I am a true ‘tankie’ I’ve lined up on all your points. Grew up in Jamaica with a father who didn’t subscribe to the West ideology. My father taught me quite a bit and he’d always tell me ‘democracy is an illusion’.
Beautifully put, Justin. Thank you for articulating what my stomach tells me by knotting up when I hear that shit the regime changer left speak. Concepts that are very useful and the opposite of "thought terminating cliches" to use Kyle Ferrana's gorgeous phrase.
Bravo, again! I needed this - it feels like a response to various liberal-leftists in my life that I wasn't able to articulate. One friend told me, "China is doing really fucked up things in Africa" (the same friend who says that Russia is imperialist). I didn't have the knowledge or clarity at the time to be able to say, "Really? How many regime changes or genocides have they done? How many assassinations? Etc." It drives me crazy the level of projection and self-blindness of imperialist thinking here in the U.S. It is generally directly proportional to how "educated" or well-read people are...so the more people feel that they are curing their own ignorance, the more propagandized they are.
It is you (and the tankie group) who introduced me to the term "tankie". I've been doing self-education in the history of the left and playing a lot of catch-up in recent years. I wasn't on social media in 2011, nor as aware of US imperialism in the way I am now. It blows my mind and twists me in knots trying to understand how this term got repurposed from its first meaning which you described above to be applied to anti-regime changers more recently. Yet another example of how the world feels upside-down. Maybe there are some missing links in the pro-imperialist thinking that I'm missing, not that it's important to make the connection. Usually I can understand the thinking of these kind of pro-imperialist "leftists" or liberals, because it's the same kind of thinking I've been working to liberate myself from.
"The lies are voluminous, systematic, repetitive, mutually contradictory, uninterrupted, flexible, and intense." 100%. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. Thanks for summarizing this all so succinctly.
Beautifully said! Tankies unite! I'm sick of the bourgeois double think we get from the regime change left who clothe themselves in shallow neo-liberal identity politics and then proceed to defang genuine anti imperialist and anti war movements. I just listened to the latest "tanky group therapy" from Sina and Co on East is a Podcast titled "the primary contradiction is imperialism" and feel that sums up cogently who the enemy truly is; the western imperialist death machine. Solidarity and free Palestine 🇵🇸 and reject all western projects of regime change regardless of what their propagandists tell us.
God, this is so good. Thank you for articulating EXACTLY how I’ve been feeling. After witnessing the genocide in Gaza, I refuse to be distracted from the evil of Western Empire by demonizing its enemies using their propaganda. Sick to death of those who pat themselves on the back for insisting on moral purity they’ll never find and doing the greatest evil’s bidding in the process.
Became a full blown tankie as a result of the Palestinian genocide. My "liberal" siblings say I've been "radicalized". Now that I understand, the propaganda seems so blatant. Glad to have found my community 💖
"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."
I found myself thinking about the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm whilst reading this - would he qualify as a tankie? … He certainly never quit ‘the Party’.
I was thinking of him because of one of the closing chapter in Age of Extremes in which he described how in 1989 the Soviet bloc countries collapsed without a shot being fired in earnest - and because of the obvious parallels with Syria today. He said their fall had destroyed at a stroke the western propaganda of the time - that the people had been compelled to obedience by the ruthlessness of their security services and the lies told to them.
What the West had called “Totalitariansim” had always implied populism, he wrote, for if it did not matter what the people thought (because mere coercion and an efficient secret service sufficed to obtain obedience) … why bother to give them the right thoughts to think? (And so conversely, the prevalence of populism in the West today must imply our descent into totalitarianism also.)
He went on to discuss the huge environmental dangers looming - how might any government retain sufficient authority to confront these. He thought they might either become more secretive or be run by charismatic leaders posing as national saviours. (Or both?) … strangely liberal solutions, suggestions or wise observations. We were told when growing up: If you’re not a socialist when young, you haven’t a heart, and, if you’re not a Tory when old you haven’t a head!
