I really stepped in it last night. My partner is livid with me for suggesting Stalin wasn’t the evil dictator he’s made out to be in the west. For a German who grew up with anti-communism and went to some very liberal universities for political science it was too much. They said something to the effect of “this feels exactly like if you said, oh Hitler wasn’t that bad, he was actually a good guy.” We’re in the midst of planning our wedding and they were suddenly at the point of doubting that they know who I am and if this is a relationship they want to maintain.
We have a hard time discussing politics as it is. We are still not so great at interpreting the nuances of way each other speaks, and our background knowledge is very different. So we have to figure out what we do from here.
I can’t come at this from the direction of “trying to convert them.” They already think I have gone into a conspiracy theory ridden and propaganda laden hole, and believe me, I ask myself the same thing every day. It really weighs heavily on me, as some of our close family members have fallen into conspiracy theory echo chambers.
We’ve decided we need to go back to basics and make sure our core values align, which I genuinely believe they do. They’re an anti-capitalist as well, although don’t have a strong idea of what to would be better, just that it shouldn’t be communism.
I’m not sure where to go after we sort out what our shared values are.
There’s a certain condescension I sense when it comes to the leftist sources I read, many on recommendation from GenZedong members. I’m often met with “leftists just make up all kinds of stuff to suit their narrative,” or “how do you know that’s a primary or reliable secondary source, it’s so easy to fake anything these days.” Meanwhile they go to Wikipedia and see that Stalin killed millions and signed a treaty with the Nazis, even as they understand that much of western capitalist media is propaganda as well. We can’t have any useful discussion on current events at the moment because we have vastly different knowledge of what’s happening, as well as entirely different analytical tools to pick it apart with.
They’re also terrified I’m going to say very extreme things in front of their family (privileged petite bourgeois liberals). I try to be careful but at the same time I won’t pretend to not be a communist. We have political discussions often and I’m not one to just sit those out. I’m sure my family would react poorly as well, but with the geographical distance to them it’s not as present an issue in our minds.
How do you all deal with this? How do you have these discussions and share these ideas with the more soc-dem or liberal minded people in your lives?
In many ways, the work at present is to focus on anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism at an entry level point.
Yes, getting people to realize that Stalin wasn’t the devil incarnate or that The DPRK is actually the good Korea is a huge victory but ultimately the primary task is talking to people where they are at and linking the current issues they face to the broader context of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism etc.
It’s better to talk to a SocDem and to ask them if they think the world is moving forward in a positive direction and if they believe that enough is being done to deal with catastrophic climate change to prevent the developing world from being obliterated by famine and disease, y’know?
As for your partner, that’s a tricky matter. I would study up on which European powers signed treaties with Nazi Germany, I’d look into the so-called “denazification” and I’d take a very gentle approach. It’s probably better to realize that West Germany/reunified Germany isn’t nearly the wonderful place that lib historians make it out to be than trying to uphold comrade Stalin as the people’s hero that he is (at least not openly with your partner anyway.)
The history of the NATO stay behind organizations is a real “Are we the baddies??” moment and it doesn’t matter how bad the Cold War was, unleashing far right paramilitary terror organizations to murder European populations in cold blood to, essentially, subvert liberal democracy in order to prevent SocDem and socialist movements from gaining traction in Europe because of the fear of the red menace is utterly inexcusable. That shit was like ISIS-tier political violence and if learning about it in depth doesn’t make you think that Stalin didn’t go far enough then you are a lost cause.
Learning about the rebuilding of Germany and western Europe after WWII is next on my list actually.
I am not trying to be an ass, but I’d like to ask for some context in the form of a harshly-phrased question before I answer you. Namely, how did it get to the point of y’all planning your WEDDING before topics like this were seriously discussed?
It’s a fair question. I hope this provides a little more context.
When we met we had very similar political views, as one often does growing up middle class in the imperial core. We’ve both changed our views on many things in that time. We both realized we’re anti-capitalist after getting together for example, and we’ve both been drawn towards pacifism.
We genuinely see a life together, we share core values and want the same things out of life, we have shared interests and have well fitting personalities.
Since getting together they’ve gone on a more of a “spiritual” journey into Quakerism and related political activism (fighting for peace, equality, and justice, put succinctly). I’ve gone on a political journey. While I don’t understand the spiritual things they’ve felt the draw to explore, I still respect that’s what they want and love who they’ve become.
We have discussions about politics and society regularly, and it’s not like I hid my engagement with leftist political ideas. What we have noticed is that we have a harder time having these discussions, as our background knowledge is very different. That and the way we talk sometimes leads both of us to sense condescension coming from the other, so we change the topic.
This one conversation yesterday really crystallized the disconnect between where we both are right now. It’s not about one topic or person or event in particular, and I’m happy to leave ones which are too contentious to the side. I think it’s more about finding a common place to start a new intellectual journey together, where we can learn theory, history, and analytical tools together.
