Dimitri Lascaris is no “ecosocialist.” He’s a fraud and a tankie
I had an interesting online interaction with Dimitri Lascaris, a Canadian-Greek activist who visited Russia (well not really — more about it below) recently and is now planning a tour of Canadian cities where he will be sharing his experience with fellow Canadians. He claims to “help generate a dialogue between Canadians and Russians, because without dialogue, there can be no peace.” In the spirit of this dialogue, I asked him, as a Russian, to shut up with his pro-Putin nonsense. It probably wasn’t very diplomatic of me, but I have very skewed optics in this particular area, which I’ll also explain below. Lascaris chose an interesting avenue of rebuttal. He responded to me thus: “Who appointed you the spokesperson for all Russians? Did you win some election?” It’s interesting because Lascaris himself doesn’t seem to represent much of anyone in Canada: not even the majority of members of his own Green party which currently holds a grand total of 2 seats in the House of Commons.
Whether I’m better prepared to be the judge of my own country than a Western tourist is up to you. I’m a Russian citizen, born in Moscow, and for the better part of my life I’ve been a journalist. I now live in exile because, under the new laws which came into effect on March 4, 2022, just one single story with my byline on it could get me in prison. Unlike people much braver than me who decided to keep reporting from inside Russia — at enormous risk to themselves and their families — I’m not prepared to take that gamble.
Also, let’s get one thing straight from the get-go. My country is a fascist dictatorship. It’s a shitty one, because even if Putin wanted to go full fash, his stormtroopers would immediately run out of jackboots because by that point they’d all have been pilfered from the army warehouses and sold to international airsoft enthusiasts by generals whose wives live in kitschy palaces in on the south coast of France. Russia invaded Ukraine — a country where half of my family comes from — not because of some imaginary “NATO threat,” or to “protect the Russian speakers in Donbas from Nazis,” but because Vladimir Putin went completely bonkers in his bunker during the pandemic and believes that Ukraine is a fake country which shouldn’t exist. Meanwhile, Ukraine is fighting a righteous war of liberation, and the only way any kind of meaningful peace can be achieved is when the Russian army is forced to fully retreat from Ukraine and restore its sovereignty within borders recognized by both countries and the international community in 1991. To achieve this, Ukraine must receive any military support it needs and my country, Russia, needs to be thoroughly defeated militarily. There you have it.
Now, back to Lascaris. On the face of it, his visit to Russia in April 2023 seems to fall under the category of “whitewashing tourism” whereby credulous Westerners embark on regime-curated propaganda trips to various autocracies to present a glamorized vision of said autocracies supposedly underrepresented or suppressed in “mainstream media.” Responding to his critics, Lascaris says his trip was completely self-funded. Which may just as well be true, but quite beside the point. Lascaris checks most of the boxes on the “gullible foreigner on a propaganda trip” list:
- By his own admission, spent most of his “Russia” trip confined to downtown Moscow;
- Typical slack-jawed admiration of how beautiful (downtown) Moscow is and how efficiently it’s run compared to Western megapoles, seemingly oblivious to the fact that this efficiency comes at the cost of democracy;
- Meets almost exclusively with the regime’s representatives, supporters and activists, government institutions and government-owned media. Do you think a random foreigner who just wants to get to the bottom of things — what Lascaris claims he is — can walk into Russia’s top diplomatic academy, ask to be allowed to deliver a speech to the students, and then be immediately indulged by the academy’s administration? I certainly can’t!
Two notable diversions are Lascaris’s visit to Nochlezhka, a charity foundation helping Moscow’s homeless, they are honest people doing God’s work so kudos to him for boosting them; and Fred Weir, Christian Science Monitor’s Moscow correspondent, to whom I myself have talked a few times in the past years and can vouch for his integrity
- Studiously repeats all the regime’s talking points while claiming he’s just an “independent thinker” who just wants to resist the “Western hegemony” or “biased mainstream media”
Such people are usually called “useful idiots,” but Lascaris is certainly not an idiot. He seems to have enough self reflection to admit the limitations of his experience:
What I observed in central Moscow might not be remotely representative of the conditions prevailing in the city’s outer suburbs, or in cities and regions that I have yet to see.