Perhaps we can’t categorise EH and others like him in this way without taking account of their experiences of fighting fascism in the thirties and forties … those who fought in the Spanish war and against Nazism and who lived through that golden, post-war economic era must have felt they were fighting on the right side of history … but in the longer view? E P Thompson said upon reflection that generation “were too naive by half”. That all the moral assets of that anti-fascist struggle had been appropriated from them by “the other side”, (and then packaged and sold on to Zionism).
That period of the nineteen fifties and sixties in which western democracy might have come of age, was instead neutered.
“We are not ruled by murderers but only by their friends.”
... goes the closing line from Kipling’s poem about Ireland, (Cleared, 1890) and it seems more relevant to our needs today. It suggested a hierarchy of evil to exist in which those who had the courage to kill were a step above those who befriended and utilised them. But it seems to me to also infer that those who choose to be ruled by the friends of murderers, occupy the lowliest rung - on which we now stand.
But this label of tankie is probably a tactical rather than judgmental thing.
Thanks for providing a coherent framework for anti-imperialists, especially with respect to your three premises for tankies. This article mentions Chomsky. I can’t provide the source, but I recall his answer to why he’s never left the USA. He mentioned a Soviet dissident who loved his country and vowed to stay until it improved. Leaving would be giving up. In the USA, you hear a lot the phrase “Love it or leave it,” the kind of crass, unpersuasive jingoism that makes the empire so unlikeable, even to some of its own citizens. I’ve never loved my country, for many reasons, some of them personal, but I will continue to criticize it, and more coherently.
The formerly free Republic of Syria had no empire. It’s as simple as that for me. Russia did and we can see traces of it here and there. For example, the orientalist pundits who blamed the free Arabs for the demise of their own country. Why would anyone say that kind of crap? It’s more accurate and polite to former allies to blame the actual empire assaulting it. To praise the Russians though, I’ve learned about the color revolutions. I had a penpal from Estonia who teemed with admiration for the Anglo-American Reich, mainly for including Estonia into NATO. I later learned how her country got its independence. They went out, sung some silly songs, and the Soviet troops left. By Estonian standards, the Palestinians were overachievers even by the 1930s, let alone 2024 and the US-Israeli Holocaust.
Lastly, thanks for your analysis here and also on Youtube. I’m shadow banned. Like I can’t even give the simplest compliment before its immediately deleted. So, I’m just saying here. I’ll listen as long as you’re there. It’s not good that so many Americans don’t read but, if they did, I wouldn’t be surprised if Substack was censored as incompletely and malevolently as YT. And, I don’t apologize for going to the YT channel of the Judaeo-Nazi military and calling them baby-killing barbarians, which they are.
Have you checked out photos of "free Arabs"? Quite a lot of Turkics and South Asians from Europe in that bunch. The Russian chauvinists are wrong, as they are in most things including what is actually happening in Donbas, but don't agency-wash the Western/Qatari backed headchoppers and their fervent supporters.
By “free Arab” that implies I’m not including the Kurdish or Turkic-speaking proxies of the imperialists. I’m talking about Assad and the SAA and their thirteen year war against the West. Don’t tell me what to do if you’re not going to understand what I’ve written first. Regarding the actual Quislings, as you probably know when the liberal elites of the West were under extreme pressure, from the Nazis, they appeased, surrendered or sold out. There’s a case study of the West. The Anglo-American elites were lucky for so much water, and of course the USSR. France is what would happen to the USA right now, if some foreign empire was destroying our economy through sanctions and sending waves of mercenary thugs. Yes on the Russian chauvinists, but I'm for them against NATO’s encroachments, or just Western encroachments in general since Napoleon.
Nobody calls SAA or Assad "free Syrians" or "free Arabs" It's FSA (literally Free Syrian Army) and FNA that gets marketed that way. Honestly, I'm out. Your response is so confusing I don't know what you're talking about anymore.
Well you can tell “Nobody” that I don’t give a fuck how FSA market their Western coup propaganda. Any Syrian that isn’t a quisling now I respect, just like all the Syrian Arabs who resisted US hegemony under Assad. No I disagree. I don’t think any of this is complicated.
