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Tankies Sinking In Ukraine’s Muddy Fields

The war hasn’t been good for Russia’s Western apologists.

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ukraine war soldier flagWhile bombing and shelling have caused enormous death and devastation in Ukraine, particularly in cities like Mariupol, few images are more emblematic of how Russia’s ground war is going than those of Russian tanks littering the Ukrainian landscape, smoldering after Javelin missile strikes, dragged behind tractors, or lying abandoned.

Russia’s derelict heaps are also a perfect metaphor for the current state of a certain group of Western media figures who, after winning fame, fortune, and Twitter blue checks by stoking cynicism toward American foreign policy, are now flailing and floundering as they struggle to make sense of a war of naked imperialist aggression waged by Vladimir Putin’s fascist dictatorship against Ukraine’s peaceful democracy. It’s a war for which the blame falls not on the US or NATO, but entirely on Russia, an adversarial country that many of these people had admired or at least tolerated as a bulwark against US-led globalization. And it has definitely not made them look good.

You might have already come across some of these people and their recent embarrassments.

First, there’s Aaron Maté, a writer for conspiracy theory blog The Grayzone, who got more than he bargained for in a recent appearance on Chinese state television. After a leading question by the host suggesting that providing weapons Ukraine’s government has requested in order to defend itself from invasion made NATO culpable for hostilities, Maté found his lies – such as that the invasion was to ensure a Ukrainian “neutrality” that would magically stop the war and that the 2014 Euromaidan uprising that overthrew pro-Kremlin kleptocrat Viktor Yanukovych was a “US-backed coup” –  systematically demolished by the refreshingly pugilistic Kyiv Post editor Bohdan Nahaylo, who dismissed him as a “Russian propagandist.”

Next up is self-appointed media critic extraordinaire Glenn Greenwald. In a recent video, he first cautioned skepticism toward government assertions generally, but immediately thereafter gave credence to the Russian and Chinese governments’ baseless claims that the US was operating biological weapons labs in Ukraine while ridiculing US media rebuttals of those claims. This is the same Greenwald who spent much of the Trump administration savaging any journalist who took seriously Russian interference in the 2016 election and in 2018 flew to Moscow to take part in a panel on “fake news” sponsored by Russian propaganda outlet RT.

Providing some much-needed comic relief in these dark times is Michael Tracey, who apparently has been aimlessly wandering around eastern Poland like a tourist who got off at the wrong tram stop, searching for something, anything, that smacks of nefariousness by NATO or the US. Among Tracey’s Pulitzer-worthy output is a tweet quoting a “US soldier” in Mielec saying the US military is enforcing a media blackout, but with a picture of a soldier with a Polish flag on his uniform, and the shocking revelation that only 50 miles from the Ukrainian border, there’s a “Texas Bar & Restaurant.”

Just as it did in Syria, Russia is committing war crimes that include deliberate targeting of civilians, shelling homes, schools and hospitals and attempting to starve besieged people into surrendering. And just as they did amid the slaughter of Syrian civilians, these same figures – Maté and the other Grayzone ghouls in particular – launder Russia’s evils. But this time, they’re discovering that fewer people are falling for their shtick, and more are hitting back.

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Most things in life are not black-and-white, but like World War II, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is one of those rare cases where there is no gray area: Russia and its defenders are unequivocally wrong, and Ukraine and its supporters are unequivocally right. If you’re blaming the war on the West or can’t condemn Russia’s actions without resorting to whataboutism, false equivalence, or   highlighting wrongdoing or hypocrisy by the US or some other Western country, then you’re not on the right side.

This doesn’t mean there are no valid criticisms of US foreign policy, but the context in which one voices them is crucial. That’s why historical accounts of Britain’s declaration of war on Germany in 1939 aren’t immediately followed with, “But while Hitler’s invasion of Poland was bad, Britain still ruled India as a colony.” Putin is a dangerous maniac who is actively murdering innocent people and represents a clear and present danger to the world. Responding with smug lecturing about historical wrongdoing or hypocrisy to efforts to stop Putin and to expressions of solidarity with Ukraine at best indicates a failure to recognize the gravity of the situation and at worst serves to undermine those efforts through distraction and deflection.