He also acknowledges, albeit in passing, by proxy and and very briefly, that
According to Fred [Weir]’s article, Russian authorities have instituted nearly 4,000 prosecutions under a pair of new laws that make it punishable to spread any “fake news” about Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, or to make any statement that authorities deem to “defame” Russia’s army or officials. According to Fred, these laws have created “an atmosphere of pervasive fear that has not been widely felt in Russia since Soviet times.”
(However, in the same breath he claims that “all indications are that the vast majority of Russian citizens do support their government” and “opinion surveys have shown consistently high levels of support for Russia’s President”, apparently seeing no contradiction in the fact the same government which claims to be universally supported by the population still finds it necessary to persecute all dissenters)
In his blog post titled “The art of peace requires us to see the world through the eyes of our enemies” Lascaris even states:
Consequently, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine cannot be justified on the basis of self-defence or the right to protect. In all likelihood, the invasion violates the vitally important legal prohibition against the use of force against a sovereign state. As such, it must be condemned, unequivocally.
(However, he’s much more restrained in his analysis at his meeting with the students of MGIMO, Russia’s top diplomatic academy, and takes great care to not refer to Russia’s invasion in Ukraine as anything else but “special military operation,” perhaps because his hosts explained to him that calling it a war is literally a crime in Russia; I wonder if he ever asked himself what kind of “peace” negotiations are possible with someone who refuses to call what they’re doing a war and punishes anyone who disobeys.)
But all these epiphanies lead Lascaris exactly nowhere and never inspire further reflection. He invariably proceeds to uncritically repeat the Kremlin’s laundry list of distortions and bare-faced lies, while admonishing others to
consult a broad array of sources reflecting diverse viewpoints and experiences of the country, and you should weigh those sources with an open, independent and critical mind.
But he himself does almost nothing of the sort. Upon further interactions with him and examining more of his writings and public statements, I can confidently conclude that all of this supposed intellectual honesty is a ruse. Dimitri Lascaris is not stupid, but he’s definitely habitually dishonest, a cynical manipulator.
Why am I bothering with this? After all, Lascaris is at best an obscure activist who’ll never have any meaningful influence on his country’s foreign policy in regards to mine or to Ukraine. But he embodies most of the worst qualities of red-brown tankies*, the Kremlin’s favorite fellow travelers. As such, he’s useful as a specimen whom I’ll dissect in this blog post.
Red-brown tankies? WTF?
Unless you are terminally online in some of the most obscure and toxic corners of political Twitter or Reddit, these words probably mean nothing to you. In this case, a short preamble which you can skip if you already know all this. You can also watch this video primer on the subjest which explains in the simplest terms who tankies are.
The term “red-browns” itself, to the best of my knowledge, originates from Russia. In 1993, two years after the dissolution of the USSR, a tactical alliance between hardcore Communists on a mission to restore the Soviet Union and just straight-up fascists with barely stylized swastikas on their banners attempted an armed coup against President Boris Yeltsin whose ongoing conflict with the Supreme Soviet, the parliamentary precursor to the State Duma, culminated in armed clashes.
Downtown Moscow in early October 1993 was an all against all bloodbath, and it’s still unclear who’s ultimately responsible for the 150+ confirmed casualties. One of them is my own uncle Viktor who was killed on the spot by a sniper’s bullet, and our family, shattered by his untimely death (Uncle Vitya was 11 years younger than I am now), still doesn’t know who and why shot him down, whose side they fought on etc. The official investigation stalled and then ultimately stopped altogether. The coup failed, but no one comes off as the good guy in this absurdly convoluted horror show totally memory-holed in today’s Russia. Yes, commies and their fash friends suck, but Yeltsin used their sadistic fantasies as a pretense to crush (literally, with tanks) the first mangy sprouts of Russian parliamentarianism which is why we ultimately ended with Yeltsin’s appointed successor, Vladimir Putin, and a political system extremely skewed towards the executive branch.
While the term “red-brown politics” might have originated in modern Russia, the political phenomenon it describes definitely predates the early 1990s in Eastern European politics. Similarly, the original tankies were members of a sect within the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who supported the Soviet foreign policy and USSR’s invasions of Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) and Afghanistan (1979), among other things. Internally opposed to tankies were more moderate Western communists who condemned the invasions as imperialist perversions of original Marxist-Leninist dogmas.
