Are you trying to turn your friends communist? Think about your own radicalization - were you a diehard liberal who got outdebated by a marxist with impeccable sources once and promptly decided they had to change their whole worldview?

I mean, yeah, kinda. It didn’t really start like that of course. I came to Marxism because I was philosophically examining my morality, and I could not reconcile the concept of third world exploitation with my liberalism. I also like to examine the world scientifically, and Marxism applies to that essentially perfectly. I would’ve never become a Marxist-Leninist, though, were it not for some of our comrades debunking atrocity propaganda on its own right. I would have never come to the conclusion that I had to take up reading into the real history of Marxist nations, nor would I have ever tried to apply scientific Marxist theory to the world at large.

I almost want to believe my friend is much like I was, in a way. Believes the working class should be armed and in the fight against fascism and such, but at the same time he is very liberal. Wants Social Democracy because of a fetishization of the ‘Nordic Model’ as “the best system we have” at governing a nation. He thinks so similar to the way that I thought back then that I believe there’s got to be something there to exploit.

Even if I cannot convince him, we have a mutual friend, he’s more to the left of the first one by a good margin. Probably best described as a centrist (and not the horseshoe theory kind, just a less politically enlightened somewhat anti-America individual with previous exposure to anti-capitalism). I would like to pull him further left as well, make him into a proper socialist, actually do something with him and the other comrades in my friend group, but it doesn’t help me when friend 1 is mouthing off about Chinese colonization, Tibet or Xinjiang or some other nonsense dreck.

This thread has given me some amazing resources to assist in those endeavors, so I guess I just hope it goes well.

Excellent reply comrade! This comment is absolute gold for disproving a load of the atrocity propaganda, my only hope now is that he actually listens to it. Thank you very much!

Yeah, that would be why he loves it so much unfortunately

Thank you for the compliment, comrade! It is in times like these that we all must remind ourselves of what is at stake, and be able to hold ourselves together in times of great strife. A principled communist should never know despair.

May your resolve never falter, and if it were to, may it return to you a thousand times stronger than when it left!

“In the final analysis, the economic development of the United States and the need of its workers to maintain their standard of living means that our struggle for national liberation is not waged against a given social regime, but rather against the whole nation… Let us prepare, then, to fight against the entire people of the United States, for the fruit of victory will be not only economic liberation and social equality, but the acquisition of a new and very welcome younger brother: the proletariat of that country.” - Che Guevara

You are correct in your analysis that the West is parasitic, and that its people are complicit, but it is ridiculously hyperbolic to say that westerners “shouldn’t be kept around” after the revolution. Is this pessimistic exaggeration or are you seriously proposing we commit a mass genocide against the West? It’s ridiculous.

We are not guilty of the sins of our fathers and grandfathers. We did not choose to be born in the West. I god damn well know I did not choose to be born in this fucking hellscape we call Florida. The people of the West are a product of their material conditions. No matter how caustic, twisted, and vile their opinions may be—you change the conditions and you change the rules of engagement for the Western people.

There will come a time in the future where even the treatlerite Westerners will give up their treats—or rather, lose access to their treats—and become properly proletarianized. There will be a day in the future where, over the ashes of the United States of America, and of the European Union, and of every hegemonic imperialist to ever exist, a new people will be born—a Western people forged and tempered in an era of scientific socialism instead of bathed in endless YouTube videos, plastic toys, porn, and addictive poisons they call foods. A Western people willing to take part in the emancipation of the international proletariat, and willing to move the wheel of history forward yet another revolution. No matter how impossible it may seem today, this will happen. Some day.

Socialism will win.

In the meantime, downtrodden Western comrade, we must struggle on! We struggle from within the belly of the beast! Perhaps the most significant of all struggles! The struggle is here, at our very doorstep! We must take every opportunity we can—we must allow this struggle to consume us! For every sin that this empire has committed—for every sin that this empire has forced us to commit—we must strike back a thousand fold! It is we who will make the change here, and it is only we who can end this empire of evil.

