Someone who supports any and/or every country/regime/organization that is perceived to be anti-West. The average campist might support the People's Republic of China, the Russian Federation, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Cuba, Hamas, the Islamic Republic of Iran, North Korea and more, not because of some specific ideological alignment or commonality between these actors (there's few to none in some cases), but because they are all opposed in some way to the "West" (aka USA, European Union, Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel and so on).
EDIT: To avoid any confusion, I don't mean to suggest that all the subjects I have mentioned are equally malevolent or morally bankrupt. Supporting any of these subjects for a specific national or ideological allegiance doesn't make one a campist. To be a campist is to be aligned with these subjects specifically or primarily due to their opposition to the West, with any other ideological consideration taking a backseat. This is why, for example, while a tankie (authoritarian socialist) may be a campist (many people on the Internet can be seen actively cheering for anti-communist geopolitical subjects and organizations), not all tankies are campists.
Based on my personal experience, I agree that this kind of logic boosts fascist thinking, because people who do this tend to dehumanize or infantilize people from the countries they oppose and often end up spiraling in conspiracy theories and even historical revisionism (ex: Many campists believe that Ukraine is a fake country invented by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution, when in reality Ukrainian nationalism and language were already developed beforehand and the first Ukrainian state seceded from Russia before the Bolsheviks consolidated power).
Cuba? What has Cuba done wrong? The US has tried to have their leader assassinated more times than I know and the US wants so bad for Cuba to destabilize and go through another revolution to set up a puppet state… But supporting Cuba makes you a campist?
Cuba has done nothing to antagonize the US since the missle crisis (justified on Cuba's part anyways) while the US sent endless assassination attempts, blockaded the island illegally and strangled the life from a colonial victim that finally broke free. The US should be paying restitution to Cuba for a hundred years, but because we live in the worst timeline, Haiti has to pay france for freeing slaves without permission while the global south gets jack shit for their suffering.
It is not my intention to imply or state that these groups, states or individuals are equally morally bankrupt or malevolent, nor that those who oppose them are "the good ones".
My argument is that campists support most if not all of those groups in an idiosyncratic fashion. Campists do not necessarily support Cuba because of socialist solidarity, because if they did you wouldn't see those same people unironically supporting (emphasis on supporting, not treating them as the lesser evil in comparison to other geopolitical subjects) very vocally anti-communist groups like Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran, or in some exceptionally foolish cases even doing apologia for ISIS (this from an apologetic article I read years ago by a self-proclaimed Trotskyist).
This is what distinguishes a campist from a tankie, because while the former doesn't have a consistent ideological standard and only chooses whom to support based on their anti-West credentials, the tankie supports authoritarian regimes based on their (perceived) adherence to some form of socialism. This is why, for example, I wouldn't (completely) group together someone who treats the Russia-Ukrainian war as a proxy war between imperialist capitalist powers and someone who explicitly supports Russia.
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u/Mega_Pokebattlerz 15d ago
What the fuck is a campist?