In the days following the results of the 2016 American presidential election, I actively searched for places to express my frustration as a young American socialist living abroad who was frankly devastated by the election results. I was overjoyed to find one Facebook group made up of Bernie Sanders supporters who wanted a place to vent. We discussed plans to perhaps mobilize protests and show solidarity with people openly discriminated against by then President-Elect Donald Trump.
In case you’re not familiar with this particular strand of communism, tankies are essentially Stalin-regime apologists who claim that any criticism against Stalin is Western propaganda. Urban Dictionary defines a tankie as a “person [who] favors overseas interventions by Soviet-style states [and] defends these regimes when they engage in human rights violation.” Tankies are often history revisionists. Although it varies from person to person, some tankies claim that Jews did not suffer under Stalin’s regime, while others flat out state that gulags never existed. Tankies exist within the communist umbrella, but many communists and people who support communism are not tankies.
I have no tolerance for tankies because of my own family’s history. On my mother’s side, my ancestry can be traced back to Beshankovichy, now a town in Russia. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, this town’s population was 80 percent Jewish at the start of the twentieth century. In contrast, at the start of World War II, only 26 percent of the town was Jewish, after Jews fled or were imprisoned and killed in gulags. Devastatingly, the remainder of the Jewish population was killed in one mass slaughter by the Nazis in 1942.
I quickly left the Facebook group because I did not feel it was a positive space for me as someone with Eastern European Jewish ancestors. My family suffered immensely because of the scapegoating of Jews in Soviet states under Stalin’s rule.
Now more than ever, leftist Jews need political communities free of anti-Semitism. One reason a Donald Trump presidency scared me was my prediction that anti-Semitism would rise. I was unfortunately completely right. At what I hope will be its worst, neo-Nazis and KKK members held a morally repugnant Unite the Right rally in August 2017. More recently, Elon Musk sent out a tweet questioning who controls the media and neglected to shut down anti-Semitic trolls who perpetrated the harmful myth that Jewish people are to blame. Meanwhile, Jewish journalists have been badgered by alt-right social media users since Trump’s candidacy.
I support socialism and communism – if a country has leaders that will not corrupt these political ideologies for their own advantage and oppress their people. I also believe socialized healthcare and free college tuition would help undo systemic issues in the United States. That’s why I voted for Bernie Sanders in the Massachusetts Democratic Primary.
But socialist and communist circles need to take a stance on tankies, because the tankie credo perpetuates anti-Semitism and in doing so delegitimizes our ideologies. This kind of history revisionism has no place in our society. It downplays the horrors that people faced and continue to face, whether at the hands of yesterday’s Stalinists or today’s neo-Nazis.
Julia Metraux is a junior studying global studies at The New School.