The way I see it, us western Marxist-Leninists have three choices:

1. Despair. Give up. Be complacent. Make deranged claims like those you made right here, in this post. Ideate and fetishize your ineptitude and allow yourself to succumb to the empire. Simply await whatever may happen to you, and hope the third world comes to save you.

2. Hope. Struggle. Fight on right here, right now. Organize your community and play your part in breaking the back of colonialism.

3. If you really cannot take it, and you have the means. If your spirit is broken and the dangers crush you from within, then do this. Learn every skill this empire can give you. Take its knowledge, its investment, and its training, and then pick up and move before you allow this economy to recoup its investment in you. Move to China, Vietnam, Laos, hell, even Russia or Iran. Wherever you can go. Take part in building up the axis of resistance, in defending the third world from the West. Depending on where you go, you may even help in building socialism across the seas. Fight back against the empire from outside of it.

Steel yourself, comrade. We have a world to win.

This may have been some form of error on my part during the reading of the question. For whatever reason, my mind took the phrase ‘coup’ as something much more public or, I supposed militarized than what happened to the USSR. Perhaps that is an incorrect way of looking at it. Call it a recent subconscious bias over what happened to Venezuela putting that interpretation at the forefront of my mind. China would undoubtedly repel Maduro-esque coup, and if the US were somehow successful in capturing Xi, it would have hell to pay in the sanctions it would recieve within the hour alone.

I also suppose that you could make an argument that because China has not gone through a period where the party line gave way to revisionism, the remaining party members would have more political capital to organize loyal factions of the PLA and the massive CPC membership to stage a counter-coup. This almost did happen in the USSR with the 1991 coup attempt at removing Gorbachev from office from more principled party members. I imagine that, were a sudden coup to just simply happen and some stooges were put in power in China, a similar chain of events would occur with a much more effective resistance measure due to the more principled party line at the moment. Take that interpretation with a grain of salt, as I am still brushing up on my Soviet history.

However, were the phrase ‘coup’ to mean something like what happened in the USSR—Yeltsin illegally dissolving the USSR after many decades of revisionism already rotting the party internally, and economic hardships on the people—this could cause a different series of events to happen in China. Even in the USSR though, there was an attempt at overthrowing the revisionist government. In China it would be a matter of questioning whether the revisionists would win in the military conflict or not.

Again, don’t take my word on the conjecture of the latter parts of too heavily comrade, I may be mistaken, as I am still learning myself. :)

If China were to fall (isn’t gonna happen) and not very soon after becoming a heavily exploited vassal nation break out into a new revolution (would actually happen almost immediately because of the 100 million member communist party and PLA) the US would essentially be at the complete mercy of every climate and oil crisis that may occur. Massive ecological collapse, immigration crises like we’ve never seen, economic and technological stagnation, and running completely out of fossil fuels in the next several decades. It would be a much more brutal future as the global south would be violently crushed under the heel of the empire once things start going, well, south. In the current timeline, though, it seems like that is only going to become less and less likely as massive portions of the global south are beginning to wean off of the West with the help of China (Belt and Road).

Leaving the Mao joke aside for a second, what are the logistics of this position man? Like, this just seems like it would hurt to me. How does this work at all?

I am from the US and learned cursive writing in kindergarten. It became my primary way to handwrite for some time, although now I am blending a bit more of print writing into my writing fashion. On the culture of touch starving, that I can agree is silently murderous to many people. When every touch, no matter how innocent, is sexualized and sexualization is a horrible taboo to most of society, a basic form of human connection is lost between entire generations of people.

Yeah, this place sucks… I’ve only ever met a handful of decent people who don’t become rabid at the first chance. I have no earthly idea how with these as my material conditions I became a communist.

I have long learned that lesson myself, unfortunately. Still, I feel like writhing in my skin whenever I simply have to stand there and swallow the slur without any action.

ooh yeah no YouTube ads is huge. Invidious and NewPipe are godsends. Me personally I’ve had relatively annoying inconveniences from changing my operating system because Google and Apple don’t let you see RCS chats (the thing that has read reciepts and allows for reactions) in group chats on third party messaging apps, so I’ve had to migrate every gc I’ve been in on SMS to Signal or Matrix. other than that degoogling is a lovley experience esp when you start downloading the foss replacement apps for stuff

Super Productivity app my beloved

Good on you for degoogling. It can be rlly inconvenient at times but it’s more than worth it

Chinese.

