A tankie primer

We're reclaiming the word. Here's what it means now.

The word “tankie” was coined by British Trotskyists for use against leftists who did not oppose the USSR intervention in Hungary in 1956 and resurrected after 2011 by pro-regime change leftists who used it to mock leftists who opposed the destruction of the Syrian state.

But the self-definition of “tankie” can be derived from Lenin’s advice to the socialists in WWI. When most of the socialists of Germany, Russia, and France were lining up with their own governments, Lenin advocated what was called at the time revolutionary defeatism. He wrote: “During a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government.” He wanted socialists, rather than celebrating their countries’ achievements in overt or covert war, to take up the struggle in their own countries: “one cannot be a sincere opponent of a civil (i.e., class) truce without arousing hatred of one’s own government and bourgeoisie!”

In my view, this is no different from what Chomsky has advocated for decades. As he was wont to do, he repeated this message constantly in the hopes that it would stick (it didn’t):

“…One of the most elementary moral truisms is that you are responsible for the anticipated consequences of your own actions. It is fine to talk about the crimes of Genghis Khan, but there isn’t much that you can do about them. If Soviet intellectuals chose to devote their energies to crimes of the U.S., which they could do nothing about, that is their business. We honor those who recognized that the first duty is to concentrate on your own country. And it is interesting that no one ever asks for an explanation, because in the case of official enemies, truisms are indeed truisms. It is when truisms are applied to ourselves that they become contentious, or even outrageous. But they remain truisms. In fact, the truisms hold far more for us than they did for Soviet dissidents, for the simple reason that we are in free societies, do not face repression, and can have a substantial influence on government policy*.”

This idea - that we’re supposed to think about the effects of our work and therefore focus on the crimes of Western imperialists, not the crimes of their enemies - is one Western tankies take seriously.

If you’re wondering why the small group of us on social media around my podcast (the Anti-Empire Project) and Sina’s (The East is a Podcast) affectionately call each other “tankies” and the politics behind it, read on.

For the purposes of this post, a tankie is someone who doesn’t want the destruction of states that are currently targeted by the US.

Tankies are glad that Stalin defeated Hitler in WWII and that the Red Army stopped the Holocaust. Tankies didn’t want Syria, Libya, Yugoslavia, or Iraq destroyed. Tankies don’t often get what they want, as you can see. Tankies don’t want Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Russia, or China destroyed.

There are other causes on which tankies and other kinds of leftists agree, like wanting a Free Palestine. But on the question of regime change in Syria and other countries, we split.

There are three main premises to being a “tankie”.

1. The US Empire, and the British Empire that it took over, which could be called the Anglo-American Empire, is the only empire today. To tankies, Russia, China, and Iran - the only countries really ever accused of also being imperialists - are not.

2. The Anglo-American Empire is uniquely genocidal and destructive. There are other bad things that happen in the world, but in almost every international political situation, with brief and occasional anomalies that quickly revert to pattern (like when they supported Stalin in WW2 or fought their own ISIS creations briefly in Syria and Iraq), victory for the Anglo-American imperialists will lead to more death and destruction than defeat.

3. No matter how much imperial propaganda you have managed to cut through, you are more propagandized than you think. It’s a safer assumption that every single claim made by the imperialists is a lie and work from there.

A few points about the reasoning behind these premises:

Premise 1: There’s only one empire. The hundred-year long debate about imperialism goes back to when Lenin used the concept, which he’d read in Hobson, to explain the origins of the First World War. The Great Powers - England, France, Germany, Japan, the US, Austria-Hungary (not really in the game any more) - had divided the whole world up into colonies from which they drained resources and which they used as captive markets. The whole world being divided up, the game had become zero-sum and the only way these powers could advance was by taking colonies from one another. The strongest powers would take the most, but relative strength would change and the only way to truly test strength was to go to war, hence imperialist war was inevitable. So argued Lenin about a century ago. But another way of looking at World War I (and WWII, and the Cold War) is as a war successfully waged by the Anglo-American Empire to subordinate potential rivals into a global system. Today Germany and Japan host US bases, the Five Eyes and France are subordinate to the US. The Western elite is disciplined, willing to subordinate local interests for US or Israel’s interests, and 100% behind Israel’s holocaust in Gaza.