Today’s tankies are leftists who align themselves with corrupt, reactionary dictatorships — like Putin’s Russia — and promote their foreign policy interests. To them, the US is the sum of all evil to such an extent that any comparable evil is existentially impossible, and any tinpot dictator who engages in performative anti-Americanism is a natural ally. Hence, Noam Chomsky (the patron saint of tankies, notorious genocide denialist who, unsurprisingly, is Lascaris’s own primary inspiration), Roger Waters and Jeremy Corbyn are wizened old tankies. Aaron Mate and Max Blumenthal are nepo baby tankies. Stop the War Coalition are tankies. So are CODEPINK and ANSWER. Tara Reade is absolutely a tankie. You get the idea.
In regards to Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, both political phenomena I described above amalgamate into something I wrote about in my article (archived w/o paywall) for the Foreign Policy magazine:
For the Western hard left, opposed to “U.S. hegemony” or “U.S. militarism,” their own anti-American and anti-Western worldview is so absorbing that they will readily take the side of any aggressor in the anti-Western camp. Similarly, they will eagerly oppose any country supported by the United States. This is where persistent sympathies among a segment of the left for repressive regimes like Russia’s and Iran’s come from — it’s not that they approve of repression per se, but the reflex to align with the anti-American camp is stronger than any disapproval.
The hard left’s holy war against its own governments tolerates no distractions — never mind that Ukraine’s case is a clear-cut struggle of a sovereign, previously colonialized nation defending itself against an imperialist invader that is entirely honest about its genocidal intent. These progressive far leftists — often self-styled as activists for peace — will ignore such evidence even when it comes from their own ideological comrades, such as Ukrainian socialists.
Instead, their arguments on Ukraine are often indistinguishable from those of the West’s extreme right, which is making a similar case for withdrawing support for Ukraine. Former British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, an icon of the progressive left, and Fox News host Tucker Carlson both liberally echo the Kremlin’s favorite talking points, including the cynical claim that helping Ukraine unnecessarily prolongs Ukranians’ suffering.
I’ll also quote from this excellent post by Vincent Artman:
One thing that I think emerges very clearly from this defensive and tone deaf reaction to the principled condemnation of the UCU resolution is that there are many people on the ostensibly “anti-war” left who simply do not view Ukrainians empathetically. Many seem content enough to run through a prefab dialogue tree about Ukrainian Nazis, corruption, NATO, “the Maidan coup,” a “proxy war,” “shelling the people of the Donbas,” and so forth by means of justification and, once they’ve exhausted those talking points, inevitably revert to their default position: they are essentially indifferent to the reality of Ukrainian suffering.
Most won’t admit it quite so openly, preferring to camouflage indifference with words like “diplomatic negotiations,” “peace,” or “solidarity with the Ukrainian working class.” Quite notably, however, they seem neither willing nor able to offer a meaningful response to those who point out that any “peace” involving territorial concessions to Russia will also consign Ukrainians to genocide.
Today’s tankies are not only very similar or downright mirroring the arguments of right wingers; some of the most descpicable elements are explicitly promoting an alliance between the left and the “anti-establishment right.” Many of them will be happy to share a stage with all sorts of fascistic bigots. This is a feature of tankieism, not a bug.
Dimitri Lascaris may present himself as a Canadian progressive “ecosocialist,” but his domestic policy positions are both irrelevant in regards to Russia and Ukraine and hypocritical if you consider the fact that he uncritically supports a regime which is a polar opposite of every value he claims to uphold. Meanwhile, his foreign policy views are virtually indistinguishable from those held by the nastiest racist cranks who see Putin’s Russia as some kind of traditionalist’s paradise (when, in fact, it’s the opposite: just look up Russia’s abortion and divorce rates, then compare them to any country in the “ungodly West”) Which is why I’ll call people like him red-brown tankies.
Putin’s Russia has attracted all sorts of unsavory characters over the years — corrupt Western politicians, grifters, creepy sex pests and pedos — but Lascaris is of a more sophisticated kind. As far as I’m aware, he’s not fully employed or paid by the Kremlin’s disinformation factory like people such as George Galloway, an ultra-fringe British buffoon, and he habitually engages in what I’ll call performative non-condemnation. Early on in a 2,000 word blog post Lascaris will very quickly blurt out something like “Russia’s invasion is bad and I condemn it,” only to immediately abandon this train of thought and never return to it again — except to use it to claim that he’s not 100% pro-Putin when confronted about the rest 99% of his otherwise fully pro-Putin statements. People like Noam Chomsky and Aaron Mate, tankie nepo baby who runs the Kremlin-friendly conspiracy blog The Grayzone, and the Stop the War Coalition, among others, do the same.
