, based in Detroit, described

themselves as Marxist-Leninist, but they had close relationships with

associates of CLR James such as Martin Glaberman, Grace Boggs, and James

Boggs who had broken with Leninism more than a decade earlier, while

also being influenced by Fanon and others. Once again the politics are a

bit more complex than the labels.

What about anti-imperialism?

Anti-imperialism means different things to different people.

Fundamentally, to be against imperialism should mean support for working

class struggles against colonialism, and opposition to capitalist war.

Unfortunately ‘anti-imperialism’ has often morphed into simply taking

the side of the USSR in geo-political conflicts, and post-1990,

unconditional support to the ruling class in any country aligned against

the US.

Lenin in 1914 wrote in The Right of Nations to Self-Determination that

communists should support the right of nations to secede, but not the

specifics of any particular national struggle. This is because Lenin saw

nationalist movements as essential to the development of capitalism over

feudalism, as a step on the way towards communism:

Throughout the world, the period of the final victory of capitalism over

feudalism has been linked up with national movements. For the complete

victory of commodity production, the bourgeoisie must capture the home

market, and there must be politically united territories whose

population speak a single language, with all obstacles to the

development of that language and to its consolidation in literature

eliminated.

Even within this statist framework, Lenin still ultimately stated that

the class struggle should take absolute precedence over the nationalist

movement:

The bourgeoisie always places its national demands in the forefront, and

does so in categorical fashion. With the proletariat, however, these

demands are subordinated to the interests of the class struggle. [...]

the important thing for the proletariat is to ensure the development of

its class. For the bourgeoisie it is important to hamper this

development by pushing the aims of its “own” nation before those of the

proletariat. That is why the proletariat confines itself, so to speak,

to the negative demand for recognition of the right to

self-determination, without giving guarantees to any nation, and without

undertaking to give anything at the expense of another nation.

Additionally, while American imperialism in 1916 was not at the level it

is now, he also rejected the hypocrisy of simply playing off one

imperialism against another, in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of

Capitalism

Let us suppose that a Japanese condemns the annexation of the

Philippines by the Americans. The question is: will many believe that he

does so because he has a horror of annexations as such, and not because

he himself has a desire to annex the Philippines? And shall we not be

constrained to admit that the “fight” the Japanese is waging against

annexations can be regarded as being sincere and politically honest only

if he fights against the annexation of Korea by Japan, and urges freedom

for Korea to secede from Japan?

In War and Revolution Lenin wrote:

Nothing but a workers’ revolution in several countries can defeat this

war. The war is not a game, it is an appalling thing taking toll of

millions of lives, and it is not to be ended easily.

Lenin therefore saw anti-imperialist struggle as being in the realm of

bourgeois national revolutions (something to ‘critically support’ but

subordinated to the class struggle), dismissing inter-imperialist

conflicts with the slogan “Turn the imperialist war into civil war”.

Didn’t the USSR support African national liberation?

Sometimes, but only when it supported the USSR’s own geopolitical

interests. CLR James described his conversation with George Padmore, who

had joined the Communist Party and moved to the USSR in 1929, before

leaving in 1934 due to the purges and a change in orientation:

But one day, sometime in late 1934 or 1935 there was a knock at my door

and I went do the door and there was George Padmore. [...] He said,

“I’ve left those people you know.” And that was the biggest shock I

received since I had gone to Brazil three years before. “I have left

those people” meant he had left the Communist Party. And he was the

biggest black man in Moscow, dealing with black people and the colonial

revolution. So I said, “What happened?” And he told me. He said, “They

are changing the line and now they tell me that in future we are going

to be soft and not attack strongly the democratic imperialists which are

Britain, France and the United States. That the main attack is to be

directed upon the Fascist imperialists, Italy, Germany and Japan. And

George, we would like you to do this in the propaganda that you are

doing and in the articles that you are writing and the paper you are

publishing, to follow that line.” And George said, “That is impossible.

Germany and Japan have no colonies in Africa. How am I to say the

democratic imperialists, such as the United States is the most race

ridden territory in the western world. So I am to say that Britain and

France who have the colonies in Africa and the United States, can be

democratic imperialists and be soft to them but be strong against Japan,

Italy and Germany. That is impossible. What do you think of that?”

Isn’t criticising the USSR anti-communist?

There is a tendency by everyone from conservatives, to liberals, to

social democrats to criticise the ‘crimes of communism’ and ignore the

actions of capitalist countries. This is complete shite and we reject it

completely.

While there were famines and bread riots in the USSR in the 1930s,

British policy caused the Bengal famine killing 3 million people in

1943.

While the USSR and China have imprisoned political dissidents, including

many communists and anarchists, the USA has the highest incarceration

rate in the world, with some political prisoners held in solitary

confinement for decades and 1,000 extra-judicial killings by police per

year.

While Lenin deported dissident Bolsheviks like Miasnikov and presided

over the crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion, social democrats in

Germany oversaw the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknicht

in collaboration with the fascist Freikorps.

While the USSR had ‘gulags’, Britain put hundreds of thousands of

Kenyans and Malayans into concentration camps in the 1950s, and there

were forced-labour camps in the UK itself in the 1930s under Labour.

While the US healthcare system leaves people without medical care and

destitute, Cuba despite economic sanctions has socialised healthcare and

trains healthcare workers for other countries.

Liberal myopia sees a horseshoe where liberal democracy is ‘reasonable’

and fascism and communism are two poles of ‘authoritarianism’. A

libertarian communist critique asserts that communism is impossible

within the framework of the nation state, and that all states, whether

fascist, liberal democratic or socialist will suppress workers

self-organisation in the interest of capital.

