HOISTED FROM THREE YEARS AGO: Tankies Gonna Tank—The Sheer Weirdness of the Putin Acolytes
From 2022-05-07: Tariq Ali managed to be wrong both before and after the invasion—and in a revealing way. On 2022-02-16., eight days before the assault, he was serenely certain that talk of a “massive” and “imminent” Russian invasion was just a U.S.-driven media psy‑op, with NATO as the real aggressor and Moscow merely “alarmed” and “slow‑witted” in response. The core move was to treat Ukrainian security as epiphenomenal, and NATO expansion as nothing but “voluntarist imperial strategy,” “not a question of national defence.” That last clause is not just analytically sloppy; it is flatly false. NATO enlargement is, very obviously, about the national defense of the countries that begged to join—first and foremost Ukraine…
That is surely the weirdest thing about the provocation of my “Tankies Gonna Tank” piece from three years ago is that on 2022-02-16, eight mere days before Putin launched his attempted three-day seizure of Ukraine, Tariq Ali was 100% certain that Putin had no plans to attack:
Tariq Ali (2022-02-16): News from Natoland <https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/news-from-natoland>: ‘Since 3 December 2021, when the Washington Post ‘broke’ the story—based on some aerial photos of tents in a field and other helpfully selected nuggets of US intelligence—the Anglophone world has been subjected to a highly orchestrated media campaign, trumpeting at top volume the ‘massive’ and ‘imminent’ Russian invasion of Ukraine…. Unnamed US security officials are wheeled out like clockwork to issue pronouncements…. Sotto voce, the cat had already been let out of the bag as to the Biden Administration’s main goals. American officials were ‘pushing European countries’ to create a ‘common prescription’ against Russia….
What tropes do the warmongers offer? First, Putin is the unilateral source of aggression, mobilizing a vast invasion force out of the blue for ‘imminent’ action. Second, NATO’s expansion is non-negotiable. Third, it is impermissible under the ‘rules-based [read: US-led] international order’ for borders to be redrawn by force. Fourth, national sovereignty must be inviolate; Ukraine must determine its own foreign policy.
What are the realities?…. Moscow was… alarmed when the Biden Administration winked at the Ukrainian military’s use of drone warfare in the Donbas in October 2021, when aerial weapons were strictly prohibited by the Minsk agreements….
It is NATO’s forces that have been on the offensive, advancing 800 miles eastward over the last thirty years, deep inside the borders of the former Soviet Union and now penetrating the Russian-speaking heartlands. The Kremlin proved at first gullible and slow-witted in responding to this…. NATO expansion—subordinating the advanced-capitalist European heartlands to US military command—is a voluntarist imperial strategy, not a question of national defence…
The last of these is simply wrong: NATO expansion is a question of Ukrainian national defense.
And yet, two months later, when it still looked liked Putin’s victory might occur in three months if not three days, he was still in there pitching for Putin.
There I suppose the truly weirdest thing is that Tariq Ali can write with an apparently straight face that:
The spinal cord of the Third Reich was, after all, crushed at Stalingrad and Kursk by the determination and courage of the Red Army…. The strength of the US war industry did the rest…
Had Britain and the US made a separate peace with Hitler in mid-1943 (Nazi withdrawal from Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, France, and Italy, say), Russia loses WWII. Without Churchill, the US is (a) not in the war at all, and (b) would have no base to deploy for any material attack—by sea, air, or land—against Nazi Europe.
It’s not “horseshoe theory”: it’s “circle theory”/
Tankies Gonna Tank:
What impels someone to sneer at Volodymyr Zelenskyy in these times? And what compels the New York Review of Books to publish it?
“Tankies gonna tank” is a truism:
Tariq Ali: The Churchill Cult: ‘The English cult of Winston Churchill… near-absurdist… backlash from anticolonial critics… received a further boost in March this year…. Russian president Vladimir Putin was assigned the role of Hitler. Zelensky took the part of Churchill. Members of Parliament from all four parties drooled with pleasure. NATO-land may have conferred a temporary sainthood on Zelensky, but we should not overlook how misplaced his analogy is. The spinal cord of the Third Reich was, after all, crushed at Stalingrad and Kursk by the determination and courage of the Red Army (in which many Ukrainians fought, in far greater numbers than those who deserted to Hitler). The strength of the US war industry did the rest…
LINK: <https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2022/04/18/the-churchill-cult-by-jingo/>
I really do wish I had more of an insight into the… peculiar psychology… that leads somebody today to sneer at Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians.
There was, after all, at least a kind of dishonorable grandeur in being a stooge for Stalin—if you sincerely thought that he was a brutal and unworthy standard-bearer for what would become a real utopia sometime in the future; or that you had to choose between totalitarianisms because liberalism’s day was over, and Stalin was a lesser evil than Hitler.
There is neither honor nor grandeur in being a useful idiot for Vladimir Putin.
All honor to the soldiers of the Red Army who won the decisive battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, and all honor to the workers of Magnitogorsk who built their tanks, and to the peasants enserfed on their collective farms who fed them. But you have to either be lying or have worked hard to keep yourself ignorant to think that “the spinal cord of the Third Reich was… crushed at Stalingrad and Kursk…. The strength of the US war industry did the rest.”
Up to the end of 1942, Nazi war industry produced 8600 medium and heavy tanks. Thereafter they produced 29,500. Yes, the Nazis lost about 1000 tanks at Stalingrad and Kursk each, but the Nazi army was still far more deadly after those battles than before.
Anyone even slightly well-informed about World War II in Europe who is not a liar says that all three of the major allies were essential. Without Russia, there was no path to victory for Britain and the U.S. (save, perhaps, for the one that turned Germany into a sea of radioactive glass). Without the U.S., it is very difficult to see any path to victory at all for Britain and Russia. And without Britain’s holding out from summer 1940 to summer 1941, Russia cannot hold when the Nazis attack, and the Americans never get into the war in Europe at all for they have no place to stage their army and air force to.
Without Churchill, Britain does not hold out.
But we did have Churchill, and we did have a British Labour Party, headed by Clement Attlee, that was strongly anti-fascist and insisted that Churchill had the government, rather than someone who had not been an out-and-out opponent of appeasement. The British Labour Party was right.
Churchill was a great asshole, but he was the asshole that the world needed in the summer of 1940.
One Video:
Volodymyr Zelenskyy: “We Are Still Here” <https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=wgCNKhtZYks>: