i go out of my way to experience different cultures and it seems like the immigrant communities in the united states originating from communist countries tend to be some of the chuddiest people imaginable. chinese, russian, cuban, vietnamese. literally every person who i ever talked to that has lived in a communist country and then moved to the united states, or is like second or third generation from that, tends to be incredibly reactionary and anti communist. i feel like i am a more well versed communist when talking to people that lived in a communist country.
its like that everyone that comes to the united states from a communist country forgets the values of marxism, socialism, and communism. i have been too polite to ask what really made these people move to this fucking shithole and if i had to guess they have something severely wrong with them and they want to participate in some small business tyrany and become capitalists. like all these assholes be chasing the dollar and they bring great shame on their own nationality even being here.
i have had much better discussions with people from countries that are still being exploited by capitalists since they already have an understanding of what colonialism and capitalism even is and they arent here to try to become small business owners or worse. people from puerto rico dont got the brain worms that cuban expats do for example.
and i should mention, they all state, they love their country but they blame everything bad with their country on communists. It infuriates me hearing these people, who were born in a nation with socialized healthcare, state controlled industry, basic welfare for citizens, just trash talk the system that make them so successful in the first place and gave them the resources they probably didn't deserve to open up a shitty restaurant selling borscht. they would know exactly why these social programs cant meet demand if they just took the blindfold off and realized that america, the great fucking satan, is the reason why the global economy is so unequal ITS ALL BECAUSE OF FUCKING AMERICA NOT COMMUNISM YOU STUPID FUCK!
ive been told not to view myself as more communist than others, but i fucking am around these parts with expats who are not communist whatsoever, that makes me more communist than them. if i was to draw a hundred mile radius around myself odds are there probably wouldnt be someone more communist than me. nobody in my life reads theory, every fucking time i tried reaching out with dsa or the bernie shit i have only met shitlibs, i have found no comrades in bipoc communities, the lgbt, religion, or labor. just having someone say to me face to face they are a communist would help me anchor my belief system to something real and not entirely made up and on the internet.
idk, communism is basically what i use to fill my god hole and its fucking hard to find communists irl and its real shitty that people from communist countries arent oftentimes communists. i just want some validation in my belief in communism by someone who is fucking real.
America caters to everything chuds love and attracts them here.
Think about the flip side, if you lived in a communist country, would you want to leave it to come live in this reactionary hellhole?
if you lived in a communist country, would you want to leave it to come live in this reactionary hellhole
When a lot of immigrants from Cuba, Vietnam, and China came over, the US was around 30-40% of the WORLD's GDP. These three countries' lifespans were literally a full decade lower than America's. The infrastructure and technology was easily many many decades behind
Not to mention a normal job in the US at the time could afford you a house and lifestyle that even the wealthiest of those countries would dream of
I mean yea there's a fuck load of South Vietnam immigrants but this argument is missing a lot of historical analysis
in fairness i dont know what the us looked like in the 90s either.
Literally the same, the US hasnt changed at all for normal people
Housing cost less, that’s like 90% of what’s different
There was way less homeless people everywhere. More young people didn’t have to live with their parents as adults because housing costs were lower. Cars were smaller and less dangerous. Etc
Life has gotten worse
Exactly the same, except your computer had only one monitor, which was a CRT that took two people to pick up.
When a lot of immigrants from Cuba, Vietnam, and China came over, the US was around 30-40% of the WORLD's GDP. These three countries' lifespans were literally a full decade lower than America's. The infrastructure and technology was easily many many decades behind
https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street?min=2068
White supremacist's version of Mecca. The US is the only country on earth to carry out such a nearly complete and total genocide on an entire continent. The undisputed champions of fascism as we know it now.
The European colonial project that built the US killed literally hundreds of millions of people in the US alone, and that was before it was even the US.
And of those who survived, only ~8% are fluent in ANY of their native languages.
The entire population of North and South America at the start of that project did not exceed a hundred million, and the vast majority of it was in central and southern America. There were not hundreds of millions of people in the US to kill.
Very possibly, every native American living within the modern borders of the US from 1400 to today might have totalled a hundred million, but the colonial project didn't kill literally every one of them.
Research by some scholars provides population estimates of the pre-contact Americas to be as high as 112 million in 1492
To get that down to the population remaining today you would have to have killed hundreds of millions of people.
You do understand that people have children right?
You:
The European colonial project that built the US killed literally hundreds of millions of people in the US alone
Your source places the highest estimates for a north American population at seven million. Most likely it was half that. "Hundreds of millions of people in the US alone" is what I am contesting.