What about Syria, Iran, North Korea?

A central line of communist and anarchist thought and praxis has been

internationalism, and an opposition to war in all its forms. This caused

the split in the Second International in 1914 when German Social

Democrats voted for war credits. However putting this into practice has

turns out to be a lot more complicated.

With the war in Syria, opposition to US intervention, shared by all

communists (though not necessarily social democrats), has been marred by

support from some organisations for the Syrian government and Bashar

Assad and Russia despite the of bombing civilians, on the basis that

areas such as Eastern Ghouta are held by Islamist militias and that the

400,000 civilians trapped there are being used as ‘human shields’.

This is further complicated by Rojava, supported by both some Marxist

Leninists and some anarchists, due to the Marxist-Leninist orientation

of the PKK, the Libertarian Municipalist ideas recently adopted by the

PKK’s leader Ocalan, the TEV-DEM system of administrative councils, and

the right to national self-determination of the Kurds. On the other

hand, both some Marxist Leninists and some anarchist and anti-state

Marxists have been fiercely critical of Rojava, due to collaboration

militarily with the US against ISIS (and most recently with Assad

against Turkey). On libcom.org we’ve continued to allow publishing of

texts both critical and supportive of Rojava, and regularly get attacked

for being NATO shills for both, whether it’s the US against Assad or

Turkey against Rojava.

With Iran, despite the religious nature of the regime and the fact that

all communist parties are banned, when strikes and street protests broke

out at the end of December 2017, there was an immediate reluctance to

recognise the grassroots nature of the actions, due to the possibility

that the US might use the protests as an excuse for ‘regime change’.

Some commentators went as far as to suggest the protests had been almost

immediately hijacked by the CIA, Mossad, or Saudi Arabia.

The cases of Iran and Assad show that in these discussions, the internal

contradictions of a country can be completely ignored, with the central

question always being “is the country aligned against the US or not?” —

on the one hand celebrating Assad’s attacks against Islamists, on the

other celebrating Iran’s religious state against the Haft-Tappeh sugar

workers or leftist students.

Our position is that regardless of the actions of the Iranian or Syrian

state, we completely oppose foreign intervention, whether US, Russia, or

Turkey, on the base that foreign intervention always makes things worse.

But to oppose intervention does not require a denial of the internal

contradictions of those states or the reality of working class

resistance to them.

The same applies to North Korea — we reject under any circumstances US

intervention in North Korea, hawks in the US talking about a nuclear

weapons programme gloss over the US bombing Japan twice in 1945, let

alone the use of depleted uranium shells against civilian areas in Iraq.

But to reject sanctions and intervention can rely on a principled

anti-militarism and internationalism, solidarity with the North Korean

working class, not with Kim Jong Un personally. As we would support the

Gwangju uprising in South Korea in 1980, we would support workers

struggle in North Korea too.

But Communist parties are very successful in India/Japan?

While the CPI-M likes to hold huge rallies with hammer and sickle flags,

it’s policies are social democratic. It runs for elections, and where it

wins pursues pro-business policies. In Kerala the new communist

administration under Pinarayi Vijayan stressed partnership between

management and trade unions and promised investment to stimulate

industry, including ‘Silicon Valley-like hubs’. Not quite seizing the

means of production, then.

The Japanese Communist Party, with several members in the Japanese

parliament (Diet) abandoned Leninism 25 years ago, deciding to pursue a

purely electoral road to socialism, and has recently attempted to work

with centrist liberal MPs.

They might be popular Communist Parties, but they aren’t... communist..

at all.

What about American Marxist Leninists, are they social democrats

too?

The Marcyite Party for Socialism and Liberation’s program also sounds

suspiciously social democrat if you actually read it, for example:

It will be a right of every person in the United States to have a job

with guaranteed union representation and full social benefits provided

by the socialist government, including a pension, health care, workers’

compensation, paid parental and family leave for up to two years, paid

sick and disability leave, a minimum of one month’s paid vacation, and

at least 12 paid holidays.

Isn’t this... Sweden?

Working conditions will aim to enhance the humanity and dignity of all

workers. The working week will be 30 hours.

That’s ten hours less than Bernie’s offering, but not quite the

abolition of wage labour.

However the PSL is just one party, and you will also see Marxist

Leninists oppose electoral activity, working on prisoner solidarity etc.

The important thing is to actually read what people say they want, and

observe what they do, not just listen to what they say about themselves

or check whether there’s a hammer and sickle or a rose printed next to

the promise of full employment — these aren’t the things that decide

whether someone is communist or not.

Liberals just call anyone they don’t like a tankie!

This is often true. There has been regular red-baiting of mild social

democrat Jeremy Corbyn, recently accusing him of being a spy for East

Germany in the ‘80s. The right wing of the Democrats at one point was

calling any Bernie Sanders supporter a Russian-influenced alt-leftist.

William Gillis of the Center for a Stateless Society recently said of us

‘Remember when libcom was about as tankie and class-reductionist as you

would ever encounter in the radical left, and we all viewed them as evil

suspicious bastards because they wouldn’t all outright id as anarchists?

‘ presumably due to our hosting and promotion of anti-state and

post-Leninist Marxists.

Therefore if someone is using ‘tankie’, they may be objecting to a

specific leftist ideology that prioritisies geopolitics over class

struggle, or they might just be punching left. When liberals have a go

at ‘communism’ they often mean the Soviet Union (and let’s be honest

sometimes it’s tempting to tell people they’ll be first in the gulags

after the revolution when they do this, especially if it’s fucking

Jordan Peterson).

Should I work with Marxist-Leninists?

