This is a good answer

If tankies are pushed to criticise tankies, they’ll say “Well I suppose the problem with tankies is an inability to criticise any non-Western country, they think that all things Western and automatically bad and all things non-Western are automatically good”.

That’s what the Grayzone is. They try to minimise the badness of Putin and Assad to blame everything on the West. The West is not omnipotent; other countries have their share of the blame.

Although it’s an allegation overused by liberals, propaganda funded by Russian influences are a real thing. And the Grayzone certainly acts like one.

On the plus side, it’s done some important investigative work, like around the alleged Douma chemical attack: https://thegrayzone.com/2020/09/29/grayzones-aaron-mate-testifies-at-un-on-opcw-syria-cover-up/

A few things to commend it (I’m being devil’s advocate for the thread, rather than asserting a conviction I have):

• The whole thing of Marxism is to focus on class and the economic base, not on non-class-based contradictions. And non-class-based contradictions are detrimental to class consciousness –

• https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/letters/70_04_09.htm – “And most important of all! Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A… The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland. This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this.”

• It seems to have mostly grown out of the USA (correct me if I’m wrong on this), a country that doesn’t really have a left, and where state-agencies have a long history of meddling in leftist movements with dirty tricks. You can’t imagine Mao or Lenin banging on about identity politics; Latin American leftists do talk about it, though not as obsessively as North Americans.

Was it good?

The concept was a bit interesting but the production seemed a bit idk a bit normie or something