Oh yeah, I don’t feel bad for lying about it one bit. I do still care for my parents, but some of the things this family says and does make my skin crawl. I plan to leave the US in the future, so I will let them come to terms with it on their own at that point. Unfortunately, the reality is that because of their unhealthy love for this nation, they will insist on reaping what they have sown here when it all comes crashing down, which I’d wager is somewhat sooner rather than later.

Maybe that will help them change their mind. I don’t know.

In the meantime, I would like to take what little public pride I can in fighting in some small way for the liberation of mankind. So, subtle it is then lol

Those are all actually pretty cool! I like Elysium so the Anti-centennial stuff fits well. The Red Guard one is my favorite, but since I’m learning Mandarin already, it’d probably be better to not raise two (literal) red flags at the same time. Thank you very much though!

Yeah, GrapheneOS comes preinstalled with solid black lock + homescreen. I kinda like it but I sort of also wanna personalize it in some way. Considering it’s Graphene and I can be a bit more open about my socialism now that Google isn’t surveilling me 100% of the time, I figured a properly themed, minimalist lockscreen would be nice.

While I would generally agree, they aren’t lightly anticommunist. I still live with them, and my grandparents are still around, and they’re all Cuban gusanos who would lose it if they learned about it. Not only would I not really know how extreme their reaction can get (i.e. kicking my ass out on a minimum wage income in college with no dorm), I don’t tell them if for nothing else than their own sake, at least for now. My mom was sobbing one time because she THOUGHT I was a communist before I was even more left than a liberal (unfortunately I was at one point) because I was like 12 laughing at the vine compilations with the USSR flag and anthem blasting. One time a girl who had a crush on me in middle school bought me a ushanka as a joke (long story) and then they went ballistic and ripped the star out of it and then went through a whole process with me to make sure I wasn’t a communist. My grandma acted like she was having trauma flashbacks (she’s lived in the US like at least 8x longer than she did in Cuba, and the ushanka wasn’t even a thing there).

Unfortunately to gusanos, explaining that you are a communist may as well be coming out as and ultra-nazi. Although I intend to tell them in the future when I move out.

From the belly of the beast, I can tell you what the liberal is doing. I see it every day.

I have a friend here, a liberal. Honestly, it’s hilarious. When we had first spoke politics, I kept mine a bit of a secret. He had asked me to place myself on the political compass. He and another friend I was talking to did in kind. He drew himself somewhere in the center of lib-left. My other friend drew himself a bit closer to center, but further down the y axis. I, not wanting to reveal my political identity because I had no idea how he would react immediately (and to some extent I was still discovering it myself), placed myself dead center of the y-axis, but all the way to the left of the x-axis. He said “Wow” and said “He was more left than a liberal.” When I asked his tendency, he said he was a SocDem. Come to find out, my more moderate friend is more truly leftist than he is.

He makes excuses for empire every day. He claims to be an ally in public, and in private, as he gets more comfortable being around me, he is progressively more homophobic. He’s quite nastily transphobic as well. He doesn’t like Hasan Piker because he’s ‘an idiot’ (fair statement for the wrong reasons) and ‘too pro-China.’ He spouts CIA talking points around Xinjiang and talks about how “China is colonizing Africa” by using debt traps. Whenever America’s evil actions are brought up geopolitically, he doesn’t deny them, but he almost excuses them by saying China is also evil, and just as bad.

He supports the banderite Nazis in Ukraine and thinks Trump is a Russian asset, and that Putin is some kind of malevolent puppet master. He doesn’t understand what I mean when I say I am ‘anti-capitalist’ or when I say 'capitalism is the reason for x problem. ’ He usually just handwaves it away to being me complaining about something as banal as billionaires. When I say that the CIA/NSA is a tool of the ruling class, he doesn’t understand and almost plays dumb about it. He pretends like American intelligence exists in a vacuum as some sort of rogue agent. He also pretends like American-Israeli relations is the tail wagging the dog, and that Israel is controlling the US through Trump.

