alt Hacker NewsIn my experience, a very significant proportion of self-reported "anti-fascists" and "anti-imperialists" turn out, upon closer scrutiny, to actually be anti-US-fascism and anti-US-imperialism. They ignore, downplay, deny and ridicule all allegations of fascism and imperialism when perpetrated by others, like China or Russia.
In a somewhat related vein, there are entirely too many "anti-colonialists" in what is now fashionably called The Global South who, when push comes to shove, reveal themselves to be actually kind of okay with colonialism as long as it's not perpetrated against them. When a colonialist war of aggression is perpetrated against these white folks called "Ukrainians", and perpetrated by Russia, a country they really rather like, then what's a little colonialism between friends? Heck, Russia shows up with a colonialist militia to prop up dictators and mine for diamonds and gold all over the Sahel and it's like, heck yeah, thank for your kicking out the French. Really interesting logic.
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> In my experience, a very significant proportion of self-reported "anti-fascists" and "anti-imperialists" turn out, upon closer scrutiny, to actually be anti-US-fascism and anti-US-imperialism. They ignore, downplay, deny and ridicule all allegations of fascism and imperialism when perpetrated by others, like China or Russia.
Or, to put it another way: they're really anti-Americans.
It's interesting to see the exaggerated responses to Trump. Objectively, he's less authoritarian than say the PRC, but he's unlocked a lot of probably pre-existing resentment in US allies (probably derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...), and gotten a much stronger and more vicious response.
I mean, if you're mad about what happened to that 5 year old immigrant with the hat in Minneapolis, what you you think about what's happening to kids in Xinjiang and Tibet (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/01/09/world/asia/ti...)?
> Gyal Lo, a Tibetan education researcher, became alarmed by the boarding schools in 2016, when he saw that his two preschool-aged grandnieces, who were attending one in his hometown in northwestern China, preferred to speak Mandarin, not Tibetan.
> When the grandnieces, then ages 4 and 5, went home on the weekend, he said in an interview, they appeared withdrawn and spoke awkwardly in Tibetan with their parents, much changed from when he saw them in the previous year. Now they behaved “like strangers in their own home,” he said.
> “I said to my brother, ‘What if you don’t send them to the boarding school?’” Gyal Lo said. “He said he had no choice.”
> Gyal Lo set out to investigate the changes that families were going through as the schools expanded across Tibetan regions in China. Over the next three years he visited dozens of such schools, and saw that many Tibetan students spoke little of their mother tongue and were sometimes only able to see their parents once every several weeks or even months.
It's much worse and more systematic.
I’m sure the western chauvinists all over Hacker News and Reddit are actually correct. NATO, US, EU going into East Slavic civilization are the innocent ones. “what's a little colonialism between friends” who has ever said that? Why not stick to what is actually said, that it’s an aggressive war by NATO?
Tankies. I argue with them constantly.
My opinion, they're mostly middle class westerners that grew up in a cradle of empire, sucking from the teat of exploitative resource extraction. Then when they stopped seeing the benefits of imperialism as their country fell into late stage capitalism and eating itself alive, they turn their resentment against capitalism and correctly identify it as what's ailing their society, but somehow completely fall for the propaganda that there are socialist countries on this planet that are "fighting capitalism." They do nothing to challenge their deeply rooted western arrogance or imperialist savior complex, and begin lecturing people from smaller nations that actually, it's not imperialism when a country with a red flag does it.