If you’re organising at work or around housing issues, the people you

work with are not going to all have the same politics at you, and your

opinions on the July 1918 uprising of Left Socialist Revolutionaries

after their expulsion from the Bolshevik government are not relevant to

that situation. Yes, really, no-one gives a shit. You’re relating to

each other as workers in that situation, not as representatives of a

political niche, at least we hope not.

Anarchists and Marxist-Leninists have also worked together as members of

anti-fascist collectives in the US and elsewhere, and this is really a

choice for people to make locally.

Things you should bear in mind when organising are —

However co-operation with individuals is very different from a

left-unity project, coalitions of organisations etc. The questions to

consider when a group is organised in for example an anti-war protest is

are they going to try to divert a protest into an ineffectual rally, or

co-operate with the police if protesters try to step outside strict

limits of activity. Similarly with workplace organising, do co-workers

have links with the union hierarchy or management? Approaches to this

differ from organisation to organisation and is not strictly linked to

ideology.

If there are real political and organisational disagreements, it’s

better to be open about them than gloss over them, and retain some

independence.

Ending the Idealization of the Other: Notes on the Queer POC Tankie

Uncredited

August 30^(th), 2019

Our fascination with the native, the oppressed, the savage, all such

figures masks a desire to hold onto an unchanging certainty somewhere

outside our own ‘fake’ experience. It is a desire for being ‘non-duped,’

which is a not-too-innocent desire to seize control. — Rey Chow, Writing

Diaspora

1. So what is a tankie?

Tankism: the uncritical, unwavering support for any state aligned

against the US, typically imperialist, anti-worker (former)

authoritarian socialist states.

What more can be said about the tankie that hasn’t already been said?

Darya Rustamova’s recent essay dismantles tankism thoroughly enough to

be the final word on the recent resurgence of this disturbing,

ahistorical school of thought. You’ll also want to read Mike Harman’s

incredibly thorough explainer on the origins of modern tankism too. Yet,

if there is a shortcoming in Rustamova’s essay, it would be that she

aims squarely at that dude we all know, the white, mansplaining, cishet

socialist bro. I don’t doubt these men make up a large part of the

tankie left in London, or anywhere else in the West for that matter,

since men are by and large the worst misogynists and purveyors of

heteropatriarchal power in socialist circles. This takes place under the

guise of a focus on “class struggle” over what is derisively called the

distraction of idpol, or identity politics. But, as many of us online

know, there’s a significant population of tankies who also identify as

queer, trans, nonbinary, and so on. Many of them are also people of

color.

2. Post-9/11, queer liberalism as forerunner

This is not altogether unprecedented. As Jasbir Puar argues in

developing her concept of “homonationalism,” the synchronicity between

the racism of “well-meaning” Western gays and lesbians and the racism of

nation-state imperialist militarism was thrown into full relief in

post-9/11 America, as the LGBT contingent that fixated on the supposed

homophobia of the Iranian regime were also the same people that opposed

the possible US invasion of Iran. Yet it was exactly the separate uptake

of Islamophobic ideology by these LGBT activists and government war

hawks that allowed the two purposes to dovetail.

The late 90s saw the general shift of the “homosexual” from association

with death (the AIDS epidemic) toward reproductive futurity (marriage

and families). This folding into life, Puar notes, signals the use of

queerness as a lens for the “production, disciplining, and maintenance”

of racialized populations, particularly against “Muslim, Arab, Sikh, and

South Asian sexualities.” While Puar’s critique is an accurate

indictment of mainstream LGBT liberalism in the early aughts, something

has changed since then as America’s so-called “Forever Wars” have

dragged on into the 2010s, the obvious object of criticism, the queer

liberal, has given way in the last decade to something quite new: the

radical queer tankie.

3. Something new

“To attribute difference to the other... even to adore or idealize that

difference, is not at all the same as to respect the other subject as an

equal, as an equivalent center of being.” — Jessica Benjamin, Like

Subjects, Love Objects

Queer tankie profiles online usually feature the same characteristics:

they highlight not just their gender pronouns and radical queer/trans

identities online but combine it with fluency in ML/MLM

(Marxist-Leninist/Maoist)dicta (distilled into a hammer and sickle

emoji). Often times quite open about their academic training, these

queer tankies spout the right talking points about the globe-spanning,

inescapable tentacles of US imperialism.While it should be clear that

the dismissal of “idpol” is simply a retrenchment of patriarchy under a

revolutionary guise, it seems it is less clear to tankies (especially in

an Anglo-US context) that the subsumption of global revolutions under

the political mapping of US politics is simply a retrenchment of

imperialism under the guise of left internationalism.

Thus, at its core, the logic of the contemporary tankie (as with the

logic of empire) must be understood through the question of “the Other.”

Uncritical defenders of “socialist states,” by idealizing them so

thoroughly as a desired and perfect object, in fact, detach the people,

the country, and its material conditions (the context of real people’s

lives) and reinsert it into their own fantasies, a psychic frame of

reference. But for what purpose?

“Identification is neither a historically universal concept nor a

politically innocent one. Identification is an imperial process, a form

of violent appropriation in which the Other is deposed and assimilated

into the lordly domain of Self.” — Diana Fuss, Interior Colonies: Frantz

Fanon and the Politics of Identification

As many theorists of Orientalism and psychoanalysis argue, the imperial

“I” must construct the other in order to construct the self. This is the

basis of the liberal Individual as well as the psychic foundation for

other acts of border creation, be it on a national, community, or group

scale. So how could this have happened? How could people with high

access to academic training that also embody marginalized identity

categories come to the point where they idealize the subjection of the

Other? The answer lies in the academy itself.