He’s upset about how Trump is ‘destroying this country’ and, when me and a fellow ML friend in the friend group made a joke about it, he said he would ‘vote for [Biden’s decaying corpse] over [Trump or Vance]’ in 2028. He declares that we won in Vietnam because we killed more people. He believes that ‘some crazy tankies’ wish they would live under ‘Stalin’s authoritarian rule’ and that ‘Taijikistan is worse (read: more ‘authoritarian’) than North Korea (? I don’t recall what spurred that on).’ He calls some specific draft dodgers cowards, and when I say there is no war for which it is worth fighting for America, he brings up World War II and D-Day as though America turned the tide, ignoring completely the contributions of the Red Army.

Despite all this, he truly believes himself to be righteous. To be politically standing up for the little guy. He believes the Democrats to be the lesser evil party that—through voting and picking the right politicians like Bernie or AOC or Zohran—can be reformed into greatness for Americans. The global south is completely free of any of his considerations. Perhaps the only time he has ever shown any sympathy towards Socialism, is expressing that Batista was the token liberal bad guy™ in the Cuban revolution. When he once read a quote from the head of Studio Ghibli talking about being anti-American (where he mentioned being anti-burger, anti-jeans, and anti a bunch of other American iconography), my friend immediately jumped to the defense of America, and to how stupid that quote is. When I mentioned it is not unlikely to say that this man is against American imperialism in Japan and anti third world sweatshops and exploitation (probably because he wants Japan to do it but I digress), his only response was “Well… He should’ve said that then!”

His views are incapable of being rationalized with the conditions of the global south. In truth, he is in favor of the untold suffering of billions so that he could have his comfortable lifestyle, and he can wag his finger at domestic examples of what we do internationally. I suppose I should not be surprised. His family is bourgeois after all. Not extremely wealthy, but certainly very well off, and he is planning to become a doctor only for the money.

TL; DR: My friend is the ultimate liberal and his views can be entirely summarized by the fact that he sees the sentence “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” as an example of a dystopian authoritarian dictatorship totalitarian word salad nightmare.

I just read the synopsis on Wikipedia and… Man you’d just be better off reading Mein Kampf honestly. This book sounds like complete bullshit even in comparison lmao. ‘Know your enemy’ means to like, know their plan of battle and understand their goals and shit, not reading their slop. I mean, just read some of this dreck:

“Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of African Americans are forced into the desert to cause an economic crisis on the System’s (Jew-controlled former(?) US government) welfare system and all Jews are beaten, lynched, or shot.”

“The Organization (white supremacist junta) raids the houses of all individuals who have been reported to be race traitors in some way, including those white people who “defiled” their race by living with or marrying non-whites. These individuals are dragged from their homes and hanged in the streets…”

“The United States government decides to invade the Organization’s stronghold in Southern California. The leaders of the Order now inform Earl Turner (protagonist) of his punishment for having failed to [kill himself prior to his] interrogation: he must pilot an aircraft equipped with a nuclear warhead and destroy the Pentagon in a kamikaze-style suicide strike, before the invasion can be launched. The 2099 epilogue summarizes how, following the success of Turner’s mission, the Organization went on to conquer the rest of the world and how all non-white people were murdered.”

This book doesn’t have anything meaningful in it. It would be like reading Atlas Shrugged in order to understand modern neoliberals. It would honestly be more of a waste of time to read this drivel than maybe reading Mein Kampf (if you really want to) and an actual class analysis of the politics of neo-Nazi groups and their place in bourgeois society. If you really wanna go the extra mile, read up on some stated ideological goals of neo-Nazi organizations like the Heritage foundation and maybe read some of Göering or Himmler’s diaries, I guess? Maybe I’m wrong, but reading this just seems like it would amount to as much educational value as a particularly edgy Rick and Morty episode listened to on the other side of two aluminium cans and a string.