Tankies are fundamentally dishonest and unserious people
However disingenuous their pseudo-condemnations of regimes they’re otherwise fully supportive of, challenging tankies on the substance of their statements is frustratingly difficult, if not outright impossible and ultimately pointless. One has to understand that they usually know precious little about the countries they opine on almost 24/7, nor do they really care about the peoples of these countries, be it Russians, Ukrainians, Uighurs, Syrians or anyone else. Tankies view them as little more than two-dimensional characters in a game where they are scoring points against “The Establishment” — aka their country’s government doing any sensible thing or supporting a just cause like Ukraine’s war of liberation against Russia’s invasion (This is also why a considerable amount of truthers, antivaxxers and assorted tinfoil hat weirdos eventually end up on Putin’s side: for no other reason than that the government which told them to get vaccinated also tells them that Putin is bad.)
It’s impossible to meaningfully debate tankies because they’ll just shout you down without ever saying anything of substance. Lascaris, in particular employs a technique often called “firehose of falsehood” designed to overwhelm an opponent who is attempting to respond with plain facts. In some of the most egregious cases tankies will do that while talking to actual Ukrainians (Russians, Syrians etc) whose lives are directly impacted by the regimes the tankies are cheerleading for. Consider, for example, this “debate” between Lascaris and Taras Bilous, a Ukrainian socialist and fighter in Ukraine’s territorial defense.
Bilous patiently attempts to engage with Lascaris on the substance of his claims while the latter just shouts his laundry list of Kremlin-supplied slogans past his opponent. Every “fact” that Lascaris throws at Bilous is at best a blatant distortion. But debunking idiotic statements like “In 2014, the United States orchestrated a violent coup that removed Ukraine’s democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovych from power” requires going into arcane minutiae of Ukrainian electoral law which takes up considerably more time and resources than incessant slogan-shouting and inevitably puts one in a disadvantageous position.
(If you’re looking for a slightly more nuanced approach to these matters, here’s my own interview with Taras Bilous.)
When confronted with hard, cold facts contradicting their perverse dogmas which coincidentally are Putin’s own favorite bugbears — no, “the West” did not promise Russia to not expand NATO “one inch further east,” for God’s sake even Mikhail Gorbachev to whom this “promise” was supposedly made said so, to a Kremlin-owned outlet no less — tankies will simply move on and pivot to the next equally content-less point, or just call you a “CIA shill.”
Lascaris’s behavior here is especially abominable, but very typical of tankies, because he condescendingly shouts down someone whose Putin’s invasion is supposed to “liberate”: a Russian speaker from eastern Ukraine. In the course of my reporting I myself have spoken to dozens of Ukrainians, including those from the east of the country. I spoke to them in Russian, because it’s their mother’s language as well as mine, although a few told me they are doing their best to literally unlearn it now because of all the horrors my country has inflicted on theirs). Some had to bury their own neighbors in shallow makeshift graves in their courtyards after seeing their homes blown to dust by Russian airstrikes and artillery. And I can assure you that, although quite a few had been sympathetic to Russia before, they had no desire to be “liberated” by Putin through industrialized murder and destruction. I’ll quote from myself (archived) again:
One of my most revealing interviews covering Russia’s war on Ukraine was with Polina Kovalevskaya. Along with her parents and two sisters, she was a refugee from Mariupol, the Ukrainian city with a prewar population of almost 450,000 that was besieged by Russian forces for almost three months. After three horrific weeks of hiding in basements during incessant Russian shelling, the family managed to escape the city, which was already a mass grave and charred ruin by then. When I asked them for a photo of their former home, they sent me a video instead. In the clip, amid a vast expanse of smoldering rubble, a Russian tank fires point-blank at an apartment building that was somehow still standing. Part of the building implodes, adding to the total devastation for miles and miles around. “This was our home,” Kovalevskaya told me when describing the video.