Is it because he wanted to keep "fighting" or because he has a cushy MIC supported tenure and a position as MSM's favorite leftist? If Chomsky was actually a threat to the system, he would have been killed or buried deep like Grover Furr or Parenti. There's a reason why everybody on the Western left knows Chomsky but very few understand anything about third anti-colonial movements or actual life under socialist systems.
You’re still alive, but I’m supposed to throw Chomsky under a bus because you don’t agree with him on everything? I’m grateful for what I learned from Chomsky on the US empire and the Democratic party, that is when most people here were praising Obama like he was the Second Coming of Jesus. If it’s a sin to be employed and not dead in the West, it’s a mild one then, since not everyone is in the position to die on the battlefield like Guevera or Sinwar or Nasrallah. Indeed, I think most people have the most respect for martyrs. Does this really need to be stated? Like not everyone’s path here has to be through the same authors you’ve read. Some of us have fields of expertise that are far removed from tankie discussions, so I’m sincerely grateful for anyone who’s guided me here.
And Chomsky is mainstream? You watch mainstream media still? I know he was tenured at MIT, but I don’t find it credible that he’s a favorite of CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, etc. I remember him being on Amy Goodman a lot. Probably like everyone else here, I don’t agree with him on anarchism or his lesser of two evils distraction. If Russia was anarchic, in any variety, in 1941, the Nazis would’ve steamrolled their Panzers all the way to Moscow.
No I’m disagreeing with you. It doesn’t matter whether I like an elite like Aristotle when he said a democracy needs a welfare state in his Politics. When Chomsky discussed Aristotle, Madison and how they would be perceived today, I don’t have to agree with Chomsky on everything to appreciate his scholarship. He said Aristotle would be viewed as a radical by some Americans; I don’t care that he worked at MIT when he said it. I’m also out, you’re an argumentative smart ass, and I seriously dislike wasting my time on people like you.
I find myself fully in agreement with Justin's (and his fellow Tankies') 3 lines in the sand. This is deeply disturbing as it goes against the core of my political experience in the student and occupy movements: rather than draw lines we managed to work through major issues of deep disagreement on worldview, strategy, and tactics: we listened to each other and did not let our movement split.
This was in marked difference to earlier generations of Western leftists who split and split again: Monty Python based their famous "People's Front of Judea" hating the "Judean People's Front" more than the Romans (Life of Brian) on their actual experience with Leftist university groups in the 1970s.
This is also my main problem with Losurdo's direction in his book "Western Marxism" that was floated in Tankie Group Therapy. Certainly there is a lot of truth in Losurdo's diagnosis of an immense blind spot when it comes to Imperialism in the Western Left (including and also beyond "Marxists"). However, we have to go beyond denunciations to re-unify a movement:
Let us try to find out where people on the other side of those lines are coming from and what they still can contribute - however deep the hole may be that they have dug for themselves.
Major Left Tendencies, how they may have lost sight of - and may be open to co-optation by - imperialism
1) ~ Communist
Historically, communist parties (Leninist, Maoist, Trotskyist, ...) certainly have done the lion share of fighting Empire and inspired people around the world. They also have most clearly named Empire and analyzed its operation starting from Lenin himself (looking forward to hearing more about this on Justin's historical podcast).
Paradoxically, that also means that they have accumulated the most historical baggage, beginning with the tension of adapting their (respective...) internationalist vision to a particular Nationalist Liberation Movement. The Baath parties initially were such a hybrid, and galvanized popular support. In Iraq, the Baath party formed a successful government in coalition with the communists who alas were the first against the wall when the Baath consolidated power. In Iran, communist parties were important in organizing the popular revolution against the Shah but alas their cadres were imprisoned and killed when the Islamists consolidated power. This is recent enough history that the "old guard" understandably harbor resentments, and the younger generations may have inherited these resentments implicitly. This makes it particularly hard for them to adhere to Justin's premise (catechism?) #1: there is only one empire.
