Bret Devereaux

Meanwhile, you've got the complexity of Imperial Japan - openly ideologically hostile to 'western colonial rule' but also, you know, a brutal, extractive imperial power just looking to replace the 'western' in that phrase and not the other two words.

Japan's imperial apologists are also of course of the right. I don't think various kinds of policy continuity between the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union makes the former a left-wing project in any sense that is compatible with a coherent political lexicon.

I think the US gets enormous mileage out of being doe-eyed about this but virtually everywhere else with an imperial legacy the political right is openly aligned with the colonial project.

The Russian Empire had collapsed, its subject peoples had obtained freedom, and then the Soviets opted to use the Red army to claw those people back in, violently suppress them and then applied the same treatment to eastern Europe. I'm not sure what else to call that.

This isn't a case of inheriting a functioning empire and deciding to keep it - the Tsarist empire was *gone* and the Soviets actively *rebuilt* it. See also the PRC rebuilding the Qing's empire, to the sorrow of the Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongolians.

I think the danger here is that there are few enough leftist regimes with any actual power that there is a temptation to no-true-scotsman all of them in service to the 'communism is anti-colonial' line which seems to me to have always been a lie.

That line is most importantly applied to the third world, where anti-colonial regimes *were* very frequently communist and right-wing blocs ostensibly organized along traditionalist lines almost always allied with (or directly represented) colonial projects.

Again, I think we need to be clear here when we say 'anti-colonial' that we don't just mean 'we are against the colonies of our enemies,' but I will grant that a lot of national liberation movements were leftist (though a lot weren't).