4. The Imperial Academy

Much ink has been spilled on the US academy’s origins as both the “arts

and sciences” arm of the American anti-Communist effort in Cold War

knowledge production and technological advancement. The core of this

project was the formation of a fundamentally American epistemology that

carved the world into bi-polar ideological empires, everything from

culture,society, and politics, fell into these two separate camps. Thus,

tankies, in distilling their understanding of post-1991 geopolitics down

to US EMPIRE vs. EVERYONE ELSE actually operate upon this foundation of

liberal imperialism that they so putatively decry.

Despite their fervent use of (dank) Soviet symbology, these unrelenting

critics of the ahistorical agent called “Empire,” thus take as

foundational the imperialist knowledge production of the academy, which

(irony of ironies) operated, if not as a literal arm of Cold War

military production, then certainly as an institution in sync with the

aims and demands of the US Information Service (the US cultural

propaganda arm) and the CIA. The academy, perhaps, has been the CIA’s

greatest psy-op.

5. About Socialist People

It is impossible for me to go any further in such a psychological

hypothesis without projecting onto it the Western vision — Julia

Kristeva, About Chinese Women

Julia Kristeva’s (in)famous Orientalist tract on “Chinese women” has

been thoroughly criticized for its cavalier, Eurocentric, and almost

complete misunderstanding of modern Chinese society and women’s place

within it.And though Kristeva is wonderfully ignorant in many ways of

her positionality as a European woman drawing anthropological

conclusions about complex societies absent any real ethnographic method,

to her credit,her text often erupts with moments of anxiety, in which

she recognizes the Orientalist analysis that she cannot help but

perpetuate.

Critically, in one infamous passage, Kristeva looks at a group of

Chinese women and tries to see herself in them, thinking wistfully that

she “recognized [her] own pioneer komsomol childhood in the little red

guards,and [that she owes her] cheekbones to some Asian ancestor.” As a

Bulgarian,she was a foreigner in France. This identification with the

position of outsider in a French context, Jane Gallop argues, allows

Kristeva to attempt to see herself as the same as Chinese women, for her

the absolute Other. Gallop concludes, that this attempt at

identification shows that Kristeva believes “she alone might be able to

bridge the abyss of otherness, to contact and report the heterogeneous,”

and that About Chinese Women is “a book precisely about the dangers of

using oneself as a measure for the other.”

So while tankies either impose an ahistorical homogeneity on China in

order to idealize it (or idealistically take CCP policy documents as a

representation of reality), they similarly impose homogeneity on Hong

Kong in order to demonize it. Unlike Kristeva, who articulates the

futility of representing the other (despite still going ahead and doing

so), this presents a unique situation wherein the US-centrism and

unconscious identificatory impulse is so strong as to have deluded

itself into thinking it has refused this imperial subject constitution.

The tankie psychology has carved up and constituted fantasy

identifications for both China and HK, disconnected almost entirely from

material reality — effectively playing a game of Risk with sites and

populations that are filled with material and historical contradiction.

As an astute comrade recently observed to me, American tankies project

US race relations as if that itself is a form of geopolitical analysis.

This is classical discursive colonialism. So intent are these critics on

mapping US political concerns, histories, and actors onto non-US sites

of struggle, that it becomes exceedingly clear — almost blindingly

obvious à la Orientalism — that the projection diagnoses the subject

themselves (tankie), not the object (China/HK).

Borrowing from Saidiya Hartman’s famous argument against white

abolitionist empathy in Scenes of Subjection, we can see that the

tankie, in fact, by “em/sympathizing” so strongly with the “Socialist

Other,” recenters the self and with their good intention actually

renders the other fungible,that is abstract. Like the white abolitionist

who reinstantiates the relations of chattel slavery through his empathic

identification with the enslaved African,the tankie reinstantiates the

relations of US imperialism (the desire to map,to see, to describe)

rather than engaging in truthful grappling or honest representation of

the other as complex, flawed, contradictory or otherwise.

The illusion is so complete because tankies often correctly cite

historical instances of US imperialist destabilization but the

anticipatory, paranoid reading of “AMERICA” into every instance of

struggle and resistance abroad shows how oftentimes the academic

critique, disconnected from material struggle, or even more simply, the

lived experience of non-US people,reduces everything outside to

something possessable and understandable on the inside. This subjugation

of the world under the rubric of American analysis is hegemonic,

colonial behavior.

6. But why queer? Why POC?

“Often, in an attempt to show ‘the ways things really are’ in the

non-West, our discourses produce a non-West that is deprived of fantasy,

desires, and contradictory emotions. When it is not the site of warfare

and bloodshed, when it is not what compels humanistic sympathies and

charities, the non-West commands solemn, humorless reverence as he Other

that we cannot hope to know.” — Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity

The seemingly obvious answer to the problem of tankism — whiteness — no

longer holds water. The idealistic notion of solidarity amongst all

oppressed peoples has also proven to be harder than a simple identity

politics. Certainly, the core problem of tankism is a colonial-racial

one: the uncritical romanticization, the noble savagery, of foreign

sites of authoritarian repression as a means to gain moral superiority

in a narrowly defined notion of anti-imperialism is by definition one

that ignores the complexity of localized racial and ethnic division and

conflict, among many other things. It also plays a cavalier game with

the violent repression of the (unidealized) Other. The so-called

dissident Other that the “socialist state” requires“protection” from —

these are the real people identified for justified extermination by

queer, people of color in America. Fascism in red clothes.

This is the painful reality, one that I have personally felt the most

betrayed by: not only that many leftist intellectuals that I must deal

with in real life,senior scholars who wield some power over me, follow

and support these tankies online but that many of them are queers, many

POC, all hopping on the tankie bandwagon to condemn those outside the US

in their struggles against imperialism and for the right to

self-determination.

