#west-supremacism

[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]

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]

(Screenshot not taken by me, I got it from a non-rebloggable post)

You heard it here first folks, us uppity non-westerners must be CIA psyops because otherwise why would we criticise westerners for talking over us about our own experiences? Honestly we should just shut up and listen to the enlightened westerners who think history doesn’t exist and only theory matters, clearly we’re too stupid to understand our own countries as well as these geniuses who’ve never been to any of them do

Also, the “imperialist narrative” is the one that says that imperialism is bad no matter who’s doing it, not the one that says “it’s okay if a Russian totalitarian invades a sovereign nation with the openly stated goal of making that nation no longer exist and restoring Russia to its imperial height, because Russia doesn’t like America so nothing it does can be imperialist”

[vigilantsycamore]

Speaking as a queer myself it's weird how some western queers gravitate specifically towards the strains of socialism that have been consistently hostile towards queer people, seemingly for no other reason than "well they didn't oppress queers in our country, just queers in those other countries that rejected our Lord And Savior Marx and therefore aren't real countries inhabited by real people"

(I wish I could say that's a strawman but no I have seen you lot say some heinous shit about non-westerners, especially those from formerly Leninist countries. The phrase "cannot be elevated to sapience" comes to mind)

[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

[vigilantsycamore]

Tankies lecturing CEE people about why we're stupid and immoral for celebrating the fall of the USSR sound a lot like English nationalists insisting that the British Empire was actually a force for good and it's a tragedy that so many countries broke away from it

[vigilantsycamore]

Tankie - authoritarian leftist; Soviet apologist; left-wing supporter of Vladimir Putin and/or of the Russian invasion of and genocide in Ukraine. Derived from "tank" as a reference to the Soviet use of tanks to suppress protests, uprisings, and reforms

CEE - Central or Eastern European; Central and Eastern Europe. There are various views on which parts of Europe fall under this description but it's generally taken to include the regions that were once east of the Iron Curtain, as well as the Balkan countries. The term is used because Central and Eastern Europeans have a lot of shared history and experiences, more than either shares with Western Europe, and because the distinction between Central and Eastern Europe is often nebulous and can be a matter of how individual people choose to identify.

Authleft - short for authoritarian left. Refers to people who hold economically left-wing views but advocate for a one-party regime or a dictatorship to suppress dissenting views. The people are expected to obey the state rather than the other way around, as long as the state follows an economically left-wing ideology

West-supremacism - the belief that people from western countries are inherently smarter, more tolerant, and more well-educated than people from non-western countries. On the left, west-supremacists will often criticise the west but will still behave towards non-westerners with contempt while viewing themselves and other western leftists as superior to non-westerners.

West-centrism - the belief that western issues and experiences are more important than non-western ones and that events in non-western countries are actually just the effects of events in western countries; on the left, west-centrists will often claim that non-western opposition to authoritarianism is actually the result of western interference and imperialism, which overlaps with west-supremacism as non-westerners are seen as too compliant to oppose authoritarian regimes of their own accord

[vigilantsycamore]

History of the term tankie:

Relatively early in the Cold War, a divide forms among western socialists between those who are willing to condemn the Soviet Union's use of military force to suppress dissent, and those either too cowardly to criticise a regime nowhere near them or authoritarian enough to see it as a good thing

The former begin referring to the latter as 'tankies' as a reference to the USSR's use of tanks against protesters in their satellite states

By the 80s, tankies are insisting that the term tankie is a slur for the only REAL communists

With the fall of the Soviet Bloc, the formation of the EU, and the development of the internet, there's more dialogue between western and non-western, especially CEE, leftists.

The latter quickly discover that a lot of the former love to defend the regimes that oppressed the latter for decades. CEE leftists begin using the term 'tankie' to describe Soviet apologists and other authoritarian socialists

Tankies are predominantly western and often display west-supremacist and west-centric attitudes towards non-westerners, especially non-western socialists who dare disagree with them, so the term tankie comes to also be associated with western bigotry against non-westerners as well, although that's not what it actually means

With Putin openly invoking the Soviet Union in his imperialist propaganda, and being generally opposed to America and "western degeneracy", authoritarian leftists, especially those from the west, begin voicing support for Putin

Since these people were already being described as tankies, the term starts being misapplied to rashists/ruscists (far-right Russian imperialists and/or Putin supporters; derived from "Russian fascist") as well. The similarities in tankie and rashist rhetoric also contribute to that