- Show
In that timespan, imperialism killed hundreds of millions of indigenous people in the Americas, and that was all necessary to building the US empire. There is no disputing that.
Well it depends, doesn't it? If I were just an average person from a very poor country and a revolution just happened, and the government was having a hard time getting basic services set up, and suddenly we're under sanction from the whole world, I'm not sure how I'd feel.
That describes people I know who came to the US from Vietnam. They grew up poor, a massive war happened, then the new socialist government had problems maintaining itself for a while.
Modern Vietnam is absolutely a success story though. It paid off in the end, but it took them a while. They're building rail transport through the country finally, they've got a robust healthcare system, and their education seems top notch. But if I were someone poor coming out of a warzone in 1976 with no idea what 2023 Vietnam would look like, I could see wanting to leave.
Most of them left because they fought on the south Vietnamese side though and lost the war and fled so they didn’t have to face Justice for their crimes.
My Chinese parents immigrated not to US but to Canada
My mom's family got their entire business (bunch of merchant shops on the street of a rural town) and large property taken away from the communists
She's pretty anti-China and a little bigoted but hilariously enough, she's also anti-Canada/US and anti-
lolMy dad just sold t-shirts on a wagon on the streets and moved to Canada because he blew his entire life savings in his 20s travelling the entire world and wanted to live in a foreign country
He's pretty pro-China *now* because of the progress and less bigoted than my mom, but also less bigoted towards white people lol
One thing you have to remember though is that Cuba and Vietnam + China in the past were incredibly poor. Like genuinely some of the poorest and worst places you can live in on this planet. Most people are not politically literate and so of course will judge their home country based on what they've seen and experienced compared to the West rather than apply historical materialism to their opinions
lmao my rich farmer great grandmother was kulak enough to have divided up their land between all the children and claimed they were all smallholders so nothing got redistributed
all their kids had joined the pla though, so it might have just been benefits for service
Yeah, as ever I recommend non-third-world people read Fanshen, about the fraught process of revolution in a town in China where the (long fled) Lord of the Manor owned a staggering 23 acres (for comparison, you probably can't support a family very well on less than three.), and the divide of rich and poor was if you could sometimes eat wheat and not millet.
you probably must feel that weird feeling all those german kids felt when they asked their parents and grandparents what they did in the war. like both of us shouldnt have the right to exist for the sins of our parents but here we are, so basically we got to self obliterate ourselves in penance and use what privilege and wealth we have to fight for communism.
its definitely a special kind of person who has the means to move across the world, like there's economic necessity to move to a country that we consider like ultimately evil (or in canada case, a country trying to imitate its evil neighbor) but the economy good and you can send money back. but it has a cost on your metaphorical soul being here on your own volition. but like being second gen sort of takes that burden off you since you didnt choose to be here.
as for the white person thing, personally i kind of consider how far one is from being black to how close one is to being a direct beneficiary of colonialism. it would be wrong to rank it but pacific asian people tend to side with white people on all the wrong issues since they are so close to "whiteness". like in the united states at least (and by proxy canada) theres like a caste system and i feel like theres culpability for everyone except the direct bottom, who frankly are innocent in all the sins of this nation.
you probably must feel that weird feeling all those german kids felt when they asked their parents and grandparents what they did in the war
I don't think being a small business owner is comparable to being a literal Nazi
like both of us shouldnt have the right to exist for the sins of our parents but here we are
People aren't born inheriting the sins of their parents
to side with white people on all the wrong issues since they are so close to "whiteness".
This is a bad take and misunderstands the whiteness concept.
The best estimates of the total death toll in India under British rule is somewhere around 60 million people but some of those famines occurred after the end of the British East India Company. A good estimate for those deaths under the Company rule is about 40 million.
All that profiting!
Whiteness is more than the colour of the skin and that play largely a role in power systems and passing.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asien-Pazifik#/media/Datei:Asia-Pacific_map1.png
Is not:
One factor is that people who have the means to move to a different country have some amount of privilege (specifically money or connections) relative to the average person in their home country, even if it’s not necessarily oligarch levels of wealth
That is to say the people who are like “I came here with nothing but $10 in my pocket and created a life for myself with hard work and immigrant grindset!” might be telling the truth about arriving with such meager wealth, but are conveniently leaving out that they somehow were able to afford the thousands of dollars it costs to complete the immigration process (over a years worth of full time work in some countries), and likely have a sponsor in their destination country they could rely on for food and shelter while starting out
not all people who move to the us are privileged though. its just that people that move from communist countries tend to be. like mexican people specifically are sort of an underclass that are exploited for cheap labor. you can find leftist sentiment in immigrants, just not immigrants from places that have actually achieved socialism.
