In light of how Xi seems to be steering the country more left I'm left wondering how the fuck the old historical leaders were even real
like maybe it's because I live in the USA so everyone past a certain political station should be only be met with trueanon gun cock sound but it's genuinely incredible to me that anything positive about people like Chavez, Che, Allende, etc. or like Stalin or Mao could even be kinda true
It's cra-zee to me that one day some MF just woke up one day and was like: "I'm going to make this bitch right!" and went, got power, and didn't immediately turn into some self interested maniac and then went and unironically made like the entire formerly illiterate population literate, gave everyone jobs, killed all the Nazis instead of joining them and in general tried to make things not completely awful
I reminds me of an anecdote on r/communism where some guy in LatAm said he became a communist because of the stories his dad had of just being in the presence of Che where he said "he was like a superhero, but REAL"
It's like how
Maybe it's unbelievable because of my own cynicism but it's so incomprehensible to me that like....they existed. And that maybe they will again some day
It's because they have a material ideology to believe in and (re)form society around, with the added validation that the other guys were trying to kill them for it. Look at Xi Jinping's life. His father was a high-ranking member of the CPC who got purged a bunch of times. Xi himself has a background of having to actually work to be accepted as a member of the CPC at all, and even then they didn't trust him at first because of his father. And not just because his father got purged, but because they were wary about forming power dynasties within the party. Basically, instead of having to prove that he was loyal to the bourgeoisie, as is almost wholly the case in western life, let alone western politics, he had to prove that he was loyal to the interests of the people. We're talking about revolutionaries here who came to fully reorient their understanding of life to be one wherein the needs of the people are to be championed and the capitalist wreckers defeated.