askchapo

I'll go against the stream this time and say that I don't particularly believe it's a defense mechanism, but a logical result of propaganda in the west.

Western "leftists" rationally do have good moral tendencies: equality is in principle underpinning their worldview, they want welfare state for everyone, freedom of speech, feminism and anti-racism, LGBTQ rights... The problem is that they've been endlessly propagandized against all of those things, and so they aren't aware of their biases.

We've been primed against immigration and Muslims and black people, we've been primed against China and Russian and Iran, primed against Islam, primed to be misogynistic and to oversexualize women, primed to be anticommunist and to disregard the failures of capitalism and overfocus on the shortcomings of actually existing socialism... We live in capitalist realism, the thought that history has ended, that capitalism is forever, and that the only possible way to make things better is either through reformism (typical lib) or through isolation from capitalist in little communities (many western "anarchists").

We've been told time and time again that communism is Stalin and that Stalin is Hitler. We've been told that communism is hunger and repression and militarism and authoritarianism. We've also been told that capitalism is gradually improving the lives of people since its inception, that development is happening everywhere, and we aren't taught that capitalism is based on the imperialist exploitation of the global south.

Liberalism is a rather logical, moral and rational conclusion with the information most people have at their disposal, and it's very socially acceptable, the problem is in the information at the disposal of people. The illogical, immoral and irrational conclusion is conservatism and right wing. What we need to change is therefore in my opinion the information that people have. We need to drill into peoples' heads our discourse, our historical evidence, and our materialist based understanding of reality.