What could it be then? Despite the radical gender and sexuality

vanguardism of these tankies, the imperial act of rendering non-US sites

as both totally knowable (an analysis by the capable “I” of a site and

its people without the first clue about its material conditions) and

paradoxically completely unknowable (a homogeneous phantasm that has no

connection to reality) reinstantiates classic patriarchal dominance that

is tied to the active subject in the liberal, Enlightenment tradition,

likewise in theories of Orientalism, in which a masculine West feminizes

the Eastern objects of study. As Rey Chow argues in Woman and Chinese

Modernity, “Kristeva’s book about Chinese women shows us how the

alluring tactic of ‘feminizing’ another culture in the attempt to

criticize Western discourse actually repeats the mechanisms of the

discourse and hence cannot be an alternative to it.”

What we see in the implicit conjunction of US-centric radical

gender/sexuality vanguardism and the abstraction and idealization of the

other in online discourse is the latent masculine chauvinism of US

imperialism as an ideology rearing its head. Puar’s

“homonationalism”revealed Islamophobia as underwriting both the paternal

LGBT bleeding-heart “concern” for oppressed gay brown people over there

and the warmongering of the US state. In queer tankism, the two flip and

become seamlessly melded together: the “anti-imperialism” of queer

tankies, and the“Western queer/trans critic” identity category through

which it is refracted,while seemingly “liberatory” in fact becomes the

mirror image of the roving,imperial “America, World Police.” So intent

on finding and fighting instances of US imperialism all over the globe,

even where it doesn’t exist,these queer tankies use liberatory rhetoric

to argue for oppressed people’s very subjection in “socialist states.”

Thus, this radicalism surrounding gender, sexuality, or race is not

necessarily inconsonant with imperial behavior. Subsuming everything

under the rubric of AMERICA, including the very critique of America,

reifies America as the geopolitical actor par excellence — it is the

mechanism of discourse repeating itself. These tankie takes, in essence,

are being underwritten by a general US chauvinism, in which American

conceptions of race, gender,sexuality, culture, and politics, however

subconsciously, come to take precedence over the real material

contradictions and complex personhood of the actors in any given global

uprising.

Let me be clear: US marginalized people’s intense identification with

the movements of the oppressed elsewhere is understandable and, in

fact,laudable. It is a project that I myself partake in. It is when this

identification and “empathy” (with all its Hartmanian overtones) run

roughshod over the voices and actual conditions of the “oppressed

elsewhere” that the reality of living and speaking and acting from the

US as still holding a certain epistemological and material power is made

clear.

The Western critique of the West must be able to grapple with the

reality of contradiction (as Mao reminds us) rather than trying to

smooth everything into something con/subsumable into the American

“critique” of America.This requires an “ethics after idealism,” the end

to the idealization of the Other as the intellectual and moral force of

our analyses and our activism.

Works Cited

I owe a great deal of the readings and analysis in this piece to this

sensitive,nuanced critique of Kristeva by Su-lin Yu of National Cheng

Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan.

Yu, Su-lin. “Reconstructing Western Female Subjectivity: Between

Orientalism and Feminism in Julia Kristeva’s About Chinese Women.” 2002.

legacy.chass.ncsu.edu

Is Genocide Denial Anti-Imperialist Now? How Tankies are Taking Over

Leftbook and the London Student Scene

By Darya Rustamova

August 13^(th), 2019

Picture a British second-year Sociology student holding a Socialist

Worker’s Party placard and shouting “hands-off DPRK” outside your

student halls (that image in your head, he’s male and wearing cargo

shorts, right? He’s going to ask you out for a chai latte, take you to

Bookmarks, explain the women’s lib. section to you, and then ghost you

for six months). Now imagine a room full of them. This is my fresher’s

week Socialist Society meet and greet.

It’s September 2013 and three people in front of me are reading RT on

their macbook pros, “an unofficial survey showed the majority of Crimea

would choose an economic partnership with Russia over the EU”. It’s not

a good start.

A boy from Cambridge in a keffiyeh he bought from Camden Lock whips his

head around when he hears what he thinks is a Russian name called on the

would be Russian. I don’t smile at him, I tell him I don’t have Russian

citizenship and he leaves me alone.

The London Marxist Society is here handing out flyers and their header

is a picture of Mount Rushmore with stone faces of Lenin, Marx, Stalin,

and Putin. If this isn’t baffling enough, these symbols are followed

with the words “down with imperialism”.

Later we all go to The Lexington, there’s a pub quiz where the team with

the funniest name wins a bag of Doritos. When the names are handed in,

the man with the microphone is astounded that 6 out of 10 are called

Crimea River. It’s weird and almost as disappointing as the Doritos

being fucking Cool Original.

---

It’s 2017 and I’m standing outside SOAS with a friend, and Jonty Leff,

the Worker’s Revolutionary Party candidate for Hackney South and

Shoreditch, comes over to us. He begins badly, “Hey you gorgeous

ladies”.

He hands us a leaflet for a symposium celebrating the 100^(th)

anniversary of the February Revolution (first outrage, attendance costs

£48), and tells me they want more women involved in their movement

because, after all, it was in 1917 Petrograd where sexism met its final

demise. He turns to my friend (a Moroccan woman) and adds “you know, the

1917 revolution was also the first defeat of racism in the modern

world!”

