Went into rant mode at work one time because they were saying the USSR was part of the axis powers.
My head of department bought me wine with a picture of Stalin on the bottle for my birthday after that.
That was pretty cool.
see, when we call americans the most propagandized people on earth, this is what we mean. no one told that person that the US fought the USSR in world war two, but it is so common and socially acceptable to not know about anything that happened before you were born that they got to adulthood without ever being corrected on it.
wait what? can you elaborate? i know the ussr fought the americas with the polar bear expedition in 1918, but ww2?
There wasn't a WWII fight, it's that Americans will imagine there was and not get corrected on it because most of our understanding of history is vibes based.
There's a ton of Stalin wines if you search online.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find the one she got me.
I have the same brand. It's a very pretty bottle (mine's a little scuffed bc it was in the freezer), and the vodka itself is not bad
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They stopped carrying these at my grocery store after Russia invaded Ukraine
How do I get ahold of Cuban booze? I want to support the revolution and make Fidel proud.
Gotta buy it abroad. I always cop a couple bottles when I visit LatAm, not just for ideological reasons either. Havana Club is a good rum in its own right, selección de maestros is probably one of the best deals out there at like $30 usd a bottle.
It’s definitely not illegal to bring it into the US under your allotted customs quota for personal use
1.5L is the limit I believe, but it might raise eyebrows if you use up both parents and the six year old’s quota lol
Oh wow i thought that was a regular-sized bottle standing on a reflective table
I mean, I once told my mom that Stalin did nothing wrong, but then walked it back and pointed out that he actually did two things wrong:
- He died
- He stopped at Berlin
I believe the question was "So are you a Republican or a Democrat?"
Yeah recriminalizing gay marriage was pretty bad, like he did a lot of good things and obviously helped save us from fascism. But the homophobic policies sucked and he was definitely a tier below Lenin as a leader.
That was part of a broad reform to criminalize pedophilia, and was really misguided, yeah. I think I read somewhere that statue was only used to imprison an otherwise normal gay person exactly once though, and it was after Stalin had died.
Does anyone know more about this?
Oh the Christians I know who say stuff like
CW
"Homosexuality is repulsive"
do talk about it and say he is bad for it, but wouldn't mind the state enacting laws and using force against our LGBT* allies.
Stalin also shouldn't have given Any Rand an education.
Also he should have realized America was bluffing with how many nukes they had, but I can't really blame him for that one.
Anything about Nelson Mandela's past. A lot of people don't know that he was a member of the communist party and that he wrote a book on how to be a good communist. Or have even bothered to listen to 5 minutes of the Rivonia trial.
Or that he advocated for the MK and its use of violence. It was an essential part of the collective struggle to have a wide variety of pressures to use and apply.
Also the fact that Mandela had a run-in with a future DA voter/UKKKraine flag in bio/Redditor in the mid-1950s who claimed that "he was too much into politics", while he was an attorney and the anti-apartheid movement was starting to gain momentum (and increasingly violent response)
There have definitely been multiple times when I have had to answer "how the hell do you know that" about extremely commie stuff, like no normal person knows about Allende or the Spanish civil war, but so far I have gotten by telling them I read a lot of stuff on the internet
Would disagree with that. I've had conversations with random people who know about Allende, in fact I was once ranting about the CIA in a semi-public place (as you do), and one random guy piped in "yeah they even couped Allende in Argentina" which is definitely some high tier historical pattern recognition as far as real life randoms go. Didn't talk much with the guy afterwards but I think it's unlikely he's a commie given where we were.
Now that it's officially been 50 years, libs are ready to start adding it to their working knowledge of "bad stuff the US did in the past that we totally don't do anymore"
Oh that's right, the 50 year liberal moratorium consigning Allende's coup to the memory hole just expired! 🎉🎉
I have the opposite problem, I can tell people directly that I am a communist and that I want a stateless classless society and they somehow forget or don't believe me, because they have to be reminded later on when I say something that a communist would say.
It's like the masquerade in Buffy/WoD where people convince each other that there isn't any vampire issue, just a lot of crime waves and people dying of hemophilla.
I really don't know what it is, I guess maybe they think I'm joking or being hyperbolic? It's odd though, you have to explain you believe this stuff three or four times before anyone starts to act like it's sunk in.
It's outside of the Overton Window so I think your typical lib or apolitical person is going to really struggle to grasp what it means.
I was an anarchist for a very long time before becoming a communist and, as such, I'm not enrolled to vote. I don't openly oppose people who choose to vote for (legitimate) harm reduction as long as their political activism extends beyond that and as long as you aren't sheepdogging people over it.
But I've had more than a few people who have been completely perplexed by the fact that they know me to be deeply political and yet I abstain from voting (where it's compulsory to do so in my country). If these people sat down and put those two details together — deeply political + actively abstains from voting — then they'd probably be able to figure out that my abstention is an extension of my political position, which would imply that I am strongly opposed to bourgeois electoralism and the rest pretty much falls into place from there on but because it's outside conventional political positions here people find it puzzling.
The same goes for why people think Hexbearians are redcaps larping as leftists; they see this apparent scattershot of political positions which they are unable to reconcile into the progressive-conservative political binary which is their frame of reference so they feel like the most logical conclusion is that Hexbearians are attempting to pass themselves off as progressive (and often failing to do so) in order to conceal their true politics as they to try and influence people to become conservative. Because that's the only way that they can make sense of a person who claims to be on the left who also criticises the "left".
