Campism

A long excerpt of the perennial points from a longer post Against Campism by a wise leftist I recommend following, Alley Valkyrie.

What’s campism, you ask?

In short, campism is taking a binary position regarding the current geopolitical alignment of the world, the belief that those who stand in opposition to the same “camp” that you are opposed to need to be supported no matter what.

It’s the ideological/geopolitical version of the enemy of my enemy is my friend, which manifests itself as the idea that any leader and/or regime positioned in opposition to the United States needs to be supported in the name of anti-imperialism.

For those who adopt this mindset, the fact that some world leaders who are seen as “enemies” of the United States are also brutal, murderous dictators who oppress, disappear and slaughter their own people is an afterthought, if even that.

More often than not, campists will insist that such beliefs are actually nothing more than Western imperialist propaganda. That in fact, folks such as Assad, Putin, Maduro, and now Khameini are really not so bad after all, and need to be supported because to not support them is to continue to prop up American empire.

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Campism is to leftism what a fear of insects is to our personal well-being: an instinct that had a legitimate function in previous stages of our evolution but which nowadays does much more harm than good.

Let me elaborate on the former.

The origins of campism are rooted in the geopolitical shifts that resulted from the emergence of the “Great Powers” in the early 20^th century, which solidified in the years after the Russian Revolution and then cemented itself in the divisions that unfolded due to the Cold War.

The Cold War created three general geopolitical groupings: countries aligned with Western capitalism, countries aligned with Soviet socialism, and the “non-aligned” countries. These three groups are where the concepts of the First, Second, and Third World come from. Three camps, if you will.

But even during the Cold War, when geopolitical lines were much more clearly drawn, adherence to campism could function as a trap. Consider the origin of the idea of tankies, a term which was birthed as a way to distinguish and call out leftists who defended the use of tanks by the Soviets in order to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Those who did so were so blinded by their allegiance to Communism that they either failed to or refused to consider that the reasons why Hungarians were revolting was legitimate and that such a show of force on the part of the Soviets was brutal and unjustified. Those who defended the Soviets in that instance, as well as during the ’68 uprisings in Prague, were engaging in campism and absolutely deserved the pejorative label that they received.

After the fall of the USSR, in the absence of the previously-stated categories, campism reinvented itself into what we see today. In place of a (theoretically) tidy capitalist / communist split, campism ended up taking on the trappings of what’s best referred to as Third Worldism. The divisions redefined themselves as follows: the Global South versus the Global North and / or the underdeveloped world versus the developed world and/or the colonized world versus the colonizer world.

Which is a set of alignments that from a leftist perspective should absolutely act as a guide, a compass, a framework that anchors where we take off from. But after the take off, nuance and critical thinking are paramount, and campism has no use for either. It’s black and white. Good guys, bad guys. And from that, the idea that any leader that the bad guys don’t like must be a good guy.

Which is how you end up with folks like Caitlin Johnstone, who has stanned pretty much every modern-day dictator that’s come up against American empire without fail. For her and other campists, the ends justify the means. The suffering and fate of millions of people is ignored in the service of taking an ideologically pure position against empire.

And such a position is abhorrent.