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.

2008, my partner, and Michael Parenti.

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.

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 had tankies slowly explain things to me over time.

then i had a blatantly fascist president and feared it, which made me go into a learning spree about fascism and who usually defeats it.

tl;dr - the answer is always just reading.

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.

Something I’ve been thinking about as I’m radicalizing even more recently is that I started college as a liberal but basically as a Bernie Bro. During college I watched a docu-series called The Untold History of the United States. It corroborated a lot of claims I was getting trickle-fed from /r/latestagecapitalism. Then when I took my History classes in college around Junior semesters, my fairly un-biased professor went more in-depth on all the stuff you normally cover in HS but mentioned that we definitely didn’t win the Vietnam War, and “most likely” the Soviets are who won WW2. It was vailidating and it I think it really kick-started the rest of my journey into socialism. Shortly after I graduated, I read the Communist Manifesto. Shortly after BLM I started seriously reading theory. At some point I read A People’s History of the United States, and the whole corroboration thing came back again. 3 separate sources confirming the same thing about the US, one being an academic professor.

But it’s also funny because I say sometimes that I’m the meme where college turned me into a socialist. I hate that I have unpayable debt from it but I also wonder where I would be politically had I not went.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I came from a red area so my initial programming was right libertarian. I was still young amid the US right’s ascendancy in the mid 2010s, and I was beginning to get plugged in to libertarian echo chambers when I first encountered the term ‘antifa’. Since I, you know, engage in politics in good faith, I investigated a bit and followed up to the libertarians with “But aren’t fascists bad? Aren’t we antifascist even if we disagree with others who are also antifascist?” to which I received the customary “antifa are the real fascists”. I knew then and there that I was dealing with unserious people and began drifting left from there. I then had a left anarchist phase but grew out of it lol

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.

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.