This is fuckin' bizarre to see, gonna be real.
I'm gonna have to point some things out here.
-"Tankie," as a term, came from Great Britain's communist party in the 50's. It's a term created by communists-- not even people who self-describe as socialists, self-identified communists-- to derogatorily refer to those who defended Soviet action against the Czechs where they rolled the tanks in. So keep that in mind, those of you who think that communism, ab initio, implies support for the actions of the Soviet Union. It does not. If it did, the phrase "tankie" wouldn't exist. This happened in the 50's, incidentally. The rejection of the Soviet Union as real communism by communists, and the rejection of Soviet actions on humanitarian grounds, began before Stalin was even in the ground.
-Of course the Soviet Union committed genocide. At least among the socialist community here on ERA (and believe it or not, we do keep a community) that is a widely-held consensus. I was encouraged to drop a friend because he started doing the "just asking questions" routine about whether or not the Holodomor was "really" a genocide-- and I did, because I couldn't get him to change his mind about that.
-Corollary to that-- you know what's really sketchy? In 2014 the official position of the Russian Federation was to start denying that the famine in Ukraine was a genocide. From then on, you'd find a lot more socialist and communist groups online willing to cape for that shit. This may seem to be a bit off topic, but those people describing current day Russia as a soft reboot of the Soviet Union are pulling on a decently big thread. The aforementioned friend from the bullet point above suddenly also started caping for the Assad regime, claiming that he was the "true socialist choice." Which leads me to:
-When those of us who see this kind of shit happening and fight against it get lumped in with people who've started supporting state capitalist propaganda, it's pretty upsetting. I get it-- and I'd like to think most of us on SocialistERA get it-- it can be frustrating and it can feel like we're caping for horrible regimes when we suggest the actual principles of communism haven't been implemented. But at the center of that argument is the reality that propaganda has been and is always being used to shape the perception of what socialism and communism is by state actors. This is why I take a much more ambivalent position to the hammer and sickle. I don't mind it on a personal level, but it's something of an albatross around our necks in some spots. I can get why Ukranians wouldn't appreciate it. 'S not happy memories and it is, in a very subtle way, being used as a symbol against them. When socialists stick to these symbols it's out of a desire and determination to overcome the imposed definitions of these meanings. Not to go back to failed experiments but to find the untarnished spirit that created these symbols and hearken back to the dreams they carried. Whether that's even possible isn't for me to judge, honestly-- but if I had to explain why I think socialists are so dogshit at branding, it'd be this.
-It's not being ignorant of history to be familiar with the Trail of Tears or the Tuskegee experiments or the coup in Iran or the shit with the Contras or the Atlantic Slave Trade or the fuckin' Iraq War. America's done some fuckin' dirt. If the stars and stripes get to not represent that history then it stands to reason the H&S might be able to shake off its stink too. But like I said, I have no strong impulse for or against believing that's a hill worth dying over.