Another definition of imperialism that I like, that you don’t have to listen to a 100+ hour history podcast to get a handle on, is arrived at by studying value transfer, for example through Jason Hickel et al.’s work, “Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015”. The imperial countries are the ones receiving the value transfer, the colonized are those whose wealth is drained by trillions every year. The Global North / the Golden Billion / the Combined West, is the metropole. The Global South is the colony.

What of China, with its dealmaking in Africa, Pakistan, and elsewhere? If you’re not willing to listen to 50+ hours about the genocidal insanity that the West brought to Africa during the Scramble, you should at least know that China isn’t in Africa chopping children’s hands off or killing ⅓ of all Congolese: they’re building roads and custom phone networks and buying minerals. That’s not what the West did - or does - in Africa.

What of Iran, which exercised influence in Syria until recently and exercises influence in its neighbouring country, Iraq? Historically Persia was incorporated into the Anglo-American global empire as a “semi-periphery”, like China, then became a firm member of the Global South, complete with at least one CIA overthrow in 1953, and is now back in the Global South as a sanctioned country whose economy is targeted for destruction. Not looking for colonies, not draining anybody’s wealth, not imperialist.

Russia? The USSR supported anti-imperialist struggles, notably Cuba and Vietnam, while it lasted from 1917-1991. The post-Soviet Russian Federation has shrunk from the USSR borders, with former members of the USSR increasingly hoisting the US flag over military bases that encroach on Russia and US-sponsored covert operations trying to regime change Russia and break it up (notably starting with Chechnya). Like Iran, Russia had some brief influence in Syria, but it gave that up. The war between Russia and Ukraine is akin to a Western-sponsored civil war, which the US explicitly says it is using to try to destroy Russia. As an economy, Russia spent decades recovering from the destruction wrought by the end of the USSR and the privatization of the USSR’s assets (what author Austin Murphy called the Triumph of Evil). Russia isn’t draining the Global South. It’s not imperialist.

Premise 2. The Anglo-American Empire is uniquely genocidal. The Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch empires are the only empires that could compete with the sheer horrors of the Anglo-Americans, but the scope and scale of the Anglo-American genocides is worse and only the Anglo-American Empire is effectively threatening to end human civilization either through environmental collapse or nuclear war (or both). The worst things in human history were the genocides of the Americas, the enslavement of Africans, and the colonization of Africa and Asia. All were conducted by the Anglo-Americans - where others like France, Belgium, and Germany, eagerly participated, they did so in a system organized by the Anglo-Americans. The German Nazis were sponsored by the Anglo-Americans until WWII started, then these Allies briefly fought the Nazis, then as soon as the war ended the Allies rehabilitated the Nazis and brought them into the heights of Western research, industry, and military coordination through Operation Paperclip. In all the major post-WW2 holocausts, the US was either doing them directly or deeply involved. The Rwandan genocide could not have occurred if the US had not organized the war and invasion of Rwanda the way it had. In the DR Congo, millions died in a war in which abusive local militias faced truly genocidal invaders from Rwanda. The abusive militias were bad; the genocidal invaders were qualitatively worse. As you would expect, the Americans supported the genocidal invaders. The ongoing Gaza holocaust by Israel could not be conducted without daily airlifts of weapons from the US and fuel and food sent daily to Israel by allies organized by the US.

Opposing the Anglo-American empire is opposing genocide. Tactically supporting any western-led regime change campaign is supporting the most genocidal system that has ever existed, and it’s beneath contempt.

Principles vs Campism: Regime changers claim to be loyal to higher principles than anti-imperialist “campists”. Campists, they claim, support authoritarianism, just not if the Anglo-Americans are doing it. Whereas regime changers, with their exalted principles, are against authoritarianism regardless of who’s doing it. Let’s leave aside the fact that “authoritarianism” is itself a term only ever applied to official enemies. Based on Premise 2, it is true that the authoritarianism of targeted regimes is the lesser evil.

Regime changer principles applied to the real world amount to endorsements of the greater evil - dismemberment of countries and genocides of populations. Politics isn’t about abstractions, but how principles are applied on the ground. And they are applied unevenly. Regime changers can perform the mental operations necessary to oppose Iran on women’s rights principle and endorse HTS removing all female judges from their jobs in Syria in practice. The regime changers’ claim to higher principles is empty.