2) ~ Social Democrat
After the disillusionment with Stalinism, Western European Social Democrats doubled down on their domestic focus of building a welfare state. While figures like Che Guevara and Ho Chi Min were sometimes popular, the models that actually informed their daily work were the material gains made in Scandinavia, Germany, and Western European countries such as France. Colonialism just was not on their radar as Scandinavian countries had comparatively limited success at colonization (recently at least), Germany had lost their colonies after WWI, and France, England, Netherlands... made a show of letting their colonies go.
In my own experience, German and Austrian social democrats were understandably proud of having achieved their economic miracle in peacetime and not at the expense of other people (unlike the previous generation who, ahem, tried to conquer Eurasia and built concentration camps filled with slave labor). Alas, this was of course not really the case: we were embedded in the Great Unequal Exchange with full access to cheap resources and captive markets... but it was difficult enough for that generation to address the skeletons in their own Nazi closets, so they never found the time to look too closely at the skeletons in the Anglo-American closets to whom they now had hitched their wagons. This makes it particularly hard for them to adhere to Justin's premise (catechism?) #2: The Anglo-American Empire is uniquely genocidal.
3) ~ Anarchist
It is naturally most difficult to write generally about anarchists, since anarchists do not police themselves ;-). As Justin has pointed out, what stands in the way of Empire are nation states with capable military and civilian bureaucracies. Naturally these are the very structures that anarchists have traditionally exposed as sources of illegitimate power...
In particular, a lot of recent anarchist and anarchist-aligned organizing has revolved around bringing the fight against oppression of gender and sexual orientation out in the open. These also happen to be areas easily co-opted by the neo-liberal project (as reforms have a negligible effect on the next quarterly earnings report). Naturally, women's rights, homophobia, etc. can be selectively used as bludgeon against states which have not yet made the token reforms that we (just now) have achieved. Worse yet, states who stand against Empire tend to resist the imposition of "gender politics" as merely another form of Western bullying, and often galvanize around "traditional values", making them hard to for progressives to see in a positive light.
It took decades for anarchists to get organized again beyond small scale projects and processes of working together overcoming hierarchies; on the geo-political scale, mostly the Kurdish project of Rojava comes to mind... and they tragically had to militarily entangle with U.S. power projection against the Syrian state to survive (for now)... a lot of the early enthusiasm may have turned to cynicism and dread...
=> The sheer banality with which the ongoing genocide in Palestine is normalized or unseen - and the ability to compartmentalize the fall of the Syrian state from this genocide - has caught even the more cynical of us (tankies?) by surprise; Justin's work - and his openness grappling with these issues Judo style - has been particularly important to me and surely to other subscribers to find our center again.
When we have done so, let us try to again engage with people who got caught up in the traumas and the tragic shift of priorities away from anti-imperialism. Let's be mindful especially of Justin's premise #3: You’re more propagandized than you even think. Becoming disillusioned with and realizing how deeply ingrained polite public discourse is with genocidal Empire projects is an ongoing, traumatic experience in itself - one that intimately isolates one from family and seemingly the community at large. It is precisely when people have been pushed close to that realization that they may most aggressively hold on to their illusions (from fear of isolation). I know I have.
"What of Iran, which exercised influence in Syria.." a country which in "April 2015 World Health Organization document noted how pre-war Damascus “had one of the best-developed healthcare systems in the Arab world.” Not only that, but per a 2018 UN investigation, “universal, free healthcare” was extended to all Syrian citizens, who “enjoyed some of the highest levels of care in the region.” Education was likewise free, and before the conflict, “an estimated 97% of primary school-aged Syrian children were attending class and Syria’s literacy rates were thought to be at over 90% for both men and women [emphasis added].” By 2016, millions were out of school.
UN Human Rights Council report two years later noted prior to 2011, Syria “was the only country in the Middle East region to be self-sufficient in food production,” its “thriving agricultural sector” contributing “about 21%” to GDP 2006 - 2011. " Source Kit Klarenberg
I am a true ‘tankie’ I’ve lined up on all your points. Grew up in Jamaica with a father who didn’t subscribe to the West ideology. My father taught me quite a bit and he’d always tell me ‘democracy is an illusion’.