Ultimately it's just a reflection of people's political naivete or political illiteracy.
Yeah this is what I do too. I tell anyone who asks and don't even try to hide it. Most people think I'm joking or they're very confused.
They also forget about it. It becomes a memory hole and then a week later I'll be forced into saying something like "People in North Korea shouldn't be massacred" and it will set off a wave of tilted heads and confused expressions.
Same, if anything people just go "oh cool" and move on where I'm at. But, it's a huge major city and I don't really go a ton of places regularly, so it's not like I go out inviting trouble
I don't hide that I am a Communist
I once sang the English version of the Soviet National Anthem in the parking lot at work within earshot of nearly everyone on lunch
To be fair, that song is a banger, but they must have thought you were crazy or just fucking with them. “Long live our Soviet motherland…”
These comments made me realize that maybe I should be hiding how much of a commie I am better lmao
Not really an "own", but I was the only one of my friends who knew what USSR stood for when we played a trivia game.
I've done the Marx thing too, replied that he was German after someone claimed he was Russian. I've met people who have mixed up Marx and Stalin too. One coworker was telling me how Marx and Hitler signed a pact in WW2. Another time I outed myself as a commie for knowing every president of China.
Knowing who Hugo Chavez was has outed me as a commie a few times, since most people seem to just say Venezuela and be done with it. I think one time I corrected someone that Che Guevara was never president of Cuba, nor was he born in Cuba.
I don't know, where I grew up is absolutely bonkers with history. You get called a leftist (or a liberal more likely) if you say the Confederacy should have lost or that slavery is bad. I got called a liberal one time because I told my mother once a confederate sympathizer, John Wilkes Booth, killed Lincoln. She was adamant that Lincoln got killed at the Gettysburg address by Robert E. Lee. That's the type of confusion I deal with.
Tbf it would have been more epic if your mom’s version of Lincoln’s assassination were correct.
i think she might have been making up the events as she was saying them, which is what a lot of Americans do with history. Everything is incoherent vibes.
I've met people who have mixed up Marx and Stalin too. One coworker was telling me how Marx and Hitler signed a pact in WW2
Thanks for sharing this insanity. I think my hatred for America just increased by 11,4%.
TBF knowing every president of China doesn’t make you a commie, it makes you a gigantic nerd.
Yeah but there's only been 12 heads of state in China since 1954, and only 5 of them have had the title of president I know every American president too. I recently started a project to memorize every Mexican head of state and it's going ok. I just like memorizing lists ok
Low literacy rate, poor education system, propaganda everywhere and a lack of being corrected. Middle class Americans live in a comfy bubble of their own vibes and never need to peer outside of it. It's also why they freak out the most at homeless people or seeing drugs. It ruins their comfy unquestioning worldview.
I was in lunch break at work and went in full rant mode when a coworker started spewing anticommunist WW2 myths of the asiatic human waves one rifle for two men variety. And another time a guy posted a meme on the offtopic/spam channel about how soviet citizens were starving during the space race.
I have this new coworker that says all sorts of crazed chud takes, but the other day he was filling a couple interns heads with absolute nonsense. He was re-defining fascism, calling the Nazis socialist because its in the name, etc.
So I started going at him, basically explaining he's making up words and undermining him at every point he tried to make, but he kept harping on the "its in the name". Eventually the manager for the entire division comes out of her office and backs me up and explains how he's wrong.
He even tried to redefine fascism as something where you don't agree and do violence. Because this guy is one of those "i'm not a racist" types, I asked if that meant the 60s civil rights protests and riots following MLKs assassination were fascism and he shut the fuck up so fucking fast.
My white coworkers were being totally not racist when talking about how north Korea is going to "nuke the earth" around me, a Korean person, snd I went off about American imperialism and the propaganda surrounding the dprk
This is kinda tangential to your point but I judge people's political literacy on the basis of how capable they are of understanding and articulating the geopolitical implications of nuclear weapons and the UN Security Council.
If they think that nukes are a tool for aggression or they make claims like how the UNSC is useless and/or needs to have more permanent seats then they are ultimately idealists and it's extremely hard to have any discussion with them about politics or history because they're going to be an utter lib about everything and I find that there's more room for discussion with someone like a neocon than someone whose view is so clouded by idealism.
TL;DR: if you don't recognise that political power comes out the barrel of a gun then don't @ me because we won't be able to have a discussion.
One of my least favorite type of libs is the "if fight back against your oppressor youre actually worse than they are"
Agreed.
Although you can be a good communist and play to the internal contradictions in their argument here and use it as a lead-in to discuss why police are bad (sure, people might do a little looting but a police officer resorting to violence to stop that makes them even worse than the looters) or anti-imperialism (yeah, Saddam Hussein was a bad guy but when the US invaded Iraq on both occasions they resorted to violence against him and that makes the US far worse than Saddam Hussein ever was.)
Obviously they're going to disagree with you because they'll make exceptions for state-sanctioned violence but it's up to you whether you use the opportunity to just agree with them and railroad your own talking points into an exchange which will make any onlooking radical centrist sit uneasily with their own convictions or you can draw out the excuses and either use it for your own entertainment or to use it as an intervention to identify the limits of their arguments and the inherent hypocrisy.
It depends on who's there to witness the exchange, what you want to get out of it, and how much hope you have for the person you're talking to tbh.
