I just want to learn about all of our nice comrad on lemmy so where did you first learn about communism and when did you became a communist ? Personaly it was communist memes and something funny is that the Stalin did nothing wrong meme became more and more accurate as time went on but one that did not become more accurate but became less and less true is the Starving in communist country . Thanks in advance and sorry for the english !
there were multiple influences and things that pushed me into radicalizing. I was a Free Market Libertarian for many years. The type who excuses child slave trade, racist memes, defends capitalism even when obvious failings of the system are shockingly obvious, etc. The first thing of note was my tour of the middle east, eastern Europe, then western Europe. I, for the first time, saw the world from a different lens. I grew up in the US, being indoctrinated into the American Religion, but getting to talk to many people from many different backgrounds and learn about other countries broke down a lot of the indoctrinated ideals, most specifically was visiting my little sister’s family in Poland, where I saw for the first time unironically a P-SSR and USSR flag hanging together in their dining room, and for the first time got direct testimony from my sister’s grandmother, who was a teen during WWII and remembered Warsaw under Communist rule - which she looked back on fondly. Ancap me was shocked, to say the least, but that sowed the seed.
Second, coming home from that trip to find the elections were coming to a close. The guy for my side was Donald Trump, and this revolted me. I got rid of anyone in my life who supported him, which ended the far-right echo-chamber in my life, and inspired me to start siding with anti-fascism. For a few months, I was identifying as a Social-Democrat (anti-Bernie, pro-capitalist, pro-liberalism, anti-fascist) in opposition to my ex-ideology’s sudden love for a character we had for years demonized.
The third is most important, I was having an argument with someone online about Socialism. I was still Anti-Socialist and of the opinion that it was evil and whatnot. But, I wanted to best the person I was arguing with, so I took about a week or so to research Socialism, I read various leftist texts, I watched a lot of leftist youtube, I asked leftists questions, and through that journey I started to realize that, “oh hey, I share a lot of these views.” and “oh hey, they make a strong argument for these things”, and before I was even really aware of it, I had become an Anarcho-Communist. Later I wrote up my rebuttal to the person I was arguing with, and came to terms with my shift in politics.
Afterwards, I joined a community with pan-leftism as a key focus and started speaking to a wide variety of leftists. There was one specific person in that community who took the time to, very humanly, walk me through Marxism-Leninism. Explain why ML’s believe what they do, explain anti-communist propaganda, explain various other things, and eventually, I too became a Marxist-Leninist.