Beautifully put, Justin. Thank you for articulating what my stomach tells me by knotting up when I hear that shit the regime changer left speak. Concepts that are very useful and the opposite of "thought terminating cliches" to use Kyle Ferrana's gorgeous phrase.
Bravo, again! I needed this - it feels like a response to various liberal-leftists in my life that I wasn't able to articulate. One friend told me, "China is doing really fucked up things in Africa" (the same friend who says that Russia is imperialist). I didn't have the knowledge or clarity at the time to be able to say, "Really? How many regime changes or genocides have they done? How many assassinations? Etc." It drives me crazy the level of projection and self-blindness of imperialist thinking here in the U.S. It is generally directly proportional to how "educated" or well-read people are...so the more people feel that they are curing their own ignorance, the more propagandized they are.
It is you (and the tankie group) who introduced me to the term "tankie". I've been doing self-education in the history of the left and playing a lot of catch-up in recent years. I wasn't on social media in 2011, nor as aware of US imperialism in the way I am now. It blows my mind and twists me in knots trying to understand how this term got repurposed from its first meaning which you described above to be applied to anti-regime changers more recently. Yet another example of how the world feels upside-down. Maybe there are some missing links in the pro-imperialist thinking that I'm missing, not that it's important to make the connection. Usually I can understand the thinking of these kind of pro-imperialist "leftists" or liberals, because it's the same kind of thinking I've been working to liberate myself from.
"The lies are voluminous, systematic, repetitive, mutually contradictory, uninterrupted, flexible, and intense." 100%. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. Thanks for summarizing this all so succinctly.
Beautifully said! Tankies unite! I'm sick of the bourgeois double think we get from the regime change left who clothe themselves in shallow neo-liberal identity politics and then proceed to defang genuine anti imperialist and anti war movements. I just listened to the latest "tanky group therapy" from Sina and Co on East is a Podcast titled "the primary contradiction is imperialism" and feel that sums up cogently who the enemy truly is; the western imperialist death machine. Solidarity and free Palestine 🇵🇸 and reject all western projects of regime change regardless of what their propagandists tell us.
God, this is so good. Thank you for articulating EXACTLY how I’ve been feeling. After witnessing the genocide in Gaza, I refuse to be distracted from the evil of Western Empire by demonizing its enemies using their propaganda. Sick to death of those who pat themselves on the back for insisting on moral purity they’ll never find and doing the greatest evil’s bidding in the process.
Became a full blown tankie as a result of the Palestinian genocide. My "liberal" siblings say I've been "radicalized". Now that I understand, the propaganda seems so blatant. Glad to have found my community 💖
Also, thank you for this:
"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."
Needs to be said!
amen. said loudly and repeatedly.
I found myself thinking about the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm whilst reading this - would he qualify as a tankie? … He certainly never quit ‘the Party’.
I was thinking of him because of one of the closing chapter in Age of Extremes in which he described how in 1989 the Soviet bloc countries collapsed without a shot being fired in earnest - and because of the obvious parallels with Syria today. He said their fall had destroyed at a stroke the western propaganda of the time - that the people had been compelled to obedience by the ruthlessness of their security services and the lies told to them.
What the West had called “Totalitariansim” had always implied populism, he wrote, for if it did not matter what the people thought (because mere coercion and an efficient secret service sufficed to obtain obedience) … why bother to give them the right thoughts to think? (And so conversely, the prevalence of populism in the West today must imply our descent into totalitarianism also.)
He went on to discuss the huge environmental dangers looming - how might any government retain sufficient authority to confront these. He thought they might either become more secretive or be run by charismatic leaders posing as national saviours. (Or both?) … strangely liberal solutions, suggestions or wise observations. We were told when growing up: If you’re not a socialist when young, you haven’t a heart, and, if you’re not a Tory when old you haven’t a head!
Perhaps we can’t categorise EH and others like him in this way without taking account of their experiences of fighting fascism in the thirties and forties … those who fought in the Spanish war and against Nazism and who lived through that golden, post-war economic era must have felt they were fighting on the right side of history … but in the longer view? E P Thompson said upon reflection that generation “were too naive by half”. That all the moral assets of that anti-fascist struggle had been appropriated from them by “the other side”, (and then packaged and sold on to Zionism).
