Bret Devereaux

Thanks for sharing your honest appraisal, and I'm sure an interesting discussion could be had on that topic regardless of the personal experiences of your Eastern European acquaintances (of which I also have a few) but I'm not the one serving up WWIII agitprop, Mr. Palmer is.

'Tankie' literally calls to defenses of the USSR's use of force to crush opposition in Hungary and the (modern) Czech Republic. It's as if there were people on twitter calling themselves "Anschlussies" but claiming that the only did it because they liked Hitler's vegetarianism.

If someone wears a war crime around their neck like a badge of honor, I am going to assume it is either because they are a monster who supports war crimes, or because they are an idiot who doesn't know any better. I really don't see any other options.

Especially since there are all sorts of ways to identify as more reasonable versions of the left - you can be dem-soc or even outright socialist but still repudiate the USSR. The point at which you are insisting on the virtue of murderous regimes *instead* of those options...

...is the point at which one assumes you are there primarily for the murder. What else is there to say for someone who would rather identify with Stalin instead of, say, modern Denmark and promote the former as a model instead of the latter?

I would rather uphold Stalin's efforts at keeping the USSR intact than promote Denmark, a country that enthusiastically partakes in NATO brinkmanship, bullying and US imperialism. The fact that they have a social safety net does not absolve them of all moral culpability.

Furthermore, how can Denmark be viable model for non-capitalists when it can only exist under the protective umbrella of US military hegemony that ensures it has its colonialist share of underpaid resources extracted across the "developing world"? This is shortsighted.