I want to add here that I read Jonty Leff’s manifesto, and I agreed with

every policy. I am a socialist, I believe in the redistribution of

wealth, free welfare, and dismantling hierarchies of power. I believe

Jonty Leff has good ideas and I would be happy to see him elected one

day. I don’t believe the USSR upheld the values of socialism or Marxism,

and I don’t believe in defending and re-evaluating a regime which on

thousands of well-documented occasions used mass rape as a tool of war,

sent women and children to gulags, and carried out countless ethnic and

religious genocides during its reign (ended sexism and racism, my

fucking hat). What I don’t believe in is uncritically standing up for

Sovietism to defend the ideologies of the Left. We have come a long way

and we can do better than 1917. These views are like the intellectual

manifestation of those inflatable things with flailing arms outside car

dealerships. They’re ugly and they don’t make sense. We need to finally

dispense with the unconditional celebration of Sovietism. 2017 is over.

It’s now 102 years since the Bolshevik revolution, and 102^(nd)

anniversaries don’t mean shit.

I know the Soviet aesthetic is edgy and quirky and kids like to have a

hammer and sickle as their Twitter names or some vapourwave Stalin cover

photo. Soviet tower blocks look fucking cool, I know. The USSR was

important and fascinating. Gulag jokes and genocide denial look less

cool. What looks like an innocent Weeaboo 2.0 aesthetic of Stalin’s face

and glitch filters, with deeply misapplied Cyrillic letters, has become

a cover-story for the denial and appropriation and revision of a history

which has been set in the minds of the Eastern bloc for centuries.

The age of leftbook has brought explicit prohibitions on racist,

transphobic, homophobic, colourist, biphobic, aphobic, anti-semitic

behaviour, yet only a handful of groups ban “tankism”. Plenty of users

see no problem with the tankies’ characteristic support for (or denial

of) Soviet violence, repression, and imperialism. The debate is wide

open and it seems like everyone has an opinion. Yet, people who grew up

in Soviet and post-Soviet nations are being silenced by Soviet apologist

Marxists who insist that “Stalin Did Nothing Wrong”. You know, those

lads who have “PLEASE DON’T BRING UP AFGHANISTAN” written in their eyes.

“Stalin can’t have murdered thousands of Muslims because there aren’t

any Muslims in Russia”.

Checkmate, history.

Those boys from the home-counties who fetishise the Eastern Bloc,

deeming any critique of Soviet-Communism as “US Imperialist Propaganda”

while refusing to listen to anyone who experienced Soviet colonialism.

The same ones who shout “religion only causes wars!!” from beneath their

fedoras while defending the secular ideology which calculatedly burned

Muslims out of the Caucasus, because their Socialism doesn’t leave space

for the religious. The ones who are rightly calling out imageries of

slavery and the holocaust in veganism campaigns, while in the same

breath firing out gulag jokes from every platform. The ones who think

Stalin fought off the Nazis because he hated racism SO MUCH. The ☭

Twitter ☭ accounts constantly fantasising about lining up their

ideological opposites against the wall or sending them to gulags while

insisting that the Soviet state did not use any excessive violence. It’s

the Worker’s Lib leaflets denouncing antisemitism yet unequivocally

denying Stalin’s. It’s the new waves of the same old people calling for

Corbyn to resign over his promise to renew Trident while defending the

right of Russia and North Korea to buy and sell nuclear arms (...without

wanting to add to the imbalanced negative coverage of Corbz in the

press, his stance on Syria would make me shout “STFU tankie” at him in

any undergrad common room.) It’s the dude in my undergrad anthropology

module wearing a “Free Tibet” t-shirt while arguing that “communist”

nation-states never play Imperialism.

Schrodinger’s Marxist insists that communism ought not to be reduced to

the views and actions of totalitarian leaders while shutting down those

who deign to criticise them. It is more damaging to try to defend the

actions of extreme war criminals associated with left movements than to

critique them, develop our views, and move on.

I kind of understand why some Lefties would feel defensive of the USSR.

It is all too often used as the litmus test of all Left-leaning

morality. Communists must be sick to death of trying to justify state

communism given the terrible attempts we’ve seen so far. As much as I

wish we had been given a great example of living Communism, we haven’t.

Only when we accept that, can we work to make it actually happen. It

does not undermine the ideologies of communism and socialism, and even

Marxism-Leninism, to accept that Stalin Did a Bunch of Stuff Wrong.

A history which no longer matters, apparently

I’m not writing a mere list of the hypocrisies within a single London

activist scene (honestly, I’d be typing for weeks), and I’m not (just)

being snarky. There is a huge problem when teen hipsters who discovered

Marxist theory at a freshers fair three months ago try to explain the

USSR to people who have known about it since they were in the womb.

Since most of the people who should be saying this were forcibly starved

to death, deported to slave camps, and/or lined up and shot, parts of me

made it through the gene pool, into the delightful world of

English-language online discourse, and I’m here to blog about it. Like

most people with post-Soviet heritage, my family history is disjointed,

depressing, and confusing. Having ancestors from what are now known as

Armenia, Uzbekistan, Russia, Britain, and Pakistan, I grew up in a

gloriously multicultural Northern town and I am lucky to have (almost)

always been comfortable asserting a British identity. I am very white, I

(unfortunately) have a strong regional English accent, and in the UK

it’s only upon seeing my name that people start to realise there is

something foreign going on.

Many of the generations born out of the Soviet era have a sense of

disconnect with their cultural and ethnic roots due to the mass

campaigns of cleansing and deportation perpetrated against them. The

resulting trauma and erasure of their histories is a living remnant of

Soviet rule.

Furthermore, much of contemporary Russian politics and public opinion is

still swayed along similar lines to that of Sovietism. People from the

Caucasus and Central Asia are routinely discriminated against in Russia

and the nations are still bearing the harmful effects of the USSR’s and

the Russian Federation’s colonial campaigns.