That period of the nineteen fifties and sixties in which western democracy might have come of age, was instead neutered.
“We are not ruled by murderers but only by their friends.”
... goes the closing line from Kipling’s poem about Ireland, (Cleared, 1890) and it seems more relevant to our needs today. It suggested a hierarchy of evil to exist in which those who had the courage to kill were a step above those who befriended and utilised them. But it seems to me to also infer that those who choose to be ruled by the friends of murderers, occupy the lowliest rung - on which we now stand.
But this label of tankie is probably a tactical rather than judgmental thing.
Thanks for providing a coherent framework for anti-imperialists, especially with respect to your three premises for tankies. This article mentions Chomsky. I can’t provide the source, but I recall his answer to why he’s never left the USA. He mentioned a Soviet dissident who loved his country and vowed to stay until it improved. Leaving would be giving up. In the USA, you hear a lot the phrase “Love it or leave it,” the kind of crass, unpersuasive jingoism that makes the empire so unlikeable, even to some of its own citizens. I’ve never loved my country, for many reasons, some of them personal, but I will continue to criticize it, and more coherently.
The formerly free Republic of Syria had no empire. It’s as simple as that for me. Russia did and we can see traces of it here and there. For example, the orientalist pundits who blamed the free Arabs for the demise of their own country. Why would anyone say that kind of crap? It’s more accurate and polite to former allies to blame the actual empire assaulting it. To praise the Russians though, I’ve learned about the color revolutions. I had a penpal from Estonia who teemed with admiration for the Anglo-American Reich, mainly for including Estonia into NATO. I later learned how her country got its independence. They went out, sung some silly songs, and the Soviet troops left. By Estonian standards, the Palestinians were overachievers even by the 1930s, let alone 2024 and the US-Israeli Holocaust.
Lastly, thanks for your analysis here and also on Youtube. I’m shadow banned. Like I can’t even give the simplest compliment before its immediately deleted. So, I’m just saying here. I’ll listen as long as you’re there. It’s not good that so many Americans don’t read but, if they did, I wouldn’t be surprised if Substack was censored as incompletely and malevolently as YT. And, I don’t apologize for going to the YT channel of the Judaeo-Nazi military and calling them baby-killing barbarians, which they are.
Neither Washington nor Moscow lives in the hearts and minds of "Western Leftists".
Have you checked out photos of "free Arabs"? Quite a lot of Turkics and South Asians from Europe in that bunch. The Russian chauvinists are wrong, as they are in most things including what is actually happening in Donbas, but don't agency-wash the Western/Qatari backed headchoppers and their fervent supporters.
By “free Arab” that implies I’m not including the Kurdish or Turkic-speaking proxies of the imperialists. I’m talking about Assad and the SAA and their thirteen year war against the West. Don’t tell me what to do if you’re not going to understand what I’ve written first. Regarding the actual Quislings, as you probably know when the liberal elites of the West were under extreme pressure, from the Nazis, they appeased, surrendered or sold out. There’s a case study of the West. The Anglo-American elites were lucky for so much water, and of course the USSR. France is what would happen to the USA right now, if some foreign empire was destroying our economy through sanctions and sending waves of mercenary thugs. Yes on the Russian chauvinists, but I'm for them against NATO’s encroachments, or just Western encroachments in general since Napoleon.
Nobody calls SAA or Assad "free Syrians" or "free Arabs" It's FSA (literally Free Syrian Army) and FNA that gets marketed that way. Honestly, I'm out. Your response is so confusing I don't know what you're talking about anymore.
Well you can tell “Nobody” that I don’t give a fuck how FSA market their Western coup propaganda. Any Syrian that isn’t a quisling now I respect, just like all the Syrian Arabs who resisted US hegemony under Assad. No I disagree. I don’t think any of this is complicated.