In this way, Maté, Greenwald, Tracey and others like them all show what they really care about – and it isn’t terrified people hiding from mortar shells in Mariupol and Kherson or fleeing Kyiv and Kharkiv as refugees.

What they really care about is protecting the comfy careers and above-it-all outsider celebrity status they spent years cultivating by promoting an anti-establishment worldview that reached its peak of fashionableness during the Iraq War, but is now becoming obsolete and irrelevant.

People who adhere to this worldview are often called “tankies,” an epithet that originated during the Soviet-led crackdown on the 1956 Hungarian uprising as a term of derision for Western leftists sympathetic to the Soviets, who used tanks to crush the rebellion. Recently, it has regained currency to describe Western leftists who defend authoritarian regimes in countries like Russia, China, Syria, and Venezuela.

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British-Lebanese combat journalist Oz Katerji best summarized the tankies’ dilemma.

“My generation, which grew up in the shadow of the Iraq war, learned to be instinctively distrusting of US foreign policy, and that alone created an entire worldview in perpetuity for many of my peers, particularly on the left,” he wrote in a series of tweets. “Those same people are now very angry as they are slowly coming to realise that the generations below them have grown up largely in the shadow of Russian imperialist violence, and that they have lost control of the narrative that comforted them through decades of the war on terror.”

As a member of that generation, I know what Katerji is talking about because – and I’m embarrassed to say it – even I subscribed to that same worldview in the early 2000s, though I thankfully outgrew it.

To be sure, I maintain that Iraq War was one of the greatest foreign policy disasters in American history. The Bush administration ignored global opposition and doubts about faulty intelligence that Saddam Hussein’s regime was developing weapons of mass destruction and had links to al-Qaeda, launching a war that killed well over 100,000 people – most of them Iraqi civilians – and cost $2 trillion or more.

But much as COVID-19 can cause long-term mental problems even after the infection subsides, the Iraq War also led to a kind of geopolitical long COVID and generational cognitive impairment among many Americans. It profoundly damaged trust in government and news media, creating a deep well of knee-jerk cynicism, anti-Americanism, and the reflexive assumption that anything in mainstream media or politics is a lie. In the ensuing years, that made many Americans more susceptible to populist grift and Russian propaganda.

Social media only exacerbated the problem, both by making it easier for jaded cynics to commiserate and enabling the rise of people looking to make a living confirming their prejudices.

When I see a screed by Maté, Greenwald, or Tracey, read unhinged comments from their fans, or witness the political demagoguery of people like Tulsi Gabbard and Jill Stein, I see the same undercurrent of cynicism, everything-is-bullshit-anyway fatalism, reflexive anti-Americanism, sympathy for illiberal regimes and ideologies, and consideration for the incoherent ramblings of crackpots that I saw in the early 2000s on proto-tankie platforms like the Independent Media Center.

I recognize the same tendencies in Russian propaganda outlets like RT and Sputnik, which managed to turn them into a business model to exploit post-Iraq War cynicism and divide American society. Little wonder, then, that the infamous December 2015 Moscow dinner celebrating RT’s 10-year anniversary drew the likes of Stein, Grayzone founder Max Blumenthal, and former British House of Commons member and longtime tankie favorite George Galloway.

But if the tankie worldview had already started to lose its luster before the invasion, Russia’s unprovoked attempt to destroy Ukraine’s democracy and independence shattered it.

Now, just as the Russian tanks stuck in Ukraine’s muddy fields stand in stark contrast with the ones triumphantly rolling through the streets of Budapest 66 years ago, crushing Hungarians’ aspirations for freedom beneath their steel treads, today’s tankies’ realization of their impending irrelevance likewise contrasts with their 1956 counterparts – and even to the confidence they themselves had less than 10 years ago.

Alaric DeArment is a journalist in New York. Follow him on Twitter at @alaricnyc.

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