A particularly irritating
memory of mine from some twenty years ago involves me trying to debate
Stalinism with a 12 – year old kid. Among his points: the Gulags weren’t so bad,
the NKVD didn’t kill that many people, nor could they have because that would
have been “against the Soviet Constitution.”
Debating kids is a bit of a mug’s game – I’m sure if you’re a parent who’s ever tried debating the existence of closet monsters or the morality of stealing from the cookie jar, or a teacher who’s tried to explain the practical value of algebra to a skeptical crowd, you might know what I’m getting at. It’s one thing to debate a flat-earther, a vaccine skeptic, or a Celine Dion fan – adults whose sense of reality is so far removed from your own, there’s really no point in engaging with them. But with a kid, you can’t help thinking there ought to be a way to get through to them. They oughta defer to your greater life-experience, your more extensive book learning, your altogether greater reserve of knowledge and wisdom.
What'd he know about Gulags?
Long-story-short: they never do, and we all ought to know that. Nevertheless,
when some kid tells you with utter conviction that Solzhenitsyn lied because he
was a fascist, and that the deportation of the Chechens never happened (they
most certainly did: https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/fr/document/massive-deportation-chechen-people-how-and-why-chechens-were-deported.html), or that the USSR executed fewer people than the USA during the 1930's, this is not a debate between peers: one can’t help feeling the need to set him
straight. And when your drunken pal with a glass of whiskey in one hand keeps
interrupting you on points of Parliamentary Privilege, one’s
irritation accumulates.
I was thinking about this, not
just because I like to grumble about it from time to time, but was reminded of
it by this article: https://freedomnews.org.uk/2022/03/04/fuck-leftist-westplaining/
and this one, from the same
publication: https://freedomnews.org.uk/2019/08/15/is-genocide-denial-anti-imperialist-now-how-tankies-are-taking-over-leftbook-and-the-london-student-scene/
The articles, by East
European activists, take issue with that species of activist my pint-sized
Stalinist may or may not have grown into. (I don’t know, I’ve since lost
touch). You may recognize the type: the ones running book tables at every
peace-rally bemoaning 1989, who unironically wear Lenin t-shirts, and celebrate
the anniversary of 1917 every year. Some have even seek to rehabilitate Stalin
himself. Either he wasn’t so bad because at least he wasn’t a capitalist, or he
wasn’t bad at all and only Western propaganda makes him so.
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on). The tankie is a modern day Stalinist. A useful idiot with hipster clothes and access to memes. In my experience, they tend to be young, stupid, arrogant, and militantly ignorant of just about every field of human knowledge. They know nothing about history, geography, economics, science, or literature, and they like it that way. They get everything they know from cheap pamphlets and memes. They have excused themselves from the burdens of finding evidence for their claims. They dismiss history and scholarship as Western-CIA-funded propaganda. They don’t read books, or talk to people outside their social milieu. They fantasize about shooting or beheading people. They are the political equivalent of the Westoboro Baptist Church, and the social equivalent of bleeding hemorrhoids. They’re really, really awful.
Hiding amongst the tankies are another, less dramatic sort, who may not openly embrace Stalinism, but certainly can’t bring themselves to condemn autocrats or dictators unless they can be blamed on the West. I’ve never met anyone who embraced Putin – homophobic, Islamaphobic, head-in-all-but-name of the stone-age reactionary, retrograde Russian Orthodox Church – but apparently they exist. (It has to be said, by the far the most active pro-Putinistas are Right-Wing Trumpeters like Tucker Carlson, who’s mandatory viewing in Russia). I’ve certainly met folk who hate NATO more than Putin or Jinping (who does indeed look like Winnie the Pooh by the way). Their way of thinking seems to be that war is a western invention, and would simply cease to occur if we stopped building jets.
Activists in the
former Iron Curtain Countries harbour no such illusions. “when you say “Fuck
NATO” or “End NATO expansion”, what I hear is that you do not care about the
safety and wellbeing of my Eastern European friends, family and comrades”
NATO is not something they
love, but something they definitely see as the lesser evil, the alternative to
eternal Russian serfdom.
A lot of commentators speak
of NATO expansion as if it were an American strategic ploy, and not something
the Eastern European member states eagerly pounced on. These countries, the victims of
Russian invasion, domination and sometimes reinvasion for decades if not centuries,
had no doubts about which camp they wanted to belong to. If they were still pawns
for the bigger powers – well, some powers play fairer than others.
“Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary joined NATO in 1999, the
Baltic countries followed in 2004. And for now, I want them to stay there, and
it doesn’t have much to do with politics tbh. It is a self-preservation
instinct, but this is another thing you will just not get.”
Survival doesn’t count for much in some ideological circles. Nor do facts. The fact is that most people who have lived under Russian domination have no wish to do so again.
"Antifascism is protecting people from individuals with
structural power. Right now that is Putin."
What the tankies don’t
understand, and probably can’t understand is that politics is not a game of football,
you don’t owe unconditional loyalty to your team, and nobody wins unless lives
are actually improved. To say nothing that facts matter, truth matters, and
reality is, as they say, “a thing”.
“If
you are What Abouting into helplessness, you are part of the aggressor.”
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