Is it because he wanted to keep "fighting" or because he has a cushy MIC supported tenure and a position as MSM's favorite leftist? If Chomsky was actually a threat to the system, he would have been killed or buried deep like Grover Furr or Parenti. There's a reason why everybody on the Western left knows Chomsky but very few understand anything about third anti-colonial movements or actual life under socialist systems.
You’re still alive, but I’m supposed to throw Chomsky under a bus because you don’t agree with him on everything? I’m grateful for what I learned from Chomsky on the US empire and the Democratic party, that is when most people here were praising Obama like he was the Second Coming of Jesus. If it’s a sin to be employed and not dead in the West, it’s a mild one then, since not everyone is in the position to die on the battlefield like Guevera or Sinwar or Nasrallah. Indeed, I think most people have the most respect for martyrs. Does this really need to be stated? Like not everyone’s path here has to be through the same authors you’ve read. Some of us have fields of expertise that are far removed from tankie discussions, so I’m sincerely grateful for anyone who’s guided me here.
And Chomsky is mainstream? You watch mainstream media still? I know he was tenured at MIT, but I don’t find it credible that he’s a favorite of CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, etc. I remember him being on Amy Goodman a lot. Probably like everyone else here, I don’t agree with him on anarchism or his lesser of two evils distraction. If Russia was anarchic, in any variety, in 1941, the Nazis would’ve steamrolled their Panzers all the way to Moscow.
see above. You're just free associating and not responding to any of my points.
No I’m disagreeing with you. It doesn’t matter whether I like an elite like Aristotle when he said a democracy needs a welfare state in his Politics. When Chomsky discussed Aristotle, Madison and how they would be perceived today, I don’t have to agree with Chomsky on everything to appreciate his scholarship. He said Aristotle would be viewed as a radical by some Americans; I don’t care that he worked at MIT when he said it. I’m also out, you’re an argumentative smart ass, and I seriously dislike wasting my time on people like you.
I find myself fully in agreement with Justin's (and his fellow Tankies') 3 lines in the sand. This is deeply disturbing as it goes against the core of my political experience in the student and occupy movements: rather than draw lines we managed to work through major issues of deep disagreement on worldview, strategy, and tactics: we listened to each other and did not let our movement split.
This was in marked difference to earlier generations of Western leftists who split and split again: Monty Python based their famous "People's Front of Judea" hating the "Judean People's Front" more than the Romans (Life of Brian) on their actual experience with Leftist university groups in the 1970s.
This is also my main problem with Losurdo's direction in his book "Western Marxism" that was floated in Tankie Group Therapy. Certainly there is a lot of truth in Losurdo's diagnosis of an immense blind spot when it comes to Imperialism in the Western Left (including and also beyond "Marxists"). However, we have to go beyond denunciations to re-unify a movement:
Let us try to find out where people on the other side of those lines are coming from and what they still can contribute - however deep the hole may be that they have dug for themselves.
Major Left Tendencies, how they may have lost sight of - and may be open to co-optation by - imperialism
1) ~ Communist
Historically, communist parties (Leninist, Maoist, Trotskyist, ...) certainly have done the lion share of fighting Empire and inspired people around the world. They also have most clearly named Empire and analyzed its operation starting from Lenin himself (looking forward to hearing more about this on Justin's historical podcast).
Paradoxically, that also means that they have accumulated the most historical baggage, beginning with the tension of adapting their (respective...) internationalist vision to a particular Nationalist Liberation Movement. The Baath parties initially were such a hybrid, and galvanized popular support. In Iraq, the Baath party formed a successful government in coalition with the communists who alas were the first against the wall when the Baath consolidated power. In Iran, communist parties were important in organizing the popular revolution against the Shah but alas their cadres were imprisoned and killed when the Islamists consolidated power. This is recent enough history that the "old guard" understandably harbor resentments, and the younger generations may have inherited these resentments implicitly. This makes it particularly hard for them to adhere to Justin's premise (catechism?) #1: there is only one empire.
