I was making this and my friend asked what it was and I said “the emblem of the Communist Party of China.” And he said “Aren’t communists bad?-like Nazis or something?” I said “No, Communists are people who want a stateless and classless society, where everyone’s needs are met. And they have always been strongly opposed to fascists. In fact Stalin wanted to go war with the Nazis years before WWII started.” He said “you clearly know a lot about this.” I said “I read and listen to a lot about such things.”

It’s really nice when people whose default is anticommunist admit they don’t know anything about it.

    • Idliketothinkimsmart@lemmygrad.ml
      1·
      2 years ago

      There’s definitely been times where I mentioned I was in a socialist org and people were immediately and noticeably turned off. I’m talking from a smile to a stone cold face.

      • redtea@lemmygrad.ml
        1·
        2 years ago

        I get that. Some people don’t mind. But those with a strong political view… even mentioning a Marxist, a Marxist idea, or speaking neutrally about certain topics (never mind positively). And they’re gone.

        It’s like they switch off. Nothing you say after that point goes in. It’s just noise while they’re waiting for you to stop or figuring out what they should do.

        You can feel them experience cognitive dissonance as they realise they’ve met someone who shouldn’t be able to exist – a person who accepts a different reality and a set of entirely contrary facts, which should not be possible except in the most unreasonable monster.

        And here you are, an apparently reasonable human that doesn’t look anything like the bogeyman. And now they’re starting to question things: why do we choose to let people starve?

        david attenborough voice Which will overcome which, the listener’s ideals or the material truth in front of them? fade to credits

        Or maybe I’m inferring too much.

        • QueerCommie@lemmygrad.mlOP
          2·
          2 years ago

          Once I made the grave mistake of mentioning that I was reading Marxist things and someone immediately went on a “Stalinist purges,” “great leap forward 100 gazillion dead,” “capitalism may be bad, but socialist is complete evil,” “read history, and you’ll see the reds are Terrible,” and “tinymansquare,” not allowed to respond to a single talking point.

          • redtea@lemmygrad.ml
            2·
            2 years ago

            It’s so frustrating. And if you do get the chance to reply, you just get another move from the playbook. While they’re telling you to read history, does it ever cross their mind to read Marx et al?

            It would be too much effort, for the most part, to explain what’s wrong with the instruction, ‘read history’. Lenin covers it really well in the first para of ‘The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism’, but will these people read Lenin? And still, we’re the ignorant ones.

            Edit: the paragraph in question (which is actually the first two paragraphs, sorry):

            Throughout the civilised world the teachings of Marx evoke the utmost hostility and hatred of all bourgeois science (both official and liberal), which regards Marxism as a kind of “pernicious sect”. And no other attitude is to be expected, for there can be no “impartial” social science in a society based on class struggle. In one way or another, all official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery. To expect science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as foolishly naïve as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether workers’ wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the profits of capital.

            But this is not all. The history of philosophy and the history of social science show with perfect clarity that there is nothing resembling “sectarianism” in Marxism, in the sense of its being a hidebound, petrified doctrine, a doctrine which arose away from the high road of the development of world civilisation. On the contrary, the genius of Marx consists precisely in his having furnished answers to questions already raised by the foremost minds of mankind. His doctrine emerged as the direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism.