TOM EATON | Thanks, but no tanks, Russia

Russian tanks are rolling through an eastern European country. Civilians are being killed. In faraway capitals leftists are explaining that the country in question is being occupied because it is fascist and that the West has no business calling for peace, even as it drops bombs on the Middle East. Welcome to 1956.

In autumn that year students in Hungary began to protest against the Stalinist puppet government, demanding democratic freedoms and an end to colonial domination by the Soviet Union. Protests became an uprising and Nikita Khrushchev sent his tanks into Budapest. Three thousand civilians were killed and 20,000 arrested as “counter-revolutionaries”.

Safely sitting a continent-width away, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) applauded the violence, with its newspaper, Daily Worker, saying the tanks were a response to “fascist-reactionary” forces in Hungary which were trying to restore capitalism there. According to journalist and author Ian Black, an emergency meeting of the CPGB commenced with its secretary-general announcing that imperialism was trying to take back the country and that if the Red Army hadn’t intervened, “Hungary would become a fascist base with a dagger pointed at the socialist countries”.

(In an attempt to bolster its claims, the party sent a Daily Worker journalist to Hungary to find evidence of fascist violence. All he found was Soviet aggression, and said as much. His honesty didn’t go down well at HQ: of the three stories the journalist filed, said Black, two were binned and the third was “heavily edited”.)

But then some CPGB stalwarts started doing something extraordinary by today’s standards: they began to weigh ideology against reality.

The ongoing invasion of Egypt by Israel, France and the UK was, they still insisted publicly, an imperialist crime. But in the privacy of committee rooms an increasing number of members began to feel the violence unfolding in Hungary couldn’t be reconciled with their anti-imperialist beliefs.

According to Black, it was the beginning of the end for the CPGB. Of course, some hardliners remained, dubbed “tankies” by the disgruntled faction because of their support for crushing democratic dissent with tanks, but when the USSR and three Warsaw Pact subordinates invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 to suppress a similar uprising, the haemorrhage accelerated, until only a devoted few remained to shepherd the party towards obscurity and eventual death in 1991.

The ANC has also demonstrated that its loyalty to old friends is more than just talk: every year it makes South Africans poorer to make Cubans richer. But this is where genuine ideology, and honesty, end.

It’s easy to mock those utopian, ultimately disillusioned defectors. But as I’ve met SA’s tankies in the press and on social media, and read their evasive or belligerent defences of Russia, I can’t help feeling that those British communists were considerably more principled than many of my compatriots. And it’s got me thinking again about how and why we believe, or pretend to believe, what we do.

To be fair, some of the South African support for Russian President Vladimir Putin has deep and perhaps logical roots. The Soviet Union gave financial and military support to the liberation movement. I also suspect people who have lived under an occupation by right-wing fascists, as millions of black South Africans did, might be more inclined to deny the harsher realities of a Soviet occupation.

The ANC has also demonstrated that its loyalty to old friends is more than just talk: every year it makes South Africans poorer to make Cubans richer.

But this is where genuine ideology, and honesty, end.

If any of this were informed by political integrity, the genuine ideologues on SA’s left would be doing what those CPGB members did in the 1960s: having realised it is impossible to be anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist, while supporting the imperial adventures of Russia’s uber-capitalist president, they would have denounced him or at least shuffled awkwardly into the shadows.

Our local Putinescas, however, haven’t gone that route because their support isn’t rooted in principle or policy.

For some, Putin is a hero simply for angering the imperial West. For others, he is the last real man, holding back a tide of feminists and LGBTQI people seeking to cast down the all-wise, all-powerful penis. I suspect a number of self-proclaimed socialists also use him to justify their hottest and sweatiest capitalist fantasies, ogling his palaces and yachts from behind the veil of his anti-Western credentials, as if all that gold and marble and red velvet were a gift from the grateful pensioners of Omsk.

Where things get complicated, however, is that few of these tankies seem to be fundamentally bad people. I’m sure they love their children and are kind and generous to their friends. They are certainly not monsters.

So how did they get that way? And under which circumstances could I go the same way?

How little would have to change for me to drift down that path whereby I first defend the unpalatable, before defending the indefensible? Am I anchored in principle or am I, like them, simply dancing to political, historical and economic tunes that seem like universal truth? Where do I draw political and moral lines, and do I understand why I’m drawing them here rather than there?

I’m not sure our tankies are open to such questions from a reactionary scumbag such as me. But if they won’t hear it from me, perhaps they’ll listen to those elderly British communists, and remember that walking away from a morally untenable position doesn’t make you a sell-out. It just makes you right.