2) ~ Social Democrat
After the disillusionment with Stalinism, Western European Social Democrats doubled down on their domestic focus of building a welfare state. While figures like Che Guevara and Ho Chi Min were sometimes popular, the models that actually informed their daily work were the material gains made in Scandinavia, Germany, and Western European countries such as France. Colonialism just was not on their radar as Scandinavian countries had comparatively limited success at colonization (recently at least), Germany had lost their colonies after WWI, and France, England, Netherlands... made a show of letting their colonies go.
In my own experience, German and Austrian social democrats were understandably proud of having achieved their economic miracle in peacetime and not at the expense of other people (unlike the previous generation who, ahem, tried to conquer Eurasia and built concentration camps filled with slave labor). Alas, this was of course not really the case: we were embedded in the Great Unequal Exchange with full access to cheap resources and captive markets... but it was difficult enough for that generation to address the skeletons in their own Nazi closets, so they never found the time to look too closely at the skeletons in the Anglo-American closets to whom they now had hitched their wagons. This makes it particularly hard for them to adhere to Justin's premise (catechism?) #2: The Anglo-American Empire is uniquely genocidal.
3) ~ Anarchist
It is naturally most difficult to write generally about anarchists, since anarchists do not police themselves ;-). As Justin has pointed out, what stands in the way of Empire are nation states with capable military and civilian bureaucracies. Naturally these are the very structures that anarchists have traditionally exposed as sources of illegitimate power...
In particular, a lot of recent anarchist and anarchist-aligned organizing has revolved around bringing the fight against oppression of gender and sexual orientation out in the open. These also happen to be areas easily co-opted by the neo-liberal project (as reforms have a negligible effect on the next quarterly earnings report). Naturally, women's rights, homophobia, etc. can be selectively used as bludgeon against states which have not yet made the token reforms that we (just now) have achieved. Worse yet, states who stand against Empire tend to resist the imposition of "gender politics" as merely another form of Western bullying, and often galvanize around "traditional values", making them hard to for progressives to see in a positive light.
It took decades for anarchists to get organized again beyond small scale projects and processes of working together overcoming hierarchies; on the geo-political scale, mostly the Kurdish project of Rojava comes to mind... and they tragically had to militarily entangle with U.S. power projection against the Syrian state to survive (for now)... a lot of the early enthusiasm may have turned to cynicism and dread...
=> The sheer banality with which the ongoing genocide in Palestine is normalized or unseen - and the ability to compartmentalize the fall of the Syrian state from this genocide - has caught even the more cynical of us (tankies?) by surprise; Justin's work - and his openness grappling with these issues Judo style - has been particularly important to me and surely to other subscribers to find our center again.
When we have done so, let us try to again engage with people who got caught up in the traumas and the tragic shift of priorities away from anti-imperialism. Let's be mindful especially of Justin's premise #3: You’re more propagandized than you even think. Becoming disillusioned with and realizing how deeply ingrained polite public discourse is with genocidal Empire projects is an ongoing, traumatic experience in itself - one that intimately isolates one from family and seemingly the community at large. It is precisely when people have been pushed close to that realization that they may most aggressively hold on to their illusions (from fear of isolation). I know I have.
"What of Iran, which exercised influence in Syria.." a country which in "April 2015 World Health Organization document noted how pre-war Damascus “had one of the best-developed healthcare systems in the Arab world.” Not only that, but per a 2018 UN investigation, “universal, free healthcare” was extended to all Syrian citizens, who “enjoyed some of the highest levels of care in the region.” Education was likewise free, and before the conflict, “an estimated 97% of primary school-aged Syrian children were attending class and Syria’s literacy rates were thought to be at over 90% for both men and women [emphasis added].” By 2016, millions were out of school.
UN Human Rights Council report two years later noted prior to 2011, Syria “was the only country in the Middle East region to be self-sufficient in food production,” its “thriving agricultural sector” contributing “about 21%” to GDP 2006 - 2011. " Source Kit Klarenberg
this piece clarifies many things for me, thank you!
Wonderfully put. Something I'll be sending to my lefty "both sides" friends.
My hormones must be odd as this made me tear several times.
An intelligent and thoughtful analysis. Thank you.
One omission is the catastrophic genocide in Australia, but then almost everyone does.