A large section of humanity’s existence hangs by a thread made up of

recent multiple genocides, forced deportations, and famines directly

executed by leaders of the Soviet Union. We have to muster some

understanding and empathy for the histories of those who suffered under

“Communist” rule. We have to listen and learn from this.

There were a huge number of deliberate and pre-meditated massacres

perpetrated on the grounds of ethnicity, religion, class, and more.

Pleas of “Western propaganda” cannot conveniently explain away the mass

graves of those targeted by Soviet leaders. Nor can any ideological

argument about the invalidity of religion, precisely which classes are

counter-revolutionary, or who conspired with the Germans, be used to

justify such a scale of suffering.

It’s a fucking outrage that I have to even give examples again,

especially as these are the most well-documented, well-researched, and

widely available instances. But here we go. Mass rape was planned and

used by Soviet soldiers across Poland and East Germany to punish

ex-POWs. Jewish communities were wiped out across countless nations. 2

million Afghans were killed in a Soviet genocide. 18 million people were

sent to gulags. 10 million deaths resulted from the 1932–3 deliberate,

man-made famine. Ethnic genocides of Poles, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars,

Karachay, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks and so many more. 4 million people

were forced to migrate within the Soviet Union, around half of whom died

as a result. Need I fucking continue?

Denying genocides and war crimes simultaneously denies the voices of

surviving populations and their right to accept and overcome trauma. It

removes the possibility for tackling the roots and causes of these

atrocities, and it prevents us from being able to move on and stop this

shit happening again. It is also horrifying that I have to even try to

summarise to someone why they maybe shouldn’t roll their eyes at victim

testimonies and deny recognised massacres.

Can you imagine being the last living member of your family, bartering

with your food allowance and not eating for three weeks, then using the

cigarettes you earned to bribe a guard to give you one metal spoon, then

sharpening the spoon gradually over two months, using it to cut your way

through a fence and threaten the guard who tries to apprehend you, and

walking for twenty eight days to the nearest liberated village (that was

a true story btw) where you run into some kind of Vice contributor from

Dorset who shouts “HoLOLdomor was fake go to gulag peasant hahaha!” You

crumble, all hope is lost, you drop to your knees and shout to the sky

“WHY DID I FALL VICTIM TO WESTERN PROPAGANDA”.

The Cold War instilled in both parties a binary view of geopolitics that

we need to deconstruct. It also cemented the binary outlook on

geopolitics, which largely essentialises ideologies into Capitalist and

Communist. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. Hating the US

doesn’t mean you’ve gotta love and believe the Russian state. What sort

of world must this be if we have to choose between the US/UK alliance,

and Russia/DPRK/China? Acknowledging and remembering the millions killed

by Soviet famine does not mean you can’t also acknowledge and remember

that Britain forcibly starved three million to death in Bangladesh.

We don’t have to pick a side. We all have a duty to dismantle power

imbalances around the world. To claim “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” is

a very Western-centric way to view the Soviet Union and all it left

behind. When you deliberately ground your viewpoint only in precisely

that which “The West” despises, you are still basing your view on the

Western worldview, and that is still not very cool nor subversive.

Attempting to retroactively justify the deaths and suffering of millions

of civilians is dangerous, baseless, and absurd. This categorically

vague and ideological (and shockingly individualistic) notion of who

does or does not deserve to live, within the strange utopia called “The

Soviet Union” which lives only in the minds of 20-year-old-white-boys,

is no more offensive than it is fucking meaningless.

The conjecture which fills the online duels between Tankies, Ultras,

Ancoms, Brocialists, etc. is so empty of any worldly referents that it’s

largely impossible to engage with. Sometimes I latch onto something I

recognise and get involved. Usually it’s famine denial or any mention of

Crimea, and usually, I get called a Nazi sympathiser by three 19

year-olds from Nottingham and sent a link to a Reddit thread describing

how the documents must have been forged by bourgeois new-world

economists because you can see the different pixels throughout the text.

But, how can you argue with somebody who’s attacking epistemology

itself? Fighting against narratives can feel like you’re in a dark room

trying to catch a mosquito that you’re not sure actually exists. Is

Twitter the forum to discuss historicism? The Tankie’s idea of the

Soviet Union, the picture in their mind, is of some rose-coloured,

radical and glorious thing which never actually existed. What the Tankie

says of the USSR says more about the Tankie than the USSR itself. God

bless Edward Said. On the whole, I’m glad people are interested in the

Soviet Union. But that interest should go further, we need more nuance,

new voices, and better arguments.

A present that matters less

The impact of “Tankies” has become damaging in contemporary discourse.

Real, wonderful, radical socialist movements are out there fighting

against the real living legacies of Russian imperialism. Unfortunately,

Western politics students with 3000+ Twitter followers are taking up

their space. They are wasting our energies on discourse about

100-year-old propaganda. The Russian state and its surrounding colonial

legacy is still harmful and still worth debating.

For example, since the USSR enforced unwanted borders and governance,

regions in the Caucasus have been fighting for their right to

independence and self-determination. You can read more about these

fights here. After Russia invaded, Crimean Tatar populations have faced

violence and discrimination in their own lands, many being unlawfully

detained, forced to leave their homes, and there are numerous missing

persons still unaccounted for. You can read more and offer your support

here. Meanwhile the usual suspects of the UK far left; Worker’s Hammer,

the Socialist Worker and the Morning Star, each unequivocally supported

the 2014 “referendum” which refused to give Tatars votes as

justification for Russia’s invasion of the Crimea.