<…>
The footage my interviewee sent me of her destroyed house closely resembles that in RT’s war documentary Mariupol. The Russian City. If the film’s title is not transparent enough concerning the regime’s ambitions, members of the camera crew also filmed themselves planting the Russian tricolor on the roof of Mariupol’s city council building. Lost to most Russians is the irony that Mariupol, like similarly obliterated Severodonetsk, lies in that part of Ukraine that is supposedly dominated by Russian speakers yearning to be free from Kyiv — yet it has been subjected to the most systematic destruction and cruelty.
But whenever confronted with the experience of actual Ukrainians which contradicts his garbage, Lascaris — like most other tankies — will just dismiss them as irrelevant and “propagandized.” He’s basically these memes:
Another manipulative bullshit technique Lascaris and his ilk regularly employ is distortion by omission. Consider this example: while in Russia, he was interviewed by a local news website. Here’s one notable exchange which I’ll post here in full. Bear with me, because it’s quite self-incriminating (it’s a double translation from the original English, which I presume Lascaris spoke with the interviewer, since he doesn’t know a word of Russian, into Russian and now back into English, so it may look a bit weird, but I don’t have the original transcript):
Q: What is your opinion, as a lawyer, about the role of private military companies (PMCs) and their necessity? Have you heard anything about PMC “Wagner”?
A: Let’s talk both in general terms and specifically about Wagner PMC. I think it’s really become a phenomenon. Blackwater, aka Academi, for example, had some smart lawyers who told the Pentagon that it was possible to create a comfortable distance between civilians in the US government and the military doing nasty things. A kind of outsourcing. It turns out that this is not just creating a distance between decision makers and the horrors of war, this is a conscious desire to pay private forces, this is a business decision. And it’s terrible. In the US, it is no longer just a private company, it is a full-fledged corporation.
By the way, France also has its own Foreign Legion, but it’s fundamentally different from Blackwater. The latter is a purely for-profit corporation created by private individuals, namely Eric Prince, a former Navy SEAL, and a number of other retired military men. Also, I do not rule out that there could be non-military capitalists involved in this formation. It is essentially a for-profit corporation whose shares are not publicly traded.
I’m not claiming that all PMCs are the same in terms of their approaches, I am not a military man and I do not presume to judge. The same above mentioned Blackwater, when it was formed and became famous, was very widely discussed in the media, and the war crimes committed were widely reported in the US and Canadian media. But people forget everything very quickly, although it was all just a while ago. Now we hear a lot about PMC “Wagner” in the West. Therefore, I treat all information with caution, it is necessary to check everything, and not blindly accuse people of any violations. Just like the Russian side did a great job, showing that their PMCs are fundamentally different from their Western counterparts. Definitely PMCs are a very effective fighting force, especially when it comes to urban combat.
We can recall the events in Iraq. Then Saddam Hussein had a fighting force of about 500,000 men. But it was not a NATO-trained army, so most of it was soon destroyed. There, Blackwater did an excellent job, because in fact they fought simply with rebels who possessed small arms and improvised explosive devices. But now NATO is facing Wagner. It’s a completely different alignment of forces.
I understand why you ask about them. It is customary in the West to demonize them so that people cannot consider this a real means of fighting NATO, as an effective tool that Russia has.
But it is worth paying attention to a very interesting interview made by a soldier of the special forces of the Australian army, a retired special forces soldier who fought in Bakhmut. He gave it to Australian radio. Throughout the interview, he expressed admiration, repeating the same phrase over and over again “they are all clean”, that they are as good as their [Australian] units. This is the highest level of appreciation and respect. He said that inside everyone is aware that the Wagner PMC is a formidable enemy for the entire NATO. After all, it is necessary to run around one country, trying to put pressure in all directions, but they do not have the opportunity to protect themselves from PMCs.
If the trend continues, <…> “Wagner” can scale up, or in a couple of years organize the training of a regular army to its level. And NATO is seriously afraid of this.
Now go back to the original question and ponder: are you now more informed about this PMC Wagner or less? Do you think it’s just like any other Western private military company, which are bad, but because it’s Russian, unlike them it’s also good and heroic and valiant in every way? (This is why whataboutism marked in bold, another rhetorical device favored by the Kremlin’s propaganda and its tankie fellow travelers, is inherently self-contradictory: if Russia is accused of something and responds with “But US does it too,” isn’t that an admission that whatever Russia does is bad? Because anything the sum of all evil does is bad by definition, isn’t it?)