Listen, mate, you don’t need debate advice or communo-evangelical advice right now. You need relationship advice. There are contexts like working for capitalists or trying to organise radicalising liberals where you need to be shrewd about what you say and how you say it, but a relationship, especially a long-term romantic one, is not the place for being tactical or tactful. You need to be able to be who you are, and speak your whole mind, around the one person you expect to spend your life with.
With that in mind, you can see that your problem isn’t Stalin or spirituality, it’s how you approach conversations with each other. You said it yourself: You can smell the whiff of condescension from each other when you come to a disagreement, which means either that your do not respect the viewpoint being endorsed, or the core philosophy and worldview behind it. This is a serious point of tension, and needs to be treated as such. As a breakdown in communication due to an inability or unwillingness to move past a difference not of facts, but of outlook.
The difficult conversation you have to have isn’t one about how the Holodomor is propaganda, or you promising not to praise the USSR. You need to sit down with your partner and say, “I know we don’t see eye to eye on this, but this is important to me, and it’s clearly important to you as well.” You are both politically-conscious individuals and the politics you have arrived at are an expression of how you engage with and understand the world. You identities are bound up in, and so you need to navigate the topics with care and in a way that a disagreement about the topic doesn’t become a negation of your sense of self and feel like a rejection of your whole belief system.
Basically, this is not an online argument, so please don’t approach it like one. It’s not a problem that can be solved with a magic answer. You have to essentially be willing to say “I will disagree with you without disrespecting you and I ask the same of you in turn. We both love each other and have the best of intentions and want to understand how best to better the world, and I want to share my perspective with you and help you understand why I see the world the way I do.”
Be willing to avoid certain topics if your partner isn’t comfortable with them currently, and set your own boundaries as well. Have a negotiation about what engaging on this topic looks like, and what you would like to do together to help understand each other better. i.e. try to prepare a neutral ground based on trusting each other enough to have difficult conversations.
The bad news is that if you can’t come to an agreement about how to have the conversations, then that is an indication of a fundamental difference that you will not be able to resolve, and you will have to ask yourself how willing you are to live with that. But try. If you have that level of trust, it will hopefully work out to step 1 of the process.
as an individual, politics matter a hell of a lot less than your relationship.
Like you arent gonna be the next lenin, you dont have to sacrifice everything for the cause.
That being said i still keep a portrait of stalin on my wall so that people know exactly what they’re getting into
in years of having to disguise myself as a “moderate” to do IRL politics, i have learned some thinngs.
The most important is to pick your battles. Is it worth it to get on someone’s bad side just to defend Stalin? Who cares. Convincing that single person won’t make a difference. It’s tough, but you just have to suck up your pride and ignore the ignorance many people have on these subjects. You also have to understand that people who have been indoctrinated since birth are not… easy to convert. If you have been told all of your life that water boils at 100 degrees no matter what, you would just think i was crazy if i told you that the temperature at which it boils on top of mount everest is different. No matter how right i was. You can present sources and do all the theoretical work you want, the truth is that with the majority of people it will just not work. Save your energy for something more productive.
Besides, if you engage one, two, three, ten times… then you do become the caricature of the annoying leftist that has to always be “akchually” and that pulls out so many unknown facts that people think it’s just made up jargon.
But if you don’t and manage to keep the “functional and moderate member of society” facade up, during important moments you will be able to go ham because people have come to know you as a reasonable person.
When the question of Russia came up in my party (which is the youth wing of the main succdem party) i and a few closet-communist pals were the ones controlling the narrative because we could just talk basic geopolitics and people would believe us since we never came off as “extremist” by praising stalin in public (don’t get me wrong we hella praise stalin in private). Yes it was annoying having to listen to people talk about how evil red fash the USSR was or how china bad, but now we got all of those people to understand that NATO is at fault for all of this solely because we managed to never lose any credibility by avoiding pointless discussions.
btw, by “losing credibility” i mean “opposing the mainstream narrative and be labeled as a conspiracy theorist”.
It is a bit harder when it comes to people you really do care about. For me it was a mix if things. for example i try to get close to likeminded people, so i never come out as a ML but i do drop some hints about being leftist to “test” people i meet and see if they get it. This alone allows you to at least avoid MOST big issues. Another thing, as said above, is just your ability to swallow your pride. We still gotta live normal lives, there is no point in ruining relationships of friendships over politics. It can be taxing long term, but let me be real: the path we have chosen to follow is not easy, it has never been for anyone. Politics is a very important field of life, but the truth is that it is only one field.
Keep up the fight, but remember that no one expects you to be fighting 24/24. Politics are very important to me and i am sure for you too to a degree, but to most people it’s just not like that. In my opinion you should just try to asess how much they actually give a shit about hitler or stalin. because chances are that they don’t care nearly enough to have THAT jeopardize the relationship.
