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10 months agoYour comments in this thread are bewildering, to say the least. The fact you respond to someone questioning your critique with “you must be roderic on an alt account” is laughably stupid. If you were lambasting The Shining and someone questioned your argument, would you immediately assume it was Stanley Kubrick on an alt account? More importantly, your unsupported accusation that his trans friend is a “sockpuppet” is the same kind of reasoning that lemmy dorks apply when they say that all of our trans comrades on hexbear are simply faking it. Terrible post, do better comrade.
Recently I have been thinking over why I find this sort of liberal anti-communism so pathetic, and I think its because there is something particularly aggravating about being scolded by a person whose level of ideological development so closely resembles a past version of myself.
If you are an atheist, you have probably encountered the specific form of anti-atheist propaganda wherein which a religious person will say something like “I used to be an atheist, I was so mad at god every day and hated him, but then I found blah blah”. These anecdotes usually make me want to laugh; its obvious they were never former atheists, and are simply (and sloppily) trying to create a strawman atheist to convince you of how bad it is. The point im trying to make is that there probably aren’t a lot of serious atheists who go on to convert to religion; its a cognitive step that, once made, is hard to take back.
The argument I am trying to make is that being a communist is the same thing. If I asked you to show me a committed, well read marxist-leninist who decided to become a liberal, I imagine you would be hard pressed to find one. I specify “committed” and “well read” because I’m sure some lemmitor would counter-argue “But I loved to play the soviet anthem out loud on the school bus when i was in middle school, and now I love Joe Biden!”. However, if I asked you to show me a committed liberal who became a communist, many of you would raise your hands, as would I!
And this is sort of the crux of the point im trying to make. Its really frustrating seeing the smugness of these individuals with regards to their hate for tankies, because I see myself in them. I know that they are literally just who I was in high school; before I had read any communist works, before I had tried to study history, etc. When I see a particularly arrogant comment from one of them, I cant help but imagine my 16 year old self saying it instead, and I just want to explain to him that he is literally just a version of me that knows less about the world, and that therefore his smugness is unwarranted.
I would like to find a way to explain this to a liberal that isnt too condescending, because I imagine it could be a powerful source of doubt for their neoliberal beliefs. Something along the lines of “I reached your level of political development many years ago, and surpassed it. You, on the other hand, were never a communist, let alone did you “surpass it””, except thats incredibly smug redditor speak and I think it would aggravate someone too much for them to process it. I used religion as the blueprint because thats where I have obviously seen this dynamic play out the most; if any of you are formerly religious and were convinced to stop being religious by a person who once belonged to your religion, maybe you have a useful anecdote for how they were able to arouse doubt in your beliefs without insulting your intelligence.