Or maybe Lascaris, as a lawyer, should have probably noted that Wagner is extremely illegal under Russia’s own laws? Articles 208 and 359 of the Russian criminal code specifically criminalize the existence of “illegal armed groups” — which is what Wagner, in fact, really is — and mercenarism. But apparently this little piece of trivia didn’t seem significant enough mention in an interview. Remember, Lascaris is a lawyer, which he never fails to mention at every opportunity. So it’s pretty simple: either he isn’t aware of this fact and hence is not competent enough to comment on these matters, so his opinion is irrelevant; or he is fully aware of it but chooses to ignore it, in which case he is consciously and willfully misinforms his audience — and hence his opinion is, again, irrelevant.
Wagner is also Nazi as shit. Do you think it’s called that because its commander Dmitry Utkin is really into epic operas? Apparently so, according to tankies who are always up in arms about the supposed “Nazi coup” in Kyiv, but will simply ignore the existence of a Wagner-aligned unit who are pretty fucking Nazi, and none of the neo- bullshit, just straight-on Hitler worshippers who torture Ukrainian POWs and carve stylized swastikas on their skins (here’s a story I edited about them, and many other fascist and Nazi pieces of shit Putin is sending to “denazify” Ukraine.) Or, again, pivot to something else or accuse you of being a “CIA/NATO/Soros shill” when confronted with these empirical, proven, easily observable facts. And it’s not like it’s some big, nasty secret in Russia: Wagner’s sponsor, criminal thug in chief Evgeny Prigozhin, will gladly go on record saying that yes, indeed, commander of his private army does sign his memos with SS runes and calls himself “Heil Petrovich,” but it’s none of your damn business and you can suck Utkin’s tattooed dick.
And you know what, Prigozhin is right — this all is totally normalized in Russia and very few people actually care that the only moment all these bandits — armed and logistically supported by the Russian army — stop their Hitler saluting is when they’re invited to the Kremlin, given awards and airtime on government-owned media. In fact, the entire invasion of Ukraine which started in the spring of 2014 has always been designed and fueled by all kinds of fascist weirdos, antisemitic cranks and far-right cultists. Also, one of the explicitly fascist units fighting on Russia’s side in Ukraine is composed of members of Russian National Unity, the splinter/successor to the original swastika-waving armed thugs who attempted to stage an armed coup a democratically elected president of Russia. Remember this next time someone like Lascaris whines about “Nazi coup in Kiev” or claims that
Russians have not forgotten the unspeakable suffering their country endured in a war of aggression launched by fascistic, imperialistic forces from a Western European nation.
Now go back to Lascaris’s interview and again ask yourself: is this man criminally incompetent and shouldn’t be going around doing interviews about things he doesn’t know anything about? Or is he a dishonest hack? The answer is, again, the latter. I present to you Lascaris’s own account of a chance meeting with an actual Wagner mercenary:
The soldier told us that his call sign was “Sokol.” He said he was a sniper in the Wagner PMC and that he had joined Wagner about seven months ago. At that time, he was serving a 16-year prison sentence. He said that he had once been a hit-man for the Russian mafia in Georgia. He was six years into his prison sentence when Yevgeny Prigozhin, the titular head of Wagner, came to Sokol’s prison last year and invited convicts like Sokol to join Wagner. Sokol accepted Prighozin’s invitation.
I asked Sokol why he had enrolled into Wagner. He said that he wanted to “protect Mother Russia”. Pounding the table with his fist, he also said that he wanted “to crush Europe”. After a pause, he added “the pay is good too.”
So here we have a violent criminal, released from prison in an astonishing perversion of justice in regards to both the law and this person’s victims with the specific purpose of committing more violence as a mercenary in an illegal armed group — which at the time of Lascaris’s writing had already been embroiled in a vicious power struggle with Russia’s own armed forces. Perhaps this experience would make Lascaris reevaluate his opinion of Wagner as being just like any other PMC, but better and also “clean,” according to some Australian dude? I asked Lascaris about it, but then he again chose a weird hill to die on. Instead of responding to the substance of my question, he took offense at my characterization of his meeting with the Wagner mercenary. No, Dimitri, chatting up a drunk, PTSD-ed dude on a train isn’t journalism, and if you claim it was, you are a really terrible journalist with zero understanding of basic ethical standards of our profession such as informed consent. After this exchange, he blocked me on Twitter.
