About me:

Before I became an anti-imperialist communist, I used to be anti-DPRK and pro–Occupy Korea (but I still love Vietnam) because I only read news from Western media and believed what they said. In 2023, however, everything changed with the start of what I consider to be the genocide in Gaza. The Western media I used to trust began spreading lies about the situation in Gaza. Through TikTok, I learned what I believe is the truth about the situation in Gaza, as well as about the DPRK and other AES countries.

P.S. Now I understand why the U.S. wanted to ban TikTok—and why they later tried to buy it. In my view, it’s because they want TikTok belong to the CIA and NSA.

Watch ‘Come and See’ - in general just read more from the actual sources of those our countries demonize.

I started to engage with socialist lit and art to get a more rounded view of things as im a sociology student and they teach you to consider many perspectives, not just one singular one. Turns out most propoganda falls apart when you actually bother to consider the other sides perspective and gain a better understanding of how ideology is shaped and manufactured.

I would really reccomend engaging with parenti and althusser as academics but also on a lighter note try out some propoganda from the USSR about the US - https://youtu.be/PAwxe-i19pg

On top of that consider liberal conceptions of ‘social progress’ - like if we compare womens rights in the 1960s between the UK and the USSR. In the USSR women could get abortions, rent was 2% of your income, martial rape was illegal and women could have bank accounts and go into pubs by themselves. None of this was true in the UK.

By writing a book about the history and politics of my country. As I did more research for the book, I realized that historical and dialectical materialism seemed to be the superior frameworks to contextualize and explicate the events of the last couple of centuries. When I began writing it, I was a timid leftist; midway through, I had become a ML.

For me it started with watching as China stomped out Covid despite the costs while western countries kept obsessing about “the economy.” Then when the SMO started and everyone started cheering for nazis and calling people “Ork” it really showed me what liberals are.

So I joined r/genzedong and they quarantined it a few days later and then I ended up here and hexbear where I was pointed to better media and books.

I was very lucky and despite growing up in the middle of nowhere, with conservative homophobic parents and going to church 3ish times a week. I just didn’t buy into it, I wasn’t really engaged in politics till I was older but I always carried the golden rule and I thought it was dumb how queer people were treated over something that doesn’t matter. Then I spotted tons of contradictions in the bible that I never talked to people about because I didn’t trust them. I constantly touched onto communism even as like a 10 year old but was constantly shooting myself down with typical rhetoric; “Too bad it doesn’t work” “shame it always leads to dictatorships” etc. Even was harassed by our police chief when he though he was being funny many times and arrested for carrying wooden sword on the side of the road as I was walking over an hour to the park.

The final thing that tipped me though, one of my friends said they were communist and I finally had someone to talk with about it who was actually educated and was able to get me past the self policing stage. it was just a landslide from there, constantly questioning what I thought I knew about everything. Researched Che guevera and Cuba’s revolution got me revolutionary, turned this into a life path for me.

All I needed was someone educated on this stuff to exist. But I got very very lucky by being empathetic and not trusting adults around me early on.

Combination of the failure of Democrats to live up to expectations, Bernie and other SocDems becoming non-viable options because the game was rigged, direct personal experience with poverty and wage labor, love of history and historical accuracy, agitprop from leftists, and the triumph of Trumpian Fascism before my very eyes as the liberal order floundered before him.

This might sound corny, but honestly the films of the USSR. They are so beautiful and humanistic. It’s what got me interested in that time period and country.

Learning about WWII and the Great Patriotic War. Reading history and communist literature. And just seeing what China is doing and comparing it to what is happening in the West.

Rev Left Radio and The Deprogram were foundational to my radicalization, coupled with reading Lenin and Mao.

I only had to read books about it.

You can thank the Capitalists for failing to better the system for queer people, the disabled, those without a home, you can thank them for destroying schools, worsening healthcare, making me pay so much money for my disabilities treatments that I could have visited China with that money, the money that gets syphoned off of me just so I can function.

All it takes is one bad day, to fall into a hole and watching countless people pass by you, unwilling to land you a hand, it’s obvious a bunch of them could come together and lift you out of there, but why won’t they? Maybe you end up stuck there, but maybe you notice people lifting others out of holes, that they’ve been stuck into, you start to notice some people get lifted out of them more than others and you start copying the ones who get lifted out. You could get lucky and get lifted out, build your own life and if you’re feeling generous lift someone out yourself.

Perhaps nobody ends up noticing you, despite all your efforts, then you hear a voice from above ask you: “You want revenge don’t you? Look at them, they don’t care one bit about you or those others who’ve been stuck in holes besides you and never managed to escape, wouldn’t you want to destroy them? Join me and we’ll crush the people who abandoned you, we’ll put them in holes.”

