Is Trump a tankie?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

He's the first post-WW2 President to speak positively of the Soviet Union.

[Peanut]

Quite clearly.

[Famous Mortimer]

The Soviet Union (1926-1991) was nationalist.

[Crumpets]

No, he's a nazbol Hoxhaist obvs.

[Indy Texas]

Two of his three wives are from former Eastern Bloc countries.

In the '80s, he bought ad space in newspapers to print an open letter calling for a less aggressive Cold War policy.

He's demonstrated constant fascination with Russia and desire to do business there.

Vladimir Putin is literally the only person he is unwilling to speak ill of.

[GMantis]

Two of his three wives are from former Eastern Bloc countries.

This is an ignorant statement and also incredibly xenophobic if advanced as an argument for Trump being pro-Soviet.

[mvd10]

Yes, absolutely. This is why we need real right-wingers like Bolsonaro. Trump is fake and he is a traitor to the cause. Bolsonaro is the real deal.

[darklordoftech]

He literally said, "I like Putin".

[Rules for me, but not for thee]

If so you lefties should love him

[HillGoose]

The Soviet Union (1926-1991) was nationalist.

nah man they were just a nation of sad, starving people.

nothing admirable about the Soviet Union.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

If so you lefties should love him

I hate all tankies.

[pbrower2a]

Two of his three wives are from former Eastern Bloc countries.

This is an ignorant statement and also incredibly xenophobic if advanced as an argument for Trump being pro-Soviet.

I can assure you that the Soviet Union got very little support from peoples connected to nations within the Soviet bloc, except for some Jewish families that brought proto-Bolshevik values with them. America got many Russian refugees hostile to Bolshevism.

Ferocious opposition to Communism is commonplace among Polish-Americans, the Slavic-Americans with which I have the most familiarity in view of living in a community that has many of them. If I lived in certain parts of Texas I would probably say the same of Czech-Americans, and if I lived in certain parts of Ohio I would say much the same about Hungarian-Americans (OK, they are not Slavs, but that is not the point).

The only Americans sympathetic to any officially-Marxist regime who have ethnic connections to a Commie state of the Cold War are Korean-Americans whom the People's Republic of China (PRC) has cultivated as allies. South Korea is a significant trading partner of the PRC, and Korean-Americans have plenty of commercial ties to the PRC.  Korean-Americans might be delighted if the People's Liberation Army (of the PRC) liberates North Korea in response to something that a state grossly-undemocratic state best described as an absolute monarchy that in no way represents any part of the Korean people does something really stupid, like launching a missile at the United States over Chinese airspace.

If you know anything about the DPRK, it makes China look like a free country by contrast!     

[Person Man]

What the heck is a tankie? I imagine its not good and  don't think it describes someone who habitually drinks Tanqueray.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

The Soviet Union (1926-1991) was nationalist.

Like literally anything, “in a sense”.

EDIT: To clarify a bit, the USSR adopted a variety of pro-Russian, pro-minority, and civic policies over the decades. I am not familiar to any extent with all of them, but they ranged from the banal to the monstrous. For example, a variety of minorities were, to my knowledge, intentionally dispersed in the twenties or the thirties, presumably in order to assimilate them and diffuse any prior ethnic identity; it might be possible to see this both as a Russian chauvinist move and as one attempting to build a civic, rather than ethnic, identity. Nevertheless (particularly after Stalin's death), the non-Russian SSR's were given opportunities to build up their political infrastructure with natives. In some situations, such as Georgia and Armenia, this was successful (one name was "korenizatsia"--I'm sure there's a misspelling there--which meant "nativization"). Thus, you could say that in some cases the Soviet Union built the very apparatuses that strengthened the national identities of minorities. Nevertheless, such was not the case eveywhere, and, particularly in Central Asia, the Communist Parties were dominated by Europeans even if the official executive title was given to a member of the titular nationality. And, while manufacturing and middle class professions were dominated by Europeans in Central Asia, there is some contention as to whether this was a result of the lifestyle of the native, often nomadic peoples; the difficulties in learning technical terminology, much of which was borrowed from Russian; or simple ethnic chauvinism. So the question of whether or not the Soviet Union was "nationalist", and on whose behalf is very much up in the air.

If so you lefties should love him

I hate all tankies.

Christ calls us to Love.

[Hollywood]

Yes, absolutely. This is why we need real right-wingers like Bolsonaro. Trump is fake and he is a traitor to the cause. Bolsonaro is the real deal.

What the hell is a real right-winger in terms of American Politics and what is the cause? 

[Sestak]

What on earth would indicate that?

[All Along The Watchtower]

No, he's just a moron.

[Chunk Yogurt for President!]

We all know that Jeb is the real tankie.

