On lemmy.world I posted a comment on how liberals use ‘tankie’ as an invective to shut down dialogue and received tons of hateful replies. I tried to respond in a rational way to each. Someone’s said ‘get educated’ I responded ‘Im reading Norman Finkelstein’s I’ll burn that bridge when I get there’ and tried to keep it civil.
They deleted every comment I made and banned me. Proving my point, they just want to shut down dialogue. Freedom of speech doesn’t existing in those ‘totalitarian’ countries right? But in our ‘enlightened’ western countries we just delete you.
I’ve talked about this before, albeit the topic was about self‐identified anticommunists, but I am sorry to say that it applies to a lot of leftoid noobs as well. Anybody who poses obviously loaded questions like ‘why is it being a “lib” to say that governments who repress the human rights and civil liberties of minorities are not practicing leftism in good faith? the same governments who have horrifically and violently crushed workers rights movements?’ does not need to be dignified with a serious response. You can’t make these bipeds educate themselves no matter how good your evidence is; it simply isn’t a matter that’s within your hands.
Do something else: unionize, agitate for better working conditions, exercise, train with a weapon, do some volunteer work, contribute to volunteers (like Food Not Bombs), or engage with communists or communist sympathizers who are very clearly asking in good faith. Personally, I spend my most productive time studying modern history, and I’ve amassed a respectable répertoire of knowledge. I can confidently say that you’ll learn more about capitalism in decay from me than you’ll ever learn from any horseshoe theorist or dullards saying ‘red fash’ unjokingly.
Basically, get offline. Every single conversation I’ve had about communism in person, I can at least get people to view communist history from a rational perspective less clouded by propaganda. Even if they don’t “agree” they can at least respect it and can marinate on it later.
Online arguments with liberals are pointless. At least the arguments on lemmygrad are mostly good faith and even if there are disagreements there’s a lot of learning that happens. Arguing on mainstream liberal forums just opens you to being brigades by bots, reactionaries, and people who are participating in bad faith to begin with.
Damn, son, you went off and gave me a reading list… continue