I've seen anticommunist sentiment from immigrants from global south countries that have never been ruled by any sort of communists, such as India, The Philippines, and even Mexico. I think there does tend to be more leftist sentiment among immigrants in the US from Mexico since compared to many other countries, the physical proximity allows for more undocumented immigration, which for better or worse is more accessible to the working class (people who don't have the privilege I was talking about), but which also has a dynamic that keeps them in an underclass in the US.
There's the matter of them having enough means to make it to the US, and in addition to that, they're the ones who picked the US out of anywhere in the world as where they wanted to go. It'd be like a westerner going to live in a communist country, they would not be a typical westerner.
what i do know is people that left countries during/after a revolution, for example cubans moving to florida, is because many of them were wealthy and fled to preserve their fortune/lives in some cases. as to why they do it now, i'm not too sure but i suspect a lot of it has to do with the idolization that some people in socialist countries tend to have with capitalist ones - michael parenti's blackshirts and reds has a good write-up about the latter in chapter 7. that, and the ones who have the means to leave are also probably wealthy and want to gain more wealth
Most Cubans who arrive in the US today plan on moving back once they get enough money.
Grouping communists (party associated with powerless laborers btw) with terrorists
You’ve gotta think that this low-effort propaganda is losing its steam but all the evidence points to the contrary
Who tf would answer yes to the totalitarian and terrorist question?
They have specific definitions and so you could be deported or prosecuted for "lying"
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Might as well lie then
My conclusion is that just because you lived in a socialist country doesnt mean youre smart or understand socialism or geopolitics. Im friends with a lot of Venezuelans none of them know what the sanctions on their country entail. I dont believe Maduro is perfect either but it sure is a one sided argument on their end. One of them is a full blown pro-usa boomer style chud. They are stupid shitheads when the socialist take over and they continue to be after the fact. Theres no magical socialism button that makes people less stupid.
yeah you don't do a revolution and suddenly all the problems go away. That's step one
We live in a world with new tools, but not a new system. Capitalism is still the exact same as it was in their day. Material conditions don't lie, no matter how much people's preferred propaganda source says that everything is great under capitalism, their own personal oppression under the system will say otherwise. Anyone who says that Lenin or Mao are "outdated" because they are "old" hasn't actually read and understood them. The internet is largely used by capitalists the same way radio, television and newspapers were beforehand, they haven't "reforged" anything, they've just used it in the same way they use every other tool. The real re-forging will happen in post revolutionary states, who can use the internet the way it was originally intended, instead of as a platform for control and profit.
I think we might be talking past each other a bit. I'm not arguing for dogmatic and blind worship of these figures, just understanding of the conditions they faced and how that can potentially apply today. Both Mao and Lenin argued heavily for the idea that each individual revolutionary movement would have its own unique material conditions and issues to face. There is no "one size fits all" revolution.
Though you sound very much like an "end of history" liberal when you insist that things have "changed" and imply that capitalism has now "won" and will never end because conditions are different to how they were 70 years ago. The contradictions are still the same, even if it means that people outside of the west (where places are still capable of self-sufficiency) are the only ones capable of revolution. The imperial core has never been and never will be the main center of revolution. That hasn't changed since Lenin or Mao's day either.
People talk out of their ass all the time about everything. Living under a certain government does not make one an expert on that government any more than watching an MLB game makes one an expert on baseball. Tons of people who don't know shit about either will loudly share their opinions and throw a fit if you disagree.
Thr question isn't "have they seen it firsthand;" it's "do they understand the events around them and the associated context"?
plenty of people now live under capitalism and could not explain capitalism if they tried
People in the US get mad at their government when gas prices go up when it’s the result of some OPEC or Saudi decision lol. People have no clue what the causes are of the things that they experience most of the time.
It’s the same in socialist/communist countries: then those dumbasses get convinced to go to the US by all of its propaganda and they continue to believe that propaganda when they live there.
my belief is that there are subsections of society which are more prone to radicalism against the establishment and subsections which are pro establishment and these subsections don't really care what the establishment is. People with comfortable settled lives will like the establisment no matter what it is the same type of person in England that loves the king would probably have loved Stalin if they had been Russian at a certain point in time and inversely some people who are anti-capitalist because they don't like the establishment and it's all too much red tape and bureacratic bullshit would probably be anti-communist in a communist society. Of course people can move between these subsections of society and a successful revolution for example will see people go from one to the other with no change in beliefs. But you've only really made it when civil servants are part of your base
East Germany essentially concluded that no matter what they do to try and provide everyone with housing education etc roughly 10% of the population just want to drink smoke fight screw around and rebel against the man.
the vast majority of defectors to the west came from this 10% and of these defectors who risked their life going to west Germany a full third came back because the people who were sitting in front of the tv in east germany thinking that in the west they would have a sports car, penthouse and be married to a model found in the west that their lack of highly in demand skills in the east translated to the west and capitalism doesn't look after people with no money or marketable skills as well as they had hoped
The only time that I have ever been stopped on the streets to be told that comunism sucks was by a Venezuelan
Somebody who probably had no clue that US sanctions were making life in venezuela hard and not socialist policies.