[PSOL]

Either way, Sir Woodsbury( I meant Mortimer, whoops) is right on something, the Soviet Union was a Russian imperialist entity. From deportations to Siberia to ending the multipluralistic Korenization policy at the start of Stalin, all of these factors are not surprisingly being supported by modern fascists with them moving on from old animosity, as proven by Trump being safe saying something as horrid as this.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

A Serb - which I think mgop is.

Interesting. I know a lot less about the Balkans than the (former) USSR proper. Wasn't aware Serbs (which I'm going to have to assume out of the former Yugoslav nations have a historical memory most mirroring that of Russians) shared that same idea. Would've thought they viewed Croats in that light. Were their confrontations between Ukrainian and Yugoslav forces in the forties?

Isn’t that a Polish perspective on Ukrainians?

I can't speak with any authority on that. There were those in Ukraine and Georgia who sided with the Axis powers as such in their situation equated to opposing Soviet authorities. That seems like the type of thing that would stick in certain historical imaginations more than others. You can see it today in the way Putin and others refer to Ukrainian nationalists (not that such can't have fascist elements, of course). A Pol would at the very least have the historical memory of combined Nazi/Soviet domination the way a Russian might not, and we can see that in the rhetoric of the current Polish government; not sure how Ukrainian fits into that paradigm.

Either way, Sir Woodsbury is right on something, the Soviet Union was a Russian imperialist entity. From deportations to Siberia to ending the multipluralistic Korenization policy at the start of Stalin, all of these factors are not surprisingly being supported by modern fascists with them moving on from old animosity, as proven by Trump being safe saying something as horrid as this.

Are you referring to a statement made outside this thread? I don't see a post by Sir Woodbury here. And a good deal of the weird love affair some in the far right have with the Soviet Union, at least in this case, likely stems from an imagined community with other Europeans in fighting the (real or perceived) terrorist/theocratic/Muslim threat stemming from the Middle East. There's a certain weird synthesis with Gabbard types; TNF, a former poster here and a Marxist Leninist (so well to Gabbard's left), very much despised the US' decision to over throw  regime that, in his telling, brought secular reform to Afghanistan.

[Arturo Belano]

We all know that Jeb is the real tankie.

Jeb would've made Stalin look like a ing anarchist.


Someone should ask Trump about Hungary '56 to make sure

[DavidB.]

Interesting. I know a lot less about the Balkans than the (former) USSR proper. Wasn't aware Serbs (which I'm going to have to assume out of the former Yugoslav nations have a historical memory most mirroring that of Russians) shared that same idea. Would've thought they viewed Croats in that light. Were their confrontations between Ukrainian and Yugoslav forces in the forties?

They definitely view Croats in that light too - the trope according to which more than half the Croats are covert or open Ustashe supporters and all that. There were no Yugoslav-Ukrainian confrontations in WW2, the relationship is indirect: Serbs and Russians feel a sense of brotherhood (already going back for a long time, of course; the Serbian struggle for independence from the Turks is relevant here, as is WW1) and Russia's side of the conflict is therefore more popular in Serbia than the Ukrainian side, and hence Croats, on the other hand, feel close to the Ukrainians. You also saw it during the World Cup, when some Croat players dedicated their win against Russia to the Ukrainians.

Of course these are generalizations and many people in all these societies mentioned don't think this way, but it's a type of thought that's prevalent.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Interesting. I know a lot less about the Balkans than the (former) USSR proper. Wasn't aware Serbs (which I'm going to have to assume out of the former Yugoslav nations have a historical memory most mirroring that of Russians) shared that same idea. Would've thought they viewed Croats in that light. Were their confrontations between Ukrainian and Yugoslav forces in the forties?

They definitely view Croats in that light too - the trope according to which more than half the Croats are covert or open Ustashe supporters and all that. There were no Yugoslav-Ukrainian confrontations in WW2, the relationship is indirect: Serbs and Russians feel a sense of brotherhood (already going back for a long time, of course; the Serbian struggle for independence from the Turks is relevant here, as is WW1) and Russia's side of the conflict is therefore more popular in Serbia than the Ukrainian side, and hence Croats, on the other hand, feel close to the Ukrainians. You also saw it during the World Cup, when some Croat players dedicated their win against Russia to the Ukrainians.

Of course these are generalizations and many people in all these societies mentioned don't think this way, but it's a type of thought that's prevalent.

Thanks for the clarification. Makes sense, given not only their long relationship (which has, of course, persisted after the Soviet Union’s demise), but also their sort-of shared space at the center of collapsed multinational Communist countries. I kinda get a kick out of the Croat-Ukrainian soccer bit (my Russian teacher was actually Croatian-American, so despite my knee-jerk contrarian support for Russia in most matches, my other biases were made to prevail in that match).

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Now we're seeing this with his pro-Juche sympathies.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Boris Yeltzin was the Dem; however, the KGB lead by Putin runs Russia