"The enemy of my enemy is my friend" type left wing campism is extremely dispiriting when it generates this type of denialism among American anti-racism activists.
It also contrasts with earlier generations of African American left engagement with Soviet anti-racism 1/
Over 90 years ago African-American intellectuals like Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson traveled to the Soviet Union to see for themselves an internationalist, anti-racist and anti-colonial Communism in practice. Even as the Soviets were persecuting their own people 2/
The internationalism touted by the Soviets seemed to promise an end to global racism and class oppression - and contrasted starkly with institutional Jim Crow violence and discrimination in the US South, and tolerance for white supremacy in the rest of America. 3/
Yet even as evidence emerged of Stalin's terror and a growing Russian nationalism fueled post-war persecutions of minorities including Jews, some true believers like Robeson could not let go of their belief in a communism that would end racial and class oppression 4/
in the rest of the world, including the United States. Robeson's Russian Jewish friends testified to him of their danger during his 1949 visit to the Soviet Union. While Robeson defiantly sang "Zog Nit Keynmol" in Yiddish in a Moscow concert afterward 5/
for his persecuted Jewish friends, outside of the Soviet Union he could not bring himself to speak out against Stalin's Terror and the anti-Jewish pogroms. 6/ blogs.shu.edu/history/2015/1…
I can understand the tragedy of African-American intellectuals like Robeson holding onto their pro-Soviet Communist beliefs in an era when white supremacy was institutionalized in the Jim Crow South, racial discrimination widespread and Communist nations offered a 7/
seemingly compelling, alternative vision of global class and racial justice...to those who could close their eyes to its domestic repressions. But anti-racist activists and Black leftists supporting a CCP regime that displays ample evidence of ethno-nationalist chauvinism, 8/
which discriminates against minorities - including continental African migrants - and which commits genocide against peoples such as the Uyghurs: that is not tragedy. it is farce. end/ theafricareport.com/39012/its-been…
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