Bret Devereaux

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.

I think you're missing the point, which is that relying on imperfect allies in an anti-colonial struggle doesn't make that struggle hypocritical. We're talking about national movements to end colonial regimes that remained active!

This is like arguing the early US could not accept any ally with a hereditary monarch.

My point isn't that struggles of liberation were invalid (they weren't). We were talking about ideologies here - imperialism of the left and right. My point is that a cause of liberation basically had to choose between one imperialist ideology or another *imperialist ideology*