I'm a little lost on this one. So I tank pretty hard & the US has always been an imperialist state - but there really isn't anything more proletarian than killing slavers. I don't get why you think Tankies would support the confederacy.
The US was not the global hegemon it is now either, it was an imperialist state sure, but not nearly on the same level... This seems like one hell of a reach; unless you just make up your own definition of Tankie.
if they had fought for states rights over any other issue I might have been on their side. even though they were just tricking the working class into dying for them to install an aristocracy that they controlled
if they had fought for states rights over any other issue I might have been on their side. even though they were just tricking the working class into dying for them to install an aristocracy that they controlled
I uh, don't know that that's quite the right take.
Because it's not quoting a specific tankie, or because using a specific example to demonstrate the absurdity of general unqualified 'critical support' is unacceptable?
I mean, fuck's sake, on this very site you can find tankies simping for the fucking Taliban.
I just came across a comment from a Hexbear user criticizing Walz's record on calling in the National Guard during the BLM protests as state-sanctioned violence against Black people. And I kind of agree with their point tbh.
But, if opposing state-sanctioned violence is a firm principle of ML political ideology, like it is for Anarchism, then how come nearly ever tankie I've ever talked to seems perfectly ok with state-sanctioned violence when it's being carried out by Maduro, Putin, Xi, or any number of authoritarian leftists? They only ever seem to have objections when the West employs state-sanctioned violence, funnily enough.
Comparing the Taliban and the Confederacy are apples and oranges. I don't support or like either, death to the Taliban, but the Taliban were (for worse) the dominant army in the area after the USA armed and financed their precursor mujahideen. So, unfortunately, they were the only group practically capable of preventing the USA invading them from the other side of the world to seize the Afghani resources. It wasn't an invasion over slavery laws. It was for oil and trade routes, and so many people will side with the Afghani state over the imperial Western alliance despite the Taliban being a disgusting regime. And remember, the Taliban were only in power because of the Western foreign interference, so it's not like there was a real Lincoln trying to free Afghanistan from the Taliban. History of the region shows that there was never a sincere attempt to 'install democracy' there, it's pure Public Relations propaganda.