My first job treating me like shit. Seriously.

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.

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.

First I saw the blatant lies in the coverage of the Gaza genocide. It was especially bad in Germany like our supposed neutral public news repeated literal IDF propaganda. An unholy rage I never felt before send me down a rabbit hole. I know “Manufacturing Consent” is not liked anymore but that burst my bubble on our propaganda being anything different than a tool to control the masses. In the meanwhile I spend more and more time on Breadtube watching overzealots, revolutionarythot etc. Somewhere along I joined here to find out what being a “tankie” is about. As a side quest I also started transitioning while I struggle through “Das Kapital”.

So to put it short: Huge flaws in liberal propaganda and decent red propaganda have brought me here.

It took a few weeks of scrolling through lemmygrad out of morbid curiosity of why y’all seem to love China and Stalin so much.

My first impression was that the China glaze here is akin to US glaze anywhere else but less harmful since it’s not a dominating narrative. I thought it would be healthy for me to read what you all have to say about China (and Stalin) and it slowly opened my eyes to the anti AES propaganda I’d been subjected to for so long. This was a few years ago.

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.

tl;dr - the answer is always just reading.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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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.