Comradeship // Freechat

I started seeing r/ShitLiberalsSay recommended to me, and it made me realize I needed to do some reflection. I used to be a "vote blue, no matter who" liberal, but it took others point out that no matter who you voted for, the bombs dropped on the same targets. I think the most liberal thing I've ever said was in reaction to someone saying "eat the rich" with "they are people, too." The subreddit made me start question what liberalism even is, and a recommendation that kept being thrown around was Liberalism: A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo. I lost a lot of sleep due to how unbelievably angry I was reading the history of liberalism and realizing that it hasn't really changed.

So I started spending most of my time lurking in online left circles. The thing that finally made me want to start learning about the USSR was seeing the images of people visiting Stalin's grave during the anniversary of his death. I was having a conversation with my wife and her Navy, Poli Sci / History major brother and brought that up. "How can people want to visit the grave of someone described as a monster?" He responded with Stalin caused the 1950 famine by introducing communism to plant growth. I didn't know much about it, but that didn't stop me from wanting to dive deeper.

There were a lot of small things I learned here and there. I noticed that no matter how progressive the USSR was, the reaction was always "they were worse than the Nazis". Which led me to Blackshirts and Reds. It was the best explanation to the vitriol coming from the western "left." It was the explanation for my liberal brother in law that had a Poli Sci class that talked about the media being the fourth wing of the government, all while repeating the "Biden was the most progressive president since FDR" line spatted by the media... I tried to give him the book, but pretty much just called me a tankie and blew me off. That made the line, "scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds" really ring in my ear.

But that wasn't everything that helped push through the propaganda. Listened to Proles Pod, The Deprogram, lurked here and Hexbear, joined my local DSA and CPUSA, and of course read.