Is Trump a tankie?

[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.

[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.

[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).