"During the 1930s, many communists and socialists from Germany and Austria sought refuge from the Nazis in the USSR. But in a shocking betrayal, the Soviet secret police handed over hundreds of them to Hitler’s Gestapo… https://jacobinmag.com/2021/08/hitler-stalin-pact-nazis-communist-deportation-soviet
Genocides of the USSR were horrible and there is nothing to justify them, but those are also not contemporary.
The justification of these genocides is nothing of the past, it happens in this moment. It creates a culture that will legitimize upcoming genocides. And tankies do this. The damage those genocide brought to society is also nothing that is something of the past, it is still present, and so is it important to speak about history and how it relates to the here and now.
I think most of the people living today that you like to call “tankies” are just historically ignorant, have had a bit too much USSR propaganda and likely think China is somehow cool because they are seemingly “winning” the current geo-political conflict.
But they are mostly not really bad people, just quite deluded (and that is substantially different to some hardcore Neo-Nazies).
I broadly agree with this sentiment, however, I still find their uncritical support for demonstrably awful states (like states tend to be) distasteful.
Take the Uyghur issue, for example. Occidental propaganda wants us to believe that there’s a literal, Nazi-style physical genocide, which isn’t true. Tankies point that out and claim “victory”, when Uyghurs are living in pretty shitty conditions, and the Chinese state is doing everything it can to erase their culture, even if no physical genocide is happening.
I think I read recently in an anti-cop sublemmy (ACAB? I forgot the name) that being against “all” cops is problematic, because, after all, cops in “proletariat-controled states” exert the will of the proletariat (unlike cops in burgeois-controlled states). And thus, they’re good. 🙄
I get that these people are not a serious political force. And they’re certainly not as insufferable as liberals (and they do much less damage, if any at all). But still.
Agreed.
On the topic of cops, obviously it doesn’t matter much what type of state these cops enforcing, it is more a matter of personal incentives and oversight that is needed to prevent abuse of power by those few professional cop like people that are probably a good idea to have in society despite all the ACAB rhetoric.
The issue is power itself. If “cop like people” are needed at all, they should be restricted in the power to the degree that they wouldn’t be recognizable as cops to anyone living in a modern state, (ie not having firearms, not having authority to arrest, etc).
Regardless of your opinion on the issue, cops being “unreformable”, and an institution that’s inherently shitty, is the anarchist position, and the basis behind the sentiment expressed in ACAB. Which is why its shitty to read cop apologist/bootlikers in sublemmies like that.