Bret Devereaux

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).

It is fair to call BS on the USA's anti-colonial bona fides because of our bad behavior in Latin America, for instance. It is equally fair to call BS on the anti-colonial bona fides of 'anti-colonial' regimes that openly aligned with the USSR or the PRC.

The USA shrugged at the efforts of France and Britain to keep their empires for strategic reasons and that's bad. But it is exactly the same shrug offered by 'anti-colonialist' regimes when their own 'side' was doing the imperialism.

We are talking about movements struggling against *their own* colonization who perceived the USSR as an ally in that struggle. Many of them would have happily allied themselves with the US as well, only to find that was not an option.

Sure! my point though is that they weren't decided between imperialist wolves and communist doves. They were deciding between the wolves and the *other* wolves. 'Our interests align with these imperialists over those imperialists' does not a moral stance make.