It’s hard to overstate just how little Americans understand about communism. My own parents just think it’s about atheism. I’m not even talking about people who have opinions on it but are wrong like “communism is when people are taxed to make everyone’s incomes equal”. I’m talking about the majority who can only loosely associate communism with “really bad thing”. Something like a vague notion that is evil like the Nazis but instead they were Russians. Our official “big boss” enemy. Their minds literally just go to cold and snow and all-male choirs singing Russian and big tanks and nukes.

[–] alexei_1917@hexbear.net 7 points 4 days ago

These people do not know what communism is. It's true of the entire Anglosphere. Hell, I do act like a stereotypical Soviet sympathiser and my mum still has no idea I'm a communist, since I don't call myself one in front of her. (She'd never claim to be a socialist. And insists she's not a communist. But when we discuss actual questions of economic and social policy... well, I think she'd have liked Cold War era USSR more than Cold War era USA. And we tend to agree on most things, even when I don't hold back the way I usually do in mixed company. And if communist revolution were to break out in our country, she'd stay put, she isn't viscerally ideologically opposed enough to uproot her life even further under such circumstances.)