You could also get lucky and be approached by a comrade who lifts you up and tells you: “Let’s plug up the holes, so that nobody falls into one they can’t get out of again.” But it’s profitable to have holes and some people have learned to enjoy them, they have started to worship the holes. They think being stuck in a hole makes you strong, those who survive in a hole all by themselves are glorified, worshipped. They hunt down comrades, doing anything they can to keep the hole society going. Ba dum tss.

To be brutally honest I haven’t actually practiced that much Marxism-Leninism. I know the theory. I was raised by a Communist that had his name published in the local newspaper for exemplary work, who died when I was 8 and we had to watch him die in pain at home with no painkillers, too expensive. I suppose it’s poetic since apparently Lenin said it’d only take him 8 years to educate a child. And I know nobody is going to help me, you guys are too overloaded and incapable to carry the burden. I’m just waiting for things to collapse and then you will know who I am. Then I won’t be a liberal any longer.

I was born in the heartland of the USA. It’s pretty much impossible to grow up in this country and not be trained from birth to despise communism.

Most people say to read Marx and it will change your perspective. Of course reading Marx was important, but in my opinion, Lenin being widely read would make millions of American communists

I was a liberal and the Gaza genocide is definitely the catalyst that made me become first anti-imperialist and then fully communist. Seeing the horrendous lies from the west about what was happening and slandering the Palestinian resistance spurred me to seek out alternative sources of political information, which in turn led me to Michael Parenti. From there I became more open to the USSR and AES, thanks to his lectures and black shirts and Reds.

I’d say I only started off as “liberal” in that I believed what every westerner is made to believe by default, that the USSR was a scary place that killed millions and stuff like that. At some point I wondered “Ok but…why was the USSR killing millions?” which is never really explained well in the liberal narrative beyond saying that communism is evil because…well…just cause. Then I actually started learning and that was that. I thinking meeting people on online forums from other countries also helped a lot and helped me learn things that just wouldn’t of been possible otherwise.

Learning about Fred Hampton and Salvador Allende, who they were, what they accomplished, and what they were trying to achieve, was the watershed moment for me. Learning how the USA crushed them with such unrepentant enthusiasm shattered a lot of the narratives I’d internalized and allowed me to confront my biases and assumptions and move beyond them.

USian ex-liberal here. It would be hard to go back and trace all the steps, I don’t have the best memory for that kind of thing to begin with and stress has probably done a number on me as well.

But in broad strokes, I know Bernie Sanders’ campaign in 2016 was a catalyst (though I’m pretty sure I was already discontented with capitalism to an extent, which was why I readily agreed with him). His positions alone, in retrospect, were pretty mild, but he wasn’t the only one involved in it. There were others who seized on the energy involved to educate beyond him and that was more what made a difference. For some time, I lingered in a state of “baby leftist” who probably sounded like one of those “leftists” who wants healthcare but also is scared of AES states and still believes in the empire. Eventually, best way I can think to put it without having all of the transformative details to rattle off, is quantitative transformed into qualitative. And when I read State and Revolution, I think I was already ready to hear it, you know? It wasn’t like a shock, like it might have been if I’d read it when knee deep in Red Scare views.

It was eye-opening to read. I don’t think it immediately made me supportive of AES states, partly because of the stigma surrounding doing that, but eventually I came to reason that if I was going to believe in ML as a solution to anything, it only made sense to be supportive of projects that were trying to do it. Back then, I knew almost nothing about the projects in the particulars and so I would default to more of an “I don’t know” mindset; rather than saying they’re bad or saying they’re amazing, I’d say I don’t know enough about them and I’m not going to pretend that I do. After being here a while, discussing, reading, reflecting, and discussing more (sometimes rather vigorously), it has become a little bit easier to defend AES states in the particulars and confidently say what they are for and what they are doing. There is still a lot that I just don’t know about the weeds of it, but now I can confidently say a thing like, “The US lets a guy like Jeff Bezos reign, whereas China would depose him of power” (which is putting is nicely, I don’t think it’s out of the question they might execute someone like him). Being able to say this to a person who is dissatisfied with the world as run by billionaires is nice to be able to do. I’m not sure how much it moves the needle on sympathy for AES states, but maybe it gets a foot in the door. It sure beats being like, “Well AES states might have done horrible things, I’m not really sure” or the so-called ‘leftist’ thing of being like “no, no, you see I’m proposing the good communism that has only ever existed in the abstract, not the bad version that they tried and had to test against actual reality, I’m a ‘safe’ commie who will never challenge your power with anything real.”

Long live the actual people’s democracies of the world.