askchapo

Honestly, and this is just speculation and my own anecdotal experiences so don't overstate the importance of what I'm about to say here, but I have found that there's a very strong emphasis on the anti- position or the negative in anarchist circles and this is reflected in how a lot of anarchists focus their criticisms and allow them to be influenced by the prevailing narrative in the media or society.

If you're anti-state it's easy to be anti-USSR, for obvious reasons, but if you're not carefully managing your biases and doing your due diligence then that leaves you very vulnerable to absorbing all of the criticisms of the USSR out there, whether they are accurate or not and whether they are situated within a historical and political context or not.

This is how you end up with MLs accusing anarchists of consuming state-department stenography.

It's easier to go along with the common narrative that the communists nearly caused a nuclear war over the Cuban missile crisis than it is to dig into sources to uncover that the US was actually the primary antagonist throughout all the events leading up to it and during the crisis, for example.

Likewise, it's easy to regress into a default position if you lean too heavily on the negation. If I said "the US committed a war crime by enacting a blockade on Cuba" it's easy to dismiss this because you reject the concept of borders or states and to use that position to avoid engaging in the matter any further and to retreat to the default position by refusing to examine your own preconceptions.

Obviously this isn't the case for all anarchists and it's just a trend that I've observed etc. etc.

Elsewhere in my life I've been known to tease anarchists over this by occasionally obstructing discussions by sort of playing a veto and accusing every side of imposing an unjust hierarchy and doing the whole "both sides are wrong and neither get my support or sympathy" routine. This is done in a tongue-in-cheek way and I play it for outrage (so an example might be about Israel and Palestine and me feigning a principled objection to both sides to stir up mischief with an anarchist) but the kernel of truth in the joke is me gently saying "watch out for this urge and be careful of what it can be used in service of..."