With the protests that have broken out in Iran, one has seen all-too-typical reactions from those often referred to as tankies or campists. With the emergence of protests against an autocratic, theocratic regime that has positioned itself in opposition to the US, tankies and campists have been quick to denounce the protests as a US-orchestrated “color revolution.” Indeed, if the Trump administration carries out airstrikes or some other form of military intervention directed at the Iranian government, it is to be anticipated that tankies and campists will lean into this narrative all the more. This occurs even as some estimates have more than ten thousand dead as a result of brutal crackdowns in Iran.
The irony of tankies, of course, has long been that despite claiming to oppose the US empire, they see little agency in the world outside of it. Any force that claims to be in opposition to US empire, no matter if it might be a dictatorial and despotic regime, a religious theocracy, or another empire that greatly resembles the US–it must be valorized. Any force that contests such regimes–even if they are clearly popular movements–must therefore be orchestrated by the US empire. It may not be surprising that tankies and campists have thus reacted against movements in the Middle East, in Hong Kong, in Ukraine, and elsewhere.
On the other hand, in the same fashion, tankies and campists often project the domestic dynamics of the US onto other contexts. While Han Chinese, for example, may be a minority in the US that is subject to racist discrimination, they are the dominant group in China, and subject groups that are “ethnic minorities” to ethnic cleansing, cultural genocide, and other forms of oppression. Tankies and campists, however, seem constitutionally unable to grasp this fact, instead preferring to project American cultural dynamics onto China, and view China in monolithic terms as inherently an oppressed nation–never mind that one can be oppressed in one context and an oppressor in another, or that any victim can also be a victimizer.
In this sense, tankies and campists are caught in an ironic contradiction. For one, while claiming to oppose the US empire, they in fact see the world solely through the eyes of American categorical frameworks. And their worldview is one that entirely sees the US in one frame and the rest of the world in an entirely different frame.
For one, in the US context, they would react against the suggestion that the rising tide of protests against the Trump administration in the US is an inorganic phenomenon orchestrated from without as an attempt to undermine the state. Instead, they think that such demonstrations are a form of homegrown resistance to the lurch of the US toward authoritarianism–and rightly so. But this accusation is made nonetheless against protests against authoritarianism in other contexts.
It may not be surprising, then, to note that tankies and campists often seem to long for a “good empire” in the form of China, Russia, or some other would-be hegemons–resembling what is, in fact, a vision of the US, except cast as leftist. This reflects how tankies and campists have simply transmuted a form of statist, nationalist liberalism into what would consider itself a radical politics, while in fact remaining highly statist and nationalist in nature, except that the object of statist nationalism adulation has shifted to a non-US state that they can project their fantasies and desires onto. And despite professing that the Third World is the vanguard of world revolution, or what have you, it remains struggles in the US that are centered and valorized – “in the belly of the beast” – to denigrate struggles outside the US as inauthentic.
This in itself reflects what can be termed imperial ressentiment – jealousy of the struggles of the peripheries due to their authenticity that results in a sense of inadequacy, hence the desire to recenter attention to themselves and assert the primacy of struggles in the US. But given the tenets of this worldview, it is not altogether surprising when one sees campists or tankies revert back to their fundamentally statist and nationalist assumptions, as this is simply a transmuted form of nationalism.
Perhaps what one hopes for, then, is an understanding of the world that does not reduce the world outside of the US to simply the shadow play of empires, and in which logic does not selectively apply to some parts of the world, and an entirely different set of logic applies to other parts of the world. More broadly, at times, one suspects that for the tankies and campists simply view humans outside of the US only ever in the frames of alterity – only as the “liberated” subjects of supposedly socialist states that they can idealize and adulate, but who are not thought of as people who themselves might have struggles, or alternatively, as the puppets of empire that they can denigrate and feel superior to.
Brian Hioe is a freelance journalist, translator, and one of the founding editors of New Bloom.
This article originally appeared in New Bloom, an online magazine featuring radical perspectives on Taiwan and the Asia-Pacific.
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