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this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2026
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Were there really ever? "Anti-tankiism" was never really a tenable position, as it required ignoring the good things communist governments did and inflating, or removing from historical context and comparison with worse capitalist actions, any negative actions.
Yeah I know but like, there's a lot of anti-tankie soft-leftists who claim to be democratic socialists that I've seen be supportive of Cuba in the past and now they're just flat out ignoring it because it doesn't fit into their belief Maduro was an "evil brutal dictator" as I see repeated over and over again.
They also don't seem to know what to think now that Maduro has been captured and yet the socialists still hold power. They've never been told that the socialists are evil, just Maduro. So they seem like they're in a limbo state about what to think about Venezuela right now.
These sound like fascinating people you've encountered. That's not disbelief, mind, but it's interesting how they could come to the belief that Cuba is good but Maduro is bad. It seems like they have a lot of Cognitive Dissonance to contend with. If this is their belief system then it would be logical to assume that they're 100% in support of Venezuela now that their only obstacle to support is in a NY jail.
I can corroborate her, I've met tons of people who defend Cuba because they see it as an underdog basically while calling the PRC and USSR evil empires.
I can't put my finger on this, but I bet there's some psychology behind rooting for the "underdog" and being repulsed by the "powerful"
There's a fair bit of writing on this topic, for example this article
~~There is also this one that more explicitly links this mindset to Christian culture~~
Those are the same essay just published in two different places. It is a banger though
I'm very silly sometimes. I read the first version but not the second. Thank you for the correction.
No worries. It doesn't help that the redsails version changed the title
I have to imagine it has to do with identification. Unless you're at the top of the social order, you're going to identify with the "underdog" to some extent, but few will identify with the powerful. Even at the higher echelons, there's still plenty of people with more power, which can lead one to the false assumption of one's own downtrodden status: hence the difficulty of many white-presenting people to recognize their own privilege, even when it becomes increasingly obvious when bolstered by wealth.
I'll admit that used to be me when I was a radlib but even then I supported Venezuela and Chavez because of how much I hate bush
There's a weird current on the left where you sympathize with Latin American socialists and are willing to consider the material constraints they have to contend with, but you have nothing but disdain for Asian and Russian communists because they didn't just snap their fingers and out of thin air create productive forces and a classless society. I guess it's unexamined Cold War racism?
There's nothing weird about it, it's just good old orientalism.
Huh. Well now I have to do what I always do when confused by confounding situations: Go do some reading. It's hard for me to conceptualize what goes into someone's head to produce such a dissonant view, but it takes all types I guess. Maybe it's incomplete propagandization? Like genetic co-dominance but applied to a worldview.
Yeah, that's my experience too.
I think this also explains why Vietnam is mostly just ignored by these people. It's doing well enough that the "underdog" thing doesn't really work, and it's also not powerful enough to have all that much influence outside its own borders. Doesn't fit any sort of preconceived narrative? Just don't talk about it.