Edit for clarity: I’m not asking why the Tankie/Anarchist grudge exist. I’m curious about what information sources - mentors, friends, books, TV, cultural osmosis, conveys that information to people. Where do individuals encounter this information and how does it become important to them. It’s an anthropology question about a contemporary culture rather than a question about the history of leftism.
I’ve been thinking about this a bit lately. Newly minted Anarchists have to learn to hate Lenin and Stalin and whoever else they have a grudge against. They have to encounter some materials or teacher who teaches them “Yeah these guys, you have to hate these guys and it has to be super-personal like they kicked your dog. You have to be extremely angry about it and treat anyone who doesn’t disavow them as though they’re literally going to kill you.”
Like there’s some process of enculturation there, of being brought in to the culture of anarchism, and there’s a process where anarchists learn this thing that all (most?) anarchists know and agree on.
Idk, just anthropology brain anthropologying. Cause like if someone or something didn’t teach you this why would you care so much?
Makhno is a pretty sordid example from a modern perspective (with the abuse he facilitated)
This is literally Zenz style gossip if you look at any modern studies of the period.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230610081318/http://www.ditext.com/voline/687.html
Offhand example. ctrl f “The second fault of Makhno” for the part I’m thinking of. It’s a highly sympathetic source and still contains things like that. Is this testimony debunked?
Haha I actually have to hand this one to you, because I was sure you were talking about the mythology of Makhno the Jew Killer given the progroms bit. The Pogroms bit is the one that’s Zenz style gossip given modern appraisals. Voline was correct.
From a modern perspective most of this period is quite literally horror. The Reds were not much better on this front, in fact quite worse given the way the Red Army sourced soldiers and what those soldiers did in turn. The Whites and Ukrainian Nationalists were the absolute worst.
No, the pogrom thing was Makhno recklessly handing out guns in the name of, uh, autonomy, I assume, and then some of those people getting together (independent of any direction from Maknho) going and doing ethnic cleansing on whichever ethnicity they disliked before Makhno’s people circled around to putting down the rightwing death squad that they were responsible for. I know Makhno personally targeting ethnicities isn’t a true story, I just think that he was immensely negligent and idealistic on the issue of arming populations and it resulted in some of the most needless deaths imaginable in vulnerable communities.
Could you elaborate on the Reds being worse? I know about the mythology a bit later in WW2 where it was part of their “Asiatic hordes” image that they did such things more than the other armies, but I don’t know about claims from this time. I bear some skepticism that such things would be worse under Lenin, since he was pretty progressive on gender equality, compared to someone who is implied to have personally engaged in gangremoved.
