EDIT: I'm very proud of this community. All the posts are making me think and solidly criticizing from an anti-imperialist perspective. Thanks, hexbear
Idealist purity moralizing fencesitting. Continuing the beautiful centuries long tradition of the failed western left that refuses to engage with geopolitics, the real world and context. Isn’t it embarrassing to be part of this trot tradition of both-sidesing everything to be above it all and gaining nothing in reality?
It gives me heart comfort to realize it’s not all socialists that are like this. There are principled communists in China, DPRK, Cuba, Vietnam and throughout the colonized world who know which side of the line to get on and how to engage dialectically with the world. This site is probably the best place in the English speaking internet and yet 50% of the population here is still chauvinist.
I really have no hope whatsoever for the western left until the west collapses and suffers deeply and is humiliated out of their brainworms of superiority (even the belief that any other entity on Earth is somewhat comparable to the American empire hegemony and colonial domination and murder/enslavement of millions is a form of brainworms. If they are ever putting the US on a scale against any enemy and coming up with “they are both bad” the scale is miscalibrated, specifically because they are a westoid most likely and have their thumb on the scale subconsciously with their own biases)
I read an interesting series of tweets from a Vietnamese communist once. He articulated four general tiers:
-
Socialist countries where the workers control the levels of power.
-
Global south capitalist countries that suffer under superexploitation.
-
Global north capitalist countries that reap the benefits of superexploitation.
-
Fascist countries that have been completely infested with fascists
with the general rule that if countries from different tiers are at war, you should almost always support the higher tier. In the end, he saw the Russian invasion of Ukraine in almost exactly the same way as the Vietnamese invasion of the Khmer Rouge, a fascist regime that had existed for far too long that needed to be put out of its misery for the sake of humanity.
