this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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No sorry needed, I'm glad you found this place. Dealing with those kind of people is an experience I'm sure most, if not all, here have had at one point or another (and if I'm not mistaken, it was one of the motivations for building this forum in the first place). Some have even described experiences like it in the west with political parties that position themselves as "left" but then have shitty stances on imperialism. It can be very disillusioning.
I haven't been here since the beginning, but from what I hear, this place has been accused of being repressive in its views or something, when it's other instances on lemmy that have a tendency to defederate with it. It really is reminiscent of DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender).
So-called "tankies" are supposedly "authoritarian" but imperialists don't blink an eye when the empire justifies another aggressive and unprovoked military operation in a country thousands of miles away, when it coups other countries, when it puts sanctions on another country that result in the deaths of its citizens, and so on.
Yeah, pretty much colonialism in a nutshell. The old "civil and savage" narrative continues to rear its head. That you'll find this sort of garbage coming from people from the US makes more sense when you consider it in the context of its origins as a settler colony committing genocide and building itself through slavery, and then its subsequent transformation to a global imperial power. And its western europe allies, many of them have their share of brutal parts in colonial history. British empire, French colonialism, Belgian, etc.
There's a term you'll probably come across, if you haven't already learned about it. Ultra-left, or left-com. Some people who purport to be on the left and even are closer to being marxist-leninist than the colonizer-brained people tend to be, will try to pull this "both sides" thing and say "the US is imperialist but also China is". So that's another angle to look out for. China, from all the evidence I've seen, does mutually-beneficial deals with other countries, or even gives them loans that are easy to pay back to help them build vital infrastructure, which is markedly different from the imperial practice of predatory loans and purposeful underdevelopment of a country in order to maintain control of it and use it as an outpost for extracting resources. ProleWiki has a good article on that here: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Imperialism#Chinese_%22imperialism%22
It was doubly frustrating because one person who took GREAT offense to the video, who also linked to wikipedia articles like the kidnapping of a Japanese director or the Malaysia assassination in 2017. When disputed on this, I was not allowed to talk about it because I was "some white dude in Iceland" and they however, was a child of a refugee from the Vietnam war(southern region I think?) and that there's generational trauma that somehow gives them higher authority on the opinion of this entire conversation. Who then proceeded to defend imperialism while at the same time saying they have issues with US imperialism. What am I to think about this? It was very confusing. Said person was American too.
I wasn't sure what to think of it myself, because well. I am not oppressed, I am white and living within the imperial core is a status of privilege no matter how well I am actually doing in life. Still though, that whole interaction still bothers me. Is it wrong?
I also read https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Essay:State_Capital_vs._Finance_Capital:_Why_China_is_not_--_and_Cannot_Become_--_an_Imperial_Hegemon which I thought was a very good essay.
Oh yeah, that's a frustrating sort of trap. You're trying to be conscientious about being a white person talking to someone who is considered non-white and they're using this against you to push narratives that actually benefit white supremacy. So I think that's the important thing to look for, is when the implicit narrative they're pushing is enabling of white supremacy and its racism. vs. when they're sharing a lived experience that is worth listening to and taking into account.
The common implication here, for example, is that 1) They (sometimes as a person who has never even lived in the region they're talking about, who is only related to it by ethnicity and distance of being a descendant of someone who has) somehow speak for millions of people who do live there and who grew up there and who still live there. 2) What the people who do live there say is not worth listening to or is tainted when they overall like their government because "they're brainwashed" (millions of them, apparently). Which is pretty racist.
So it circles back to the superiority thing, but they're siding with the imperial/colonial view instead of the one that benefits their own people (and to be fair, they may have less connection with their ethnic country of origin than the imperial core country they live in if they grew up in the empire, immersed in its culture).
As for where they get the narratives like "my father/grandfather/etc. was oppressed by the government and fled", sometimes that goes back to their relative being among the power elite from the previous regime and so they fled for that reason. Like a landlord. It's not always the case, but when we're talking about governments led by a communist vanguard party, it is one of the reasons those stories get started. I believe another reason is people buying into fear-mongering of "scary commies" when the change of power happens and fleeing for that reason. War of course can be scary and involve hardship regardless of what side you're on, and Vietnam was trying to shake off the yoke of colonialism.
So yeah, in short: If they're pushing views that further white supremacy, them being non-white doesn't excuse it. And some of the so-called victims of communism are members of the former exploiting class who ran. If you're ever uncertain about it, please feel free to bring it up more on this forum and ask. None of us is imbued with proper judgment on it with ease and working through stuff together can help.
P.S. I don't think I've actually read that essay myself, but I will give it a read, thanks for mentioning it. Looks like a good addon to the point, to further back it up.