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?
yeah I suppose it would be better to say “the red scare is more recent, and anarchism has a more accepted culture built around it” (ie punk, see: hot topic joke below)
anarchism hasn’t been a geopolitical threat to
hegemony so the hate machine isn’t spun up.
if there were a major anarchist insurgency somewhere relevant or a longstanding thorn in the empire’s paw like Cuba is they’d be more overt in marketing the repression.
the green scare and WTO protests of the 90s definitely targeted anarchists. the ALF and ELF were the FBI’s major concerns of domestic insurrection even while mcveigh and other nazis were bombing federal buildings.
The feds were right. The ecologists were far and away the biggest domestic threat to the regime. If the ecologists had been successful in convincing the public that global warming was a world altering threat the government might have toppled.
yeah they crushed that shit while it was small.