Imagine that you’re a landless peasant from a poor country in West Africa:

You’ve been ground down your entire life, toiling for 12 hours a day in the sun for a small barely subsistence wage. Your parents were born as colonial subjects in a European colony. Your grandparents were essentially slaves. Your great grand parents were formally slaves. After decolonization, the CIA backed a coup in your country that installed a brutal dictator that terrorized your people and chopped up your parents for having been involved in the decolonial struggle.

You find out about a subversive political group that’s been preaching everything you know intuitively but could never articulate. They say that your labor is exploited, and the reason your pay is so low is because a cut gets sent to the West where white people will get to use it to live lavishly. The group is your local Communist Party.

You get educated through free classes by the Communist Party and eventually become a member. You risk imprisonment for just being a member and the ruling regime has been known to disappear and torture Communists. You don’t care, it’s worth it. You’ve now read virtually all of Marx and Lenin and Mao and Fanon etc despite never having attended school. Your involvement in the Party over the years gets you into influential positions within it.

You attend an international meeting of Communist Parties as a representative from your country. It’s an extreme honor to work with comrades from all around the world. You hear their stories and realize that their struggles are the same whether they’re in Africa, the Middle East or Latin America. The group sets out to work on a principled anti-imperialist line to help liberate all these comrades from the grip of imperialism and eventually capitalism. You understand that socialism is impossible in your country until the aggression and exploitation from the West ceases, so this is very important to you. You and your comrades have decided that despite many of their flaws, you should support Russia as a counterweight to US Imperialism which has utterly decimated your peoples, as well as DPRK, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and China, which have all always stood by your comrades when they fight Western occupation and exploitation.

On the other side of the world, sitting in an air conditioned suburban home that is worth more than all the homes and possessions of all the people in your village combined, is the infamous western anarchist (or democratic socialist, whatever they’re going by at the moment). He’s 28 and recently laid off from his job as assistant manager at pizza hut. He’s not a millionaire or anything but he never has to skip meals, has electricity, clean running water, and owns a catalog of video games worth more than your annual salary. He’s never had to work more than a 10 hour shift baking bread sticks. He’s been living off his parents who are both retired and receive generous pensions funded by collecting dividends from companies that exploit your village. The western leftist looks at his laptop made with rare earth minerals from your country (three of your cousins died in the mines) and is also worth enough to feed your children for three years.

He sees on Twitter dot com that an international group of Communist Parties has released their Anti-Imperialist line in support of Russia. The western leftist reads it as he sips coffee that was made from beans grown in your comrade’s home country, where his mother, father and aunt and uncle were all killed by CIA-backed death squads. The western leftist reads the article and is incensed. “How could they do this? How could they be this stupid? Fucking tankies, don’t they know you can support oppressed people without supporting authoritarian dictatorships”?

(Taken with slight modifications from an old post on CTH, that place had the occasional gem)