Vital and important histories of Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Tatarstan, Crimea,

Siberia, Ichkeria, and so many more, are being co-opted, appropriated,

and re-written in Leftbook groups made up of middle-class students in

Paris. People whose Google searches only bring up English-language

articles and archives should not be telling Georgians and Uzbeks that

they are just passive victims of Western propaganda. The creeping

Russian occupation of Ukraine and the Caucasus is being bolstered and

supported by Twitter warriors who have never been East of Berlin (okay,

Chiang Mai doesn’t count).

People who open up a critical discourse about the Soviet Union are

excluded from certain Western leftist spaces. Whether explicitly, like

this...

The exclusion of post-Soviet voices goes further. We still have worrying

misunderstandings of the post-Soviet nations, they are under-represented

in the press, popular culture, and academia, and for many historical

reasons, few people travel or migrate outside of their nations,

particularly from Russia and Central Asia. Few people from Europe travel

beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg. Post-Soviet voices are already

marginalised in Western spaces. The left-leaning agenda simply has to

fight against this.

For example, a few years ago, Chechnya started trending on every

platform. At the same time, “Where is Chechnya” was searched in Google

just over 178,000 times. International Business Times broke the first

English-language article “Chechnya detains 100 gay men in first

concentration camps since the Holocaust”

Firstly, Chechnya isn’t actually a country (not that it shouldn’t be,

but the fact that so many individuals and news outlets are writing it as

a nation in itself shows how little they understand).

Secondly, Russia, which Chechnya resides within (for now — freedom and

justice for the North Caucasus will come), has been systematically

detaining, torturing, and by extension killing LGBT+ folks for a long

time now. I have to add, this probably isn’t the ‘first concentration

camp since the holocaust’ — ethnic Chechens were not long ago put in

what I would call concentration camps. This isn’t one of those “how did

you not know this has been happening for AGES???” arguments, but when

the IBT reports that Chechnya is doing it, why does this trend

instantly? A particular Russian (and European and American) Islamophobic

agenda currently marks the, predominantly Muslim, Caucasus and Central

Asia as a space of terrorism and general barbarity.

In a flash-back to denial of Stalin’s crimes against ethnicities, the

Unconditional-Russophiles are aligning themselves with Islamophobic

forms of racism once more. Thus the people and campaigns defending every

facet of the Soviet Union keep backsliding into support for Putin and

the modern state of the Russian Federation. For example, in early 2016,

a historian exposed new accounts of Stalinist crimes via the unearthing

of a mass grave containing 9000 bodies from the 1930s, (yeah, deny that

Tankies) now a remembrance site known as Sandarmokh. He was swiftly sent

to a psychiatric ward by Putin and was evaluated at the Serbski centre,

an infamous interrogation centre around which several propaganda efforts

are spin-doctored, and remains on trial.

Since his re-election campaign, Putin has strongly emphasised that what

he calls an “excessive demonisation of Stalin” was being used to

undermine Russia and its government. Along with the instrumentalisation

of Victory Day, this has led to Stalin’s popularity rising to a “record

high” among Russians today. He denounces all attempts to dredge up

negative accounts of Sovietism precisely because it undermines the

primacy of the Russian state and the rampant Russian nationalism it

spreads.

Putin is arming and supporting violent states and armies around the

world. He is brutally repressing LGBT+ and women’s’ rights within his

own nation and imprisoning protestors. He has solidified a system of

oligarchy and corporatism, a form of state-regulated capitalism which

centres the profits of the government and its aristocracy. He has

restored the Russian Orthodox Church in the government, bolstered by

repressions of other religions throughout the nation. His foreign policy

has seen the occupations and/or invasions of Chechnya, Ingushetia, South

Ossetia, Abkhazia Georgia, Ukraine, and Crimea. He is perpetrating daily

massacres in Syria. Saying all of this doesn’t mean “Putin is worse than

America or Britain!” It means “apply the same critical lens to Putin’s

Russian Federation as you do to Western nation-states”.

Tankism often goes hand-in-hand with a particularly gruesome form of

Assadism. These are the chemical weapon deniers (or even celebrators),

the militarists, so-called “kebab removers” recapitulating the same

excuses of “Western propaganda” and endlessly bootlicking Russian

geopolitical interests through any possible man or medium.

Yet, many seem to feel that Russia is an oppressed underdog which needs

its name and reputation protected. It’s somehow become impossible to

consider that the Russian Federation in all its forms throughout modern

history has been little more than a mirror of the US (and its lap-dog,

the UK). Russia has colonised or attempted to colonise most of central

Asia. It’s aligned itself with the cruellest forces in the world (now

including the USA and the UK). Throughout each of its eras, it has

systematically cleansed itself of religious and ethnic minorities. It’s

fully terrible. It is imperative that all Tankies re-evaluate their

priorities and direct their dubious critical thinking capacities

elsewhere. Leave this mess behind.

---

Tankie Discourse is over for me. I’m not engaging in it anymore. It

surrounds a set of ideological referents which respond to nothing in the

living or dead world. It is a toxic network of arguments and

counter-arguments based upon unfounded claims and empty accusations of

propaganda. It’s a disaster of a fashion parade by people who have no

idea about the still-living experiences of the Soviet world. Bin this

arrogance, the dialectical nonsense, the cultural insensitivity and

sheer ignorance of Tankism.

We don’t have a choice. Stalin Did Some Things Wrong. Stalin’s state was

dramatically racist, sexist, and destructive and the effects of his

failures are still ringing out through the Eastern Bloc. Ignoring,

denying, or re-writing What Went Wrong only undermines socialist and

communist movements today. If we can’t find a way for our movements to

progress from this, then I’ll happily watch them die out. Tankies are

regressive and, frankly, a fucking embarrassment to the Left.