I could go on, but this is getting tiresome and you should’ve gotten the idea by now. Dimitri Lascaris is a fundamentally dishonest man who claims to be progressive but supports a reactionary dictatorship whose very nature is an affront to everything he claims to stand for. I wouldn’t call him pro-Kremlin or pro-Russia, because you can’t be pro something you not only don’t know anything about but actually refuse to learn. He’s carries Putin’s water because the hated “West” or “Establishment” call out Russia’s president, rightfully, as one of the worst tyrants of the XXI century who wages an openly genocidal war against an neighboring sovereign state with the explicit, openly stated aims of physically destroying whatever material assets he can, killing as many Ukrainians as possible, abducting their children and forcibly reeducating them as Russians, and erasing Ukraine’s culture and national identity. Lascaris is fully aware of the horrors of the war Russia is waging, but is prepared to throw a sovereign nation under the bus for no other reason than the fact that the Canadian government supports Ukraine. Lascaris is like a petulant teenager who lashes out against his parents when they ask him to clean his room. In other words, Dimitri Lascaris is a typical tankie.
Dealing with tankies
As I hope it’s abundantly clear by now, debating with tankies is pointless. They are deeply unserious people whose beliefs are inherently self-contradictory and always boil down essentially to “America bad.” They never hold themselves up to the moral standards they claim to defend. Met with the slightest pushback, tankies will whine that their right to free speech is being violated — while they themselves abuse their own societies’ commitment to free speech by promoting regimes which actively, institutionally and violently suppress free expression. They claim to oppose “American exceptionalism” or “US hegemony” — but are themselves so singularly focused on the shortcomings of the US foreign policy that they actually claim that no other country ever can be called a dictatorship. They pretend to care about the “working class” of authoritarian regimes like Russia — while ignoring the fact that the Russian state is the Russian working class’s biggest enemy. There are no independent labor unions left in Russia — I know this because our own was forcibly dissolved by the state on the basis of its members taking part in campaigns of solidarity with jailed journalists. They will move to Russia while claiming to be persecuted in their home countries as “peace activists” — oblivious to the fact that Russia literally tortures actual peace activists to death in police precincts.
Tankies should be opposed and deplatformed. One way of dealing with them is messaging the venues they book for their events: these venues should be made aware of who they’re hosting. It works like a charm. Don’t worry, this has nothing to do with free speech: no venue is obligated to host them, and they’re completely free to convene under a bridge or in a parking lot. And anyway, if you support regimes which jail and murder their critics, you don’t get any freeze peach. Here’s an example of an email that worked for me:
I don’t blame you if you’ve never heard about any of it and are wondering why you should even care. Tankies aren’t a party or an unified movement. It’s a tiny online subculture, and when they crawl out of their basements, they can barely muster a crowd of a few hundred people. But they aren’t harmless. One thing they can do is poison a few uninformed minds, and that has consequences: tankies can be violent, and Ukrainian refugees are often double-victimized not just but the horrific invasion of their home country but also by attacks on them in the countries they had to flee to, through no choice of their own. Tankies bear at least part of the responsibility for this too and must be stopped. Tankies infiltrate organizations such as labor unions and shoehorn their agenda into legitimate causes, forcing moderate members to quit in disgust, abandoning the union to a tiny extremist sect. Tankies hijack pacifist slogans and replace them with actual Putin’s war aims: to erode Western support to Ukraine and then force Ukraine to accept “peace” — at the cost of 1/4 of its sovereign territory, consigning millions of people to cultural and actual genocide. The most despicable ghouls such as tankies behind the Grayzone conspiracy blog actively collaborate with the intelligence services of dictatorial regimes such as Russia to undermine and harass foreign and domestic critics of these regimes (I know this because it actually happened to an independent publication I worked for; they bragged about it.)
If you are Canadian and outraged by all this, you can do your part. Send links to this blog post to your fellow Canadians and others who might fall under Lascaris’s malignant influence. Call venues where Dimitri Lascaris is doing his “peace” tour and let them know what kind of “peace” he is actually preaching: the very same kind that Putin is demanding. When these fake peaceniks say “Stop the war in Ukraine,” what they really mean is “Stop helping Ukraine repel a genocidal invasion.” Don’t be fooled by them and don’t let others be fooled. And please support Ukraine in every way you can.
