So, in my circles of friends, I am the most terminally online person. I remember being a soc-demmy kinda person (who called themselves socialist) when I joined r/cth when it hit 69,420 members.
Now here I am with opinions like "Stalin and the USSR weren't so bad" and "The tanks rolling into Hungary in 1956 were correct, actually". I feel like the community here on hexbear has kinda shifted in the same way. That said, we've steered clear of the patsoc menace, who aesthetically venerate AES while following the most regressive social/nationalist opinions of what they think of as the working class.
This has somewhat put me at odds with a lot of my RL friends, who are anarchists or trots of varying degrees. I'm generally not down with getting into spats with said RL friends, so I keep a lot of my opinions to myself. This is especially onerous with opinions about the Ukraine war.
How did I end up here? How did we..? I remember back on r/cth the line "This is enough to turn me into a tankie", or some such thing, as though being a tankie was just socialism + willingness to use violence to achieve it.
I can remember online anarchists posting fairly high profile Ls that I think split actual anarchists and left-liberals who just liked to call themselves anarchists (and now online anarchists who really like NATO? idk). But those events had a lot of people shy away from the anarchist label and kinda mull about their own beliefs. The main ones off the top of my head were CHAZ, Vaush audience watchers, and the anti-work breakdown. Certainly, I remember r/cth being a lot more awash with anarchist rhetoric and population (claimed or otherwise) than hexbear currently is.
I don't want this to be a sectarian rant session, but more a reflection of political journeys from r/cth's medicare for all socdem position to the current vibes of hexbear, both personal and pontifications of why this shift occurred.
This isn't the be-all and end-all of my thoughts of my own political evolution. I'll comment some more as I think of them (in between cleaning for rent inspection)
Maybe a quick summary of the last 2 1/2 years?
1- I'd highlight the US mishandling COVID specialy when compared to China zero COVID policy. A lot of western sucdems may want healthcare and college but a significant number of them just don't understand that this isn't enough. How many people complained about masks and vaccines, even among those that accepted using them at some point? "Authoritarianism" means just having a functional government with the actual power to force people, but specialy corporations to do shit for the sake of the greater good. Also don't forget the incredibly Chinese initial response, they built a hospital in 7 days.
With the media and reddit trying to blame and shame China for actualy trying to save lives this was a turning point for the anti-China narrative. Being a tankie started to become just being someone that likes to see the government actualy care about saving people and building hospitals etc.
2- The realization that Biden and the harm reduction narrative was bullshit. Between COVID and the supreme court. If you were here from the beginning you'll remember the struggle sessions over this back then.
3- The obvious Ukraine war kind of forced a lot of people here to have more commited views. The initial reaction of "war is bad" was very popular here, but eventualy(with some persuasion) people had to realize that this is not a viable position in the long term.
Certainly any revolution would be incredibly bloody and if you can't stand war then that already limits any type of revolutionary action.
Over the months many important things happened, I think the most important fact that shaped the narrative was that the AES were all positioning either in favor of Russia or at least focusing in strong anti-US/NATO messaging. This was during the initial media blitz remember the Putler shit, genocide claims, the embarrassing Ukrainians becoming white Europeans overnight while other immigrants got fucked, the libs all jumping over themselves to sound like this "war in Europe" was such a bad thing even though Israel exists, even though Syria/Iraq etc etc. The moment you tell these people "hey can you take 5 minutes to learn about what was happening in Ukraine since 2014" they either change their mind or go into super aggressive NPC mode.
And realy with all the evidence so readily available thanks to simple google searches, anyone trying to deny Ukraine wasn't literaly filled with Nazis ended up being ridiculed.
Again this was another moment where you have to decide if you are going to follow what other socialists or third world leftists are saying or are you going to still support meaningless anti-war/violence statments or worse support imperialist sucdem positions.
The end result is you have the entire Bernie camp against Russia and the war vs the entire AES/third worldists in favor of Russia and the war.
I feel like we were already primed not to blame covid on China before it became a thing.
This all compounds in an interesting way- based on the V***sh user responses after the CDC rolling back quarantine guidance you'd think they were entirely libs ready to get back to brunch. :thinking-about-it: Being plugged into mainstream news sources and accepting them uncritically really molds what you consider 'acceptable'