#west-centrism

[vigilantsycamore]

If you're from anywhere between Berlin and Beijing, being on this site is fun because some of the most popular blogs on here routinely make posts saying that the time an imperialist state tried to commit genocide against your people - or is currently committing genocide against your people - that's actually just good socialist praxis and you're a brainwashed USAmerican fascist for disagreeing

And most of this site's userbase adores those blogs anyway, to the point that we routinely get called paranoid for speaking out about this

[ohmystarsy]

oh yeah tankies getting more notes than Ukrainians talking about their first-hand experience of the war is what I love to see on tumblr dot com /s

[fcbswiatek]

nothing to add

[whentheynameyoujoy]

It’s not really surprising to see Westerners uniformly go 😭😭😭 for poor precious Gorbi as a) for Germans his death is a welcome opportunity to perform their traditional rite of not giving a fuck about anyone but themselves, and b) the Gorbi cult feeds into the self-flattering notion that a colonial empire is dissolved when its leaders have an a-ha moment and realize the empire‘s existence is by design immoral, not by being toppled or becoming too weak to exist. And boy oh boy are Westerners powerfully married to the idea they stopped their imperialism and colonialism out of the goodness of their sweet moral hearts, not because they failed at pursuing their usual course any longer despite no lack of trying on their part.

[vigilantsycamore]

I’m not going to start a massive argument on the post that actually brought this on, because it’s late, I’m tired, and I’m worried about sending the wrong message and accidentally alienating some of the people I actually consider friends (something that I’m pretty sure did happen once before in a similar context and which I’m still not over)

But for fuck’s sake

You can assert that there’s no way to reclaim the USAmerican flag for the left. That’s an argument that has merit. You can’t do that while you’re “reclaiming” the hammer and sickle, especially not when you’re from a western country.

It feels like every few months some queer leftist from a post-Soviet country will make a post on here about precisely this - why you shouldn’t be trying to reclaim the hammer and sickle, especially in ways that imply it’s some symbol of LGBT+ liberation - and every single time we get people dismissing everything we say, accusing us of views we categorically do not hold, misrepresenting our words, and basically just going “but I wanna trivialize the symbol of a brutal regime :’(”

[vigilantsycamore]

I cannot imagine the arrogance required to routinely tell CEE people "actually, the Soviet Union was a force for good, the only reason you disagree is because you've been brainwashed by American propaganda"

How do you get through life with your head so far up your own ass? Genuinely want to know how you west-supremacist fucks have made it this far

[vigilantsycamore]

Tankie takes on geopolitics are so funny because these people like to position themselves as the authority on what is Leftist and Progressive and Factually, Morally, and Ideologically Correct, but also they're constantly of the verge of literally openly saying "democracy and human rights are western ideas and inherently colonialist, non-westerners aren't equipped to handle them"

[vigilantsycamore]

One of the realities of using this site while being from a post-soviet* country (and i'm only using that term because it's relevant). is that you're kind of faced with a choice between

1. only following other people from those countries

or 2. accepting that you'll always be no more than 3 links in a follower chain away from somebody that seems to think you're an animal incapable of independent political thought**

*"post-Soviet" here includes not only countries that were part of the USSR itself but also countries that were ruled by Soviet puppet governments

**oh, you think i'm exaggerating? i've literally seen those people debating whether our countries "can be elevated to sapience" and describing us as human animals. they do this all the time