Premise 3. You’re more propagandized than you even think. Leftists who have come to understand that the US empire is a force for evil in the world but then think that all the people the US are trying to destroy are also evil, have half-emancipated their own minds and given imperial propagandists a loophole to win them back: by lying about the targets, they win potential anti-imperialists back to pro-imperialism or useless nihilism.

The lies are voluminous, systematic, repetitive, mutually contradictory, uninterrupted, flexible, and intense. You watched them do it throughout this genocide in Gaza. Lies about beheaded babies, mass rape, human shields, Palestinians bombing themselves, and tireless ceasefire efforts. But after watching the whole campaign of lies about Gaza, and the genocide continue through it all, regime changers have nonetheless readily accepted fantastical stories about Syria under Assad and the virtues of those occupying, partitioning, and destroying Syria now. Regime changers criticize Venezuela’s economic policies, or Cuba’s, or Iran’s, as if these countries aren't being sanctioned by the US with the open purpose of destroying their economy.

If you’ve broken the grip on your mind that tells you that the West is uniquely benevolent, or benevolent at all, congratulations. But your work isn’t done. You have to look at what else the West is telling you (to hate all its enemies on its schedule) and break those grips too. Believe nothing they tell you about official enemies. Make that your default stance and change it only if there is overwhelming evidence.

The regime change left exists to wreck antiwar work - and for no other reason

I’m not here to own liberals in online debates. I don’t want to talk to regime changers at all.

But the regime change leftists do want to talk to us. That’s all they want to do, in fact.

Why? Because their only value in the world is their value to imperialists and they provide this value by disorganizing and disorienting antiwar potential.

Imperialists don’t care what pro-Palestine leftists think. It doesn’t matter whether these leftists are tankies or regime changers. Leftists are in no position to materially help the assassins and mercenaries assembled at various border points preparing to destroy imperial targets. Regime change leftists’ only value is in harassing and disrupting any potential antiwar movement. As Jean Bricmont wrote a decade ago in his article about the “Wishful Thinking Left” (also about Syria):

“the main defect of… the humanitarian interventionist Left… is: to whom are they talking? The rebels in Syria want as many sophisticated weapons as possible... Those rebels want Western governments to provide them with such weapons - they couldn’t care less what the Western Left thinks. And those Western governments hardly know that the wishful thinking Left even exists. And if they did, why would they listen to people with no serious popular support, and so no means of pressuring governments? The best proof of that is given by the cause to which so many signatories have devoted a good part of their lives: Palestine. Which Western government pays any attention to the demands of the “Palestine solidarity movement”?

The main effect of the regime change left is to undermine antiwar work. It

“weakens and confuses what is left of antiwar sentiments, by stressing that “our” priority must be empty gestures of solidarity with a rebellion that is already militarily supported by the West. Once this mindset is acquired, it becomes psychologically difficult to oppose U.S. intervention in the internal affairs of Syria, since intervention is precisely what the revolutionaries that we must “support” want.”

Bricmont continues: regime changers

“will probably say that “we” must denounce both U.S. imperialism and the oppressive regimes against which the “people” revolt. But that only shows the depth of their delusions: why claim doing two things at once, when one is not capable of doing either, even partly?”

Regime change leftists will lie, scream, use identity politics, hijack left-wing rhetoric, and smear us relentlessly. What they won’t do is set out what it is they want to achieve, nor their strategy. Because what they want to achieve is screwing anti-imperialists up and their strategy is simply to wreck everything we try to do.

On the other hand, I can tell you exactly what we want: An end to these genocides and regime change wars, a world where sovereign Global South countries keep the fruits of their own labours, where Indigenous peoples take care of their own lands. I can tell you our strategy too. It is to try to develop a constituency inside the West that is strong enough to stop imperialism.

I admit, it’s not going all that well. While we let regime changers pretend they’re on our side (but with some nuance), it will keep not going well.

The best we can do now is try to find our friends, exclude our enemies, and avoid distractions.

A thread on things tankies oppose.

French in Cote d’Ivoire… tankies oppose this.

Americans in the War on Terror… tankies oppose this.

Israelis in Occupied Palestine… tankies oppose this.

Note:

*Watching the way this genocide has unfolded, I am no longer so sure that we “can have a substantial influence on government policy” and still working out what that means… but let’s leave that for future exploration.