I wish that more leftists were like this author. We don’t have to overwhelmingly agree with each other. What we should be doing is making serious, continuous efforts to understand each other; efforts that don’t with us hastily dismissing the other as ‘crazy’, or ‘stupid’, or whatever oversimplification feels most useful at the moment; efforts that involve empathy. I’m not even talking about ‘left unity’ — that’s unlikely to survive in the long term — but conscious, informed neutrality; an absence of hostility that we arrive at through our patience and reasoning. That is the approach that I want to see more of us practise.
Vaush is pro colonialism and pro imperialism so of course he slanders “tankies.” That doesn’t make him stupid, it makes him my political enemy. It makes him dangerous. I’d rather he be silenced than engaged with.