I've been trying to read up on the history of Venezuela (and modern-current day), but don't know where to find a book that wasn't written by someone with let's say... vested economic interests.
I know it's a punt, but would you happen to have any recommendations?
i figured the us vetted communist-country immigrants and picked the most rabid anticommunists
An immigrant who is or has been a member of or affiliated with the Communist or any other totalitarian party is inadmissible under INA 212(a)(3)(D), unless an exception applies.
Under INA 212(a)(3)(D), an officer must first determine whether the organization in question meets the definition of Communist or any other totalitarian party.
The regulations define the Communist Party as:
-The Communist Party of the United States
-The Communist Political Association
-The Communist Party of any state of the United States, of any foreign state, or of any political or geographical subdivision of any foreign state;
-Any section, subsidiary, branch, affiliate, or subdivision of any such association or party;
-The direct predecessors or successors of any such association or party, regardless of what name such group or organization may have used, may now bear, or may hereafter adopt; and
-Any communist-action or communist-front organization that was required to register under former Section 786 of Title 50 of the U.S. Code, provided that the applicant knew or had reason to believe, while he or she was a member, that such organization was a communist-front organization.[30]
“Any other totalitarian party” is defined as “an organization which advocates the establishment in the United States of a totalitarian dictatorship or totalitarianism.”[31]
“Totalitarian dictatorship” or “totalitarianism” refer to systems of government not representative in fact, characterized by:
-The existence of a single political party, organized on a dictatorial basis, with so close an identity between such party and its policies and the governmental policies of the country in which it exists, that the party and the government constitute an indistinguishable unit; and
-The forcible suppression of opposition to such party.
After determining that the group in question meets the definition of the Communist or any other totalitarian party, the officer must determine if the person is or has been a member of or affiliated with that group. If the group does not meet the definition, then the person is not inadmissible under this ground.
https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-8-part-f-chapter-3
Wait a minute. So people who are inadmissible include those associated with a that forcibly suppresses opposition, but trust us, we're not doing that to communist parties. Don't worry, you can totally trust us!
But you see if two parties are doing the oppression it isn't Totalitarian!
when the us headhunts for only labor aristocracy and persecuted car salesmen you get a negative feedback loop of people who consider themselves the best and above their countrymen. i want the global south to judge these judas' for abandoning their country. obviously not all are bad but i feel like miami would be a lot emptier if there was some kind of reckoning against reactionary people.
you get a negative feedback loop
Umm akshually you are describing a positive feedback loop 🤓
(I knew what you meant I just couldn't help it)
Or even if the US just allowed those rich gusanos stealing wealth from all over Latin America to be investigated and prosecuted by their home countries for the thefts and corruption that made them into rich Miami gusanos.
The US is the greatest haven for anti-social greedy criminals in the entire world.
Hilariously the CPC does not reach the definition of a Communist party. Nor does those of the DPRK or the former DDR because they tolerate multiple parties.
do you live in a cave? do you eat human flesh?we had a struggle session on why the word troglodytes is bad, ive heard the argument that cannibals are the real vegans. if you adhere to hexbearist thought you are in fact a chud.
Hey now, I freely admit I was on the wrong side of the Great Troglodyte War.
they moved for a reason. usually, its because they're reactionaries in their home country but (thankfully) cannot spread their reactionary beliefs there, so they come to the reactionary capital of the world, america.
Yeah not exactly surprising that the Cubans that moved to the US because Castro took their slaves away begat children that spew anti-socialist rhetoric.
my ex emigrated from Guangdong about 5 years ago, he wasn't a chud cuz he got that socialist education.
why do the hottest water particles evaporate off first
the ones that leave and go to the US are going to be the most pro US before they left
Being in Florida my main exposure to this is Miami Cubans. But it’s pretty obvious why they’re all chuds, they’re the children of the rich people who fled when the communists rightfully took all their shit.
My mom knew someone who fled Peru during the